Bowling News
This is a copy of a posting on the Bowls Observer website made on 17 July by and about Paul Ashmore the new BCGBA Chief Executive.
Thanks for the opportunity to let people know a little about what I’ve been doing and what the BCGBA has been doing this year.
To the personal stuff first, I am happily married and father of one and I’m based just outside Liverpool and my working life has seen me take a variety of roles in the care sector. This included moving up into care home management with the aim of making sure the finances were well managed and then more recently working for an independent funeral firm in accounts administration.
I’ve been involved with bowls administration at county level for 20 years and for longer at grass roots level. Originally in Merseyside and now Cheshire. I am part of the group who run the Esselle Sport Management bowling holidays.
For the BCGBA, I was appointed as National Safeguarding Officer for the BCGBA in 2014 and have been attending national safeguarding meetings since then. In that role I’ve helped develop our safeguarding policies which have helped raise the fact that safeguarding is the responsibility of everyone. We have worked with the Bowls Development Alliance (BDA) to develop our policies. Without their help they probably wouldn’t have been possible. The BDA are the main way the UK government talks to bowls across all its various codes.
I started in the role as Chief Executive at the beginning of April. Since then, I’ve been receiving an average of nearly 250 emails a week, all of which need to be worked on, I had no idea just how many I would receive, and these are added to the phone calls I receive daily. I can assure you that much of my diary needs several phone calls and emails as part of the meeting and event planning process. A large part of my 20 hours a week is spent working on these communications for the BCGBA.
My recent commitments of behalf of the BCGBA include:
12th May- Junior Comp
18th May – Board Meeting
11th June – Ladies County Vets Qualifying rounds.
15th June to 21st June – IOM as part of the Festival Team and had a meeting with the Governor of the IOM and represented BCGBA presenting Prizes on finals day.
25th June – Ladies County Vets finals day.
3rd July – Jack and Jean Isherwood Veterans Merit Finals Day @ Prees Cricket and Bowling Club
4th July – Attended a funeral on behalf of the BCGBA.
6th July – Board Meeting
9th July to 11th July – Sports Governance Course
13th July – Ladies Merit @ Hawcoat Park in Barrow-in-Furness. (Extremely pleased that our commitment to start doing things differently, with increased promotion of the event and live-streaming and commentary of the event, seemed to go well).
15th and 16th July – Meetings with BDA.
The board meetings mentioned above are the new independent board formed earlier this year. We meet regularly to develop ideas and a new way of doing things to try and take the sport forward.
Both the members of the board and I have only just started on what we want to do, to try and re-launch the sport of crown green bowls, to take it forward and build on what has been done before. We are under no illusions of the work we have ahead of us. I would be wrong not to thank my predecessor Mark Bircumshaw who did so much work developing the new formation of the new structure. Without Mark’s work we would still be months away from doing the work we need to do.
As part of our membership of the BDA we get a seat on their management board. Along with the Chief Executives of the other bowling codes I attend the quarterly board meetings in Leamington Spa. In effect we meet weekly as items are raised and must be worked on before they are addressed at these quarterly meetings.
We were lucky to have an experienced marketing professional as one of our county officers and a board member, Calvin Jackson was therefore tasked with developing a marketing strategy for crown green bowls. This has been accepted by the board and the next meeting will be to instigate some of the proposals Calvin has suggested. It is essential that we work with the counties to move the sport forward and make the BCGBA a better association.
The new structure is that we now have an independent board working to develop long-term projects and strategies to take the sport forward. I am grateful to the board members for their dedication to the sport.
One of the first things introduced was a new Disciplinary policy. This was needed as there have been several incidents which have shown the sport in a bad light. The new policy also follows the recommendations of charities tasked by the UK government to advise on the safety of vulnerable adults and children both on and around the green and in social media.
Our old policies restricted what we could do so we had to bring them into the modern world. The aim of the new policy is to make sure there is a deterrent to hopefully stop the incidents from happening again. It is our primary concern that crown green bowls is seen as a safe sport for everyone to enjoy.
One of the first things we also wanted to do was to ask what our members think of the BCGBA. Almost to create a baseline of what their opinion of the BCGBA was and how we can try to take it forward. We know we have a lot of work to do to improve things for our members, but we are determined to do it. This will be the first of however many surveys we need to do. In future surveys the questions may be more specific towards various topics as work to develop policies and procedures to improve them.
We know that our competitions and events are the main way the BCGBA sells the sport to the world. We need to develop other ways to do this, but we also need to sell the events better. We need to attract outside investment into the sport and events are one of the ways we can do that.
We also need to review if loss-making competitions need to be removed from the calendar but if we can get outside investment or support for our events then that will take away some of the strain on the balance sheet. We look after the fees received from our members and must spend them carefully, this will sometimes include paying travel expenses to make sure our people are in the place they need to be to do their job.
I hope to see as many of you as I can at our events, we have what I hope will be a full and busy season ahead of us.
Comments