After the excitement of the European Championships and the World Wheelchair Rugby Challenge our focus returns to the domestic season with the start of the new Super Series. Division 2 battled it out at Leicester at the weekend with Bulls taking an early lead to top the group with 15 points and Canterbury close behind with 13. The Canterbury team got 4 best of class awards so lots of talent and potential on show here. Division 1 start their season on 28 November at Stoke Mandeville.
Behind the scenes we are now starting work on the new funding application for Tokyo 2020 – the next 4 year UK Sport cycle which starts in 2017. Although it may seem a long way off, we have to get our initial plan in by the end of this year and will then get feedback before finally presenting it at the end of March. There is a huge amount of work needed for this which will occupy us pretty much full time over the coming weeks. As yet we do not know the timetable for the Sport England process but anticipate starting that early in the new year. You will know that there is a consultation process out in the public at the moment which is asking questions about sport and what and how it should be funded. This is against a background of very significant savings to be made by the government and I think we can be sure that sport will have to play its part in helping to balance the nation’s books. It is going to be important for us to demonstrate that we are not just asking for money to play our sport but that through our sport we are able to play our part in the wider community. So we will want to show how we can contribute to the government’s health and social care agendas, how we can engage youth and education and what more we can do to add value to the priorities around disability. Today I tweeted in support of the Sport & Recreation Alliance campaign GetYourKitOn which aims to convince the government to protect grassroots sports’ funding. Although we are supporting the campaign we must also beware of ‘special pleading’ for I think we all understand that there are equally valid claims on public funding whether that be the NHS, Education or the social care budget. What we need to do is to show how what we do benefits society more widely. This is one of the reasons that our broader programmes around youth, sport variants and the rehabilitation of the military are so important. We have a great story to tell and we are working hard to ensure those who make funding decisions understand the wider benefits of what we do.
There is much in the news at the moment about the governance of sport with football and athletics in the headlights. Whilst far from being complacent, I am very pleased to report that against a number of standards, UK Sport has again assessed our governance as Green this year which means we can be considered for continued funding. That said we still have more to do! Clubs will be involved in the affiliation process over the coming weeks and we still have more to do to embed our safeguarding and equality procedures and processes. We also have an on site governance assessment in early February where a team come in to go through all of our governance and finance – so lots still to focus on.
To end on something a bit more interesting! We had the pleasure of reading a large number of Ticketmaster reviews of the World Wheelchair Challenge and were bowled over by most of the comments made by those who had purchased tickets to the event. They clearly enjoyed it and I will leave you with the views of one of the ‘happy customers’!
‘What an experience! Thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, the players are absolutely amazing, so fast and competitive but also enjoying themselves, so glad we took the opportunity of going to see it’.
David Pond