BFA AGM - Friday 7th February

[Boris]

The BFA Annual General Meeting will, as notified elsewhere, be held at 7pm on Friday 7th February at Rileys Liverpool (during the Liverpool Open).

Agenda

2013 minutes & matters arising
Chairman's Report
Financial Report
Constitutional Amendments
Note that the formal deadline for changes to be notified has passed, any changes voted on by the AGM will need to be ratified by an EGM before coming into force.
Election of Executive Committee
Chairman, Treasurer, 7x EC members, ratification of Vice Chair & Secretary
Any Other Business

Persons seeking election or re-election to committeenor an officer post should declare themselves in this thread and include a 'manifesto' if appropriate.

[willhawkes]

No-one seems to be coming forward yet for this... perhaps after me there'll be a flood of people putting themselves forward.

Yes, I'd like to stand for the Committee again. In the past year I have filled the "media and marketing" category for the BFA, 99% of this being done by maintaining the Facebook presence. I also was involved in setting up the RegOnline platform for managing BFA memberships. I have actively participated in discussions and debates in the Committee and hope my contribution has been useful.

I have a lot of ideas for the BFA and some time to spare to help move things along. I'd like to do more in terms of our digital presence, reaching more people who may want to play the game - but it would be within the framework of whatever vision the BFA Committee collectively sign up for, for 2014.

Cheers all, see you in Liverpool next weekend.

[ybbun]

I won't be at the AGM (I'll be arriving in Liverpool later on Friday evening) but I will stand for committee again and if elected would continue my role as website administrator.

[Mase]

Hi all,

I would like to inform the British Foosball Community of my intention to stand for Chairman.

I have been involved as many of you will know with British Foosball for best part of a decade. In that time I have served 3.5 years on the committee and 2 years as Vice Chairman. I then had 3 years away from the committee playing my last few yeas of high level competitive cricket and where I have focused on the playing side of Foosball and on setting up the FiveBar brand with Jon May and Christopher Lyall.

So the question might be asked “Why are you back now?”.....
Well the answer is that I believe now is the time to try to move the association and sport onto the next level. I believe with the right structure team, Road Map and leadership this can be done. We have done good work so far but with people standing down and leadership looking unsure I felt now was the time to come back.

Before I was happy to make the decision to commit to being Chairman I canvassed the opinion of some of the prominent figures in UK foosball to share thoughts on:

”Where we are now”
“Where we want to be”
“How shall we get there”

The answers given were some that would be expected and some not so. Much of this along with my own vision has allowed me to look at a 1-3-5 year vision for the BFA. Should I be elected I would look with the new committee to build a road map to achieve our 1-3-5 year aims.

Year 1 would potentially involve a restructure of duties and giving power to those in positions to make choices themselves and not require a committee vote for every action.
If the committee chooses someone to do a job they should give them the autonomy to get it done.
Below is a working idea of the structure and some actions the committee could consider to carry out at soonest opportunity to make a start in moving forward.

TCC
Under the TCC working group there would be four areas of focus with four teams.

National –
Regional -
Educational -
Sport England -

Commercial and Financial
Under the Commercial and Financial working group there would be two areas of focus with two teams.

Treasury –
Commercial –

Womens Game
Under the Womens Game working group the sole focus would be on developing the womes game and uptake around the UK.

Membership, Media and the Website
Under the Membership and Media working group there would be two areas of focus with two teams.

Membership –
Social Media –
Britfoos Website –

Team GB
Under the TeamGB working group the sole focus would be on Promoting Brand TeamGB and stimulating interest in foosball. This interest will be then directed to the BFA and the regions. Managed properly it will generate publicity, interests and quite possibly funds.

ITSF
Under the ITSF working group the sole focus would be on liaising with the ITSF to make sure we are getting all the support and materials relevant to our other working groups and various aims. The other duty would be to represent our best interests.


