You may remember that we asked how we should invest in the club for the next 2 years to get the improvements our members wanted to see. We had sheets for completion at sign-on for a couple of weeks and have now collated those that were completed and discussed at the committee meeting this week.
We have received 16 completed sheets from members. Some members put more than one response on each sheet so we ended up with 26 suggestions in total.
When pull them all together and you look for themes it looks like this…
| What ? |
How many want it? |
| Better facilities in the hut |
3 |
| Indoor activities |
3 |
| Turbo sessions |
3 |
| Training camps |
3 |
| Race team for juniors |
3 |
| Hetton sessions at Prissick |
2 |
| Better Mountainbike trails |
2 |
| Bike Maintenance |
2 |
| Cleaning equipment |
1 |
| Pro’s attending sessions |
1 |
| More awards to younger riders at the awards night |
1 |
| Level 3 bikeability award |
1 |
| New coaching equipmet |
1 |
| Give all the money back to members |
1 |
We feel that we have a relatively small sample size and that we are going to ask again with a refined second wave of feedback starting in January but we have been able to act on some of the ideas already so here’s an update…….
Better Facilities in the Hut – We can’t change this one on our own, but there is a redevelopment of the centre in planning and we will be involved with this as a club to try and shape it where possible.
Indoor Activities & Turbo sessions – The 2016 turbo sessions are about to start on the 20th of January and will be every Wednesday night for 11 weeks. WE have decided to invest in buying some rollers to get new riders up and running and they will be available to hire for a small fee where you can take them home and use them for the week. More details in the new year.
Training Camps – We have Berwick training camp with the Scottish clubs in March and the Sandstone Way in June. I guess some of the suggestions wanted more exotic locations than Berwick so we will look at possible locations like Ashington or Killhope for the true exotic!!!
Race Team for Juniors – This is something that we are conscious can take up a lot of time, but also that we have had a number of riders leave in the last 6 months because we don’t have the facility currently. We have a couple of early ideas that we will present to the committee next month so watch this space.
Hetton Sessions at Prissick – There was a lot of debate around this at the meeting and Peter Jarps and Mike C will take it up to see what the possibilities are to run sessions on a regular basis. Watch the website for more updates over the next couple of weeks.
More awards for the younger riders at the awards evening – This is a great bit of feedback that we have been able to action straight away to improve the evening for our younger riders. Our newly qualified level 1 coach Matthew Lynn has agreed to design and run a series of skills tests throughout the year (similar to the league 2000 skills tests) for our younger riders that form a separate set of awards. Also, all younger riders will receive more direct recognition for efforts and results by way of certificates and medals not just at the evening, but also at the races we run in 2016.
Bike Maintenance and Cleaning – We are looking in to this as it will need better drainage and a working water supply in the hut which we will try and fix over the coming weeks. If any parents want to take this on as a task let us know.
New Coaching Equipment – The first area to start with this is around Matthew’s skills tests for 2016 so have given Matthew a budget to work with Paul Cooke and acquire or build anything new that they need to run the tests.
Summary
We were expecting big, expensive ideas, but in reality there are a lot of relatively inexpensive, simple things that we can start to implement and make improvements quite quickly.
As always, the most important resource will be time to make them happen so if any parents or riders want to get involved just stick your hand up and let us know.
We believe that there are more great ideas out there as we only had the 16 responses so we will have more sheets out during the January sessions for people to complete and copies of this report are now on the website to stimulate discussion.
Hetton Hawks Cycling Club is ran by volunteers for the benefit of every one of our young riders so this has been an excellent exercise to help us make it even better. Marginal gains I believe they call it…………….It may even catch on!