Potential Actions for Consideration by the new Committee

Actions that should be taken at the soonest opportunity
- Define Roles of working groups and appoint the teams
- Contact Liberty Games and Home Leisure to get a BFA insert put inside all sold tables
- Decide what MI is important to make sure we can track progress moving forward.
- Uni Society pack – Info on how to set up and run.
- Announce league details ASAP with Regular and No Pro team events.
- Pick two committee members to go to ITSF congress.
- Jon May to hand great start made with TeamGB twitter over to Will Hawkes
- BFA drop box access to all
- Under the TCC educational team to look at youth involvement and creating new players at the lower levels

Actions to be considered by new committee at a later date.
- Striking up relationships with professional Partners eg Lib Games, Diageo etc
- Social Media Tools on offer from Hubub (JM’s company)
- Divide UK into regions and regions into localities to aid regional development
- Clubs are encouraged to be their own organism, clubs encouraged to bring players to events and engage more, for doing this the clubs will receive some of the membership fee per person back.
- Logos for BFA and GB to be reworked to bring upto date. Branding a major consideration!
- BFA table sticker to be put on tables by manufacturers directing purchasers to us and our events.
- Make all current members of the BFA founder members.

One piece of feedback from those canvassed is that the forum is not always the quickest way to communicate and get things moving. My intention would be to hold at the minimum a bi monthly (1 every 2 months) committee meeting. This would be moved around the country to make it fair.

The first to be hopefully be held in February as soon after the AGM as possible.

I hope I have the support of the community, I have always given to the sport and look to do so again.

I will be at the AGM to answer any questions you might have and should I be elected I will happily build on some high level thoughts.

Kind regards,


Mase

[Alex MM]

Hi everyone, I will be standing again for the committee again next year. This year was my first year on the committee and I took up the newly created role of Sports director. Next year I’d like to take up the same role and increase my responsibilities. My main responsibility last year was supporting the major tournament tour with operations, logistics and some much needed man power. An important part of this was getting dates out early with at least 3 months’ notice. I’ve managed to work up some real guns over the last year without ever needing to go to the gym!!!! But on a serious note I’ve learnt a lot about the BFA as an organisation and whilst certainly there are some changes needed to get it working smoothly again the potential to grow the sport and community really is there and I want to be a part of that in the forthcoming years.
As my role hasn’t really been defined I’ve included some of the jobs I’ll be expecting to take on alongside all the general committee roles:
• Draw up budgets for working bodies under my management.
• Develop the workforce directly below me in the organisation. Restructuring based on department and commitment level.
• Move the vast majority of sport discussions outside of committee forums to between the effected stakeholders and/or relevant working force.
• Report to the committee about operations with clear monitoring points on a regular basis.
• Provide support for major and some minor tournaments (especially those marketed at growth of 13-21 year olds.)
• Support the development of a coaching scheme.
• Increase the amount of money being injected into the game at a local level.
• Using the membership scheme to support club development, (reporting tools and filter money down)
• Incorporating a not for profit company able to issue community shares.
• Support clubs/uni societies run more effective sessions through more written documentation and insuring they get to talk to the right sort of people.
• Liaise with the Marketing team to advertise events appropriately on the website and on social media.
• Liaise with BUCS about starting a yearly ‘student only’ tournament and expanding this.

Now as I’m relatively new to the sport and organisational side of things so I thought I’d just lay out some of my basic thoughts of where I think the sport is and what areas really need growth.

A lot of the BFA members think the structure of a player base is linear in the sense that local scenes feed into regional tournaments which lead into national and international with schools and universities also feeding in at the bottom end and everyones goal is to become that awesome pro master. This is one route a player may follow while he is taking part in a sport however this will be a player who is very eager to learn the sport and is highly interested in competing to a high standard. Throughout this route the intensity of the sport increases and for the majority of players it is too much or not their goal. The difference between table football and a lot of other sports in the UK is currently this is the only route a player can take. If this route becomes too intense there are only a handful of organised opportunities for a fun, less intense level of sport. A player’s route in sport should be as individualised as possible. The BFA must recognise lots of players do just play for fun and don’t want to practice or get better. The approach of few big tournaments with lots of events that try and appeal to everyone has not grown the participation of table football in the UK and it will not. It is important to provide opportunities for beginners to get involved at a high level as they can improve drastically but it should be recognised this only engages a small proportion of those players and is not strategy for increasing participation or recruiting new players.

Table Football is brilliant at how inclusive it is; no matter your gender or age you can be awesome and compete with the best players in the world. However this doesn’t mean we should expect 13 year olds to leap at the chance to compete at major tournaments nor encourage it necessarily. In fact it is imperative that the organisational structure we set up for table football is indeed age related. Coaching initiatives should teach younger players the core basics like catching the ball, tic tacs, pinning and other general ball control techniques. When they get a bit older say 16-25 they should be learning some basic passes and shots focusing on execution. Finally the over 25s learning the rich mental tactical part of the game. With wiggle room for players who want to play at a higher or lower level. The competition/event structure should also reflect this and only gradually become more intense with a players age.

In summary, we need to be expanding the net of less intense level of play for everyone who just wants to play for fun and creating age related levels of play and friendly competition and communicating all this heavily. If you’re a bit confused, disagree or are simply intrigued with what I’m talking about then check out the generic participant development model that sport coaches UK created in 2008.
http://www.sportscoachuk.org/sites/defa ... ument2.pdf
http://www.sportscoachuk.org/resource/p ... -modelling

Previously my main focus last year was to organise the major tournament tour however as many people will have noticed quite amazingly we already have 5 tournaments announced throughout 2014. This puts the BFA’s next committee in a brilliant position. More time can be devoted to the areas of the sport outlined above and others which in the past have taken a back seat.

More on coaching.
The great news is that the ITSF have set up a new commission that is dedicated to creating and sharing resources related to coaching and teaching so this is just the right time to get started with all this exciting work. Ben Mason has already got a good knowledge of coaching cricket in schools and plenty of Brits have started or are planning to coach small groups and individuals in the past year too. Ben has also been in contact with the brains behind some of the oversea foosball youth programs and got extensive details that are very exciting. Coaching can take on many forms from high performance coaching, participation orientated coaching (focuses on having fun and getting players involved in a less intense manner, think killer, dyps, 2ball etc) or teaching the FUNdamentals. It is a sports association job to help coaches reach their own goals for teaching and provide official recognition. This should be a fun project that will spark a lot of interest in the community. I can’t wait to get stuck in!

Empowering communities through investment
Injecting money into club level of the game is essential. I wouldn’t have started playing foosball competitively if it wasn’t for a funded trip to play a friendly match against Oxford uni. We got thrashed sadly but after that I was hooked. There are lots of ways to get this money into the clubs:

• Draw up funding schemes for clubs to purchase their own table to create a regular source of income. Examples include sponsorship, community share issue, grants, loans, prizes etc.
• Feed some of the money generated from the membership scheme back into the clubs pro rata and/or encourage clubs to start charging for membership.
• Train the club’s exec to hold events such as tournaments, beat the pro etc to raise funds for the clubs
• Set up regional donation funds.

I know this is all going to be hard work and I’m prepared to put in about 15-20 hours a week, provided the face to face meetings within the committee go ahead as this saves so much time and effort to work on actual projects. There are plenty of other enthusiastic BFA members of our community who do so much already but their are lots who want to do stuff but either don’t know what to do or just don’t have the time. Over the next year the BFA committee will definitely be looking for help from the community as the groups Mase talks about start up operations. With some good management I hope members actually want to get involved rather than feel they are being asked to. I will also be providing plenty of more ways to give feedback and just keep us informed on whatever interesting foos related activities you’ve been up to. This will allow us to share this information to others and also develop ways to support you. Communication is so important. I hope everyone is excited about next year as me and I look forward to helping out whether in the committee or outside.

Alex MMMMM

[Christopher Lyall]

I intend to stand for election to a committee position this year.

Chris

[Elvis]

Some great manifestos here and I wish you all good luck - Id also like to say how impressed Ive been with Will's Facebook posts over the past year, they project a great image for the BFA .

I also quite like some of the stuff Mace wants to bring forward, especially the proposals around empowering committee members to make decisions without the need for constant debate - if you are elected to a leading role you should be allowed to lead.

And finally, could I urge someone to contact our junior team coach Darren Warr and encourage him to join the committee - he has some great ideas, lots of common sense, a vast amount of tournament experience from travelling around Europe but most of all a proven track record in junior development.

Martin

[matty96]

Leave it out Martin.

Pretty sure he wouldn't want to throw his hat in the ring.

[Boris]

If the constitutional bar on a person with any commercial interest in foosball from standing for treasurer is lifted I will stand for treasurer, as I am already a signatory on the bank account and have prepared the accounts for the past 2-3 years.

If not I will stand for a basic committee position and stand down as General Secretary.

[Boris]

New BFA Committee

Chair - Ben Mason
Vice-Chair - Dave Oates
General Secretary - Will Hawkes
Treasurer - Boris Atha
Sports Director - Alex Millington-Marston

Womens Officer - Jody Walding
Exec Member - Andrew Nubbert
Exec Member - Steve Lyall
Exec Member - Chris Lyall