Committee Tasks: Year 1 :)

halenger

This is not a place for chatter. The "Some thoughts" thread should be used for that. The point of this thread is to outline tasks for the year. What we need to do, who we need to contact etc.

I will sticky this post too to make it easier on us. I'll say it one more time, NO chatter. Keep questions etc for other threads. I will delete off topic chatter/questions.



Few things that spring to mind are:


Deciding duties for every committee member;
Website;
Contacting the IAAA;
Appoint a liason perhaps?;
Contact all universities etc who don't have an archery club with information on how to start etc;
Contact all clubs to make sure a rep is appointed;
Decide on competition format (for next year not this year - to be practical);
Publicise all events - media contacts/press notices etc. College marketing departments are often interested in helping;



Continue the list please...

Renegade_Archer

OK, first off, need a website, and a domain name. I'll talk to my fellow skynet admins and see if we can get ourselves some webspace on skynet, and I know a good cheap registrar(the ppl I use for 10xshot.com) that will give us a .com or .org for 2 years for 24eur or there abouts. As a sign of good faith I will pay the domain registration fee.

Once we have the online presence and an actual commitee established, we nominate an IAAA liason(is this Burke's job already?) and get them to tell the IAAA who we are and what we are going to be doing. Once the IAAA are aware of our presence, we contact CUSAI, and tell them they will be dealing with *us*, not the IAAA, when it comes to university archery in this country.

As for the intervasities, we really dont need much involvment, they pretty much run themselves, we could transfer the record keeping from the UCD site to the new association site (Dermot, you want to be records officer? doing a good job so far...), and perhaps organise the end-of-year trophies by extorting money out of the various university teams. We could also make the site the final resting place for the intervarsity schedule.

Other than that, we should probably try to organise a selection system for teams for stuff like the British Outdoors and World Universities etc (nothing too nazi, just shows we are organised enough to care enough to select a team by process other than "who wants to go?")

On a tangent from the selection shoot thing, I believe the biggest thing we need to do this year is get that 70m shoot organised, and get some CUSAI people to show up.

Post-selection it would be nice if we had a few practises together as a team before the competition(from EuroNations experience, training with your team is better than training on your own), pre-selection, as far as Im concerned you are my mortal enemies, but if youre on a national team with me, I'll do my best in terms of coaching.


DISCLAIMER: all of the above is In My Humble Opinion(tm), feel free to reply if you feel you have any better ideas.


(edit)
And yes, for gods sake, lets have some publicity... the IAAA is awful at it... if its a slow news day in the sports dept you would be suprised who will send a reporter to a shoot... doesnt hurt to see if we can get a local TV crew to turn up to a shoot as well..
(/edit)


Regards



Ewan

Aryzel

i'll keep doing the records then,

Cusai.ie were very efficient, results for the year are now up on their site, team results for each IV, final team league table and gents and ladies champions.
http://www.cusai.ie/irishaffairs/20032004/iv/calendar.html

The PR side of things is important, each of the colleges have college news papers, every club need to send in photos and a little results/news story to them after every intervarsity, only takes 30min to do.

Also the site will need photos and a news bit for each competition, i presume Ewan will be taking care of that for the site, but if you want a hand with anything web related just give me a shout, i should have a good lot of free time next year.

Renegade_Archer

OK, I officially have webspace on skynet, now all we need to do is decide on a name and I'll go register the domain. Whats it going to be?

Aryzel

Things that need to be done:

---

Represent us to IAAA (i.e try to send people to international competitions)

Represent us to CUSAI (i.e try to send people to international competitions)

Represent us to Sponsors (i.e try to get money)

Host, maintain website. (news, photos, history, committee, results, ect.)

Writing for News papers/website

Helping orgainising Intervarsities (supply list of accomodation, travel info, ect.)

Selecting Team

Organising team going to competition (i.e travel, accomodation, ect.)

.........

---

The constutition has this as the committee
i) Chairperson
ii) Secretary
iii) Treasurer
iv) Webmaster
which don't provide a smooth fit with the jobs needed to be done, ye might want to look at that.

Ye might consider having those 4 to deal with running the committee, and then have number of optional officer roles, to do the jobs needed to be done.

for example, ewan is webmaster, but i'll do the IV results and give them to ewan, so ye could appoint and call me a Records officer, but next year ewan might do the website and records himself so no need for a Records officer then. Similarly someone might want to do newspapers articles, or do the job of looking for sponsorship ect.

Aryzel

on selecting a team, one possiblity is have a selection competition for whatever round the competition will be on.

For example, if its an OR competition, we could hold a OR selection competition (even if its only scored practice) and select the top scores until the number of places we have is filled or to some lower limit.

If its an indoor competition, (we should look into going to the British Indoor Champs) the intervarsity before it would suffice.

If there wasn't sufficent time, then the top 5 ranking gents/ladies who have scored above a certain cut off point (450 advance) in the current intervarsity season could be our team.

Aryzel

www.uniarchers.com
www.uniarchery.com

www.irisharchers.com ( but www.irisharchery.com is the IAAA site, which gets confusing)

halenger

www.collegearchery.com?

Tis available. Uni(versity) would be sorta exclusiveof ITs etc, if I'm not mistaken.

I think someone suggested it before but:

Collage Archery Group of Ireland as the name?

Reku

http://www.CAGE.ie ?
Collage Archery Groups Eire/Eireann?

cage.net, cage.org and cage.com are already taken.

Just think it sounds a bit cooler than College Archery Group Ireland, or CAGI.

The Northsider newspaper tends to publish all kinds of stories so maybe they'd be a newpaper that's definitely be worth a shot, only 15mins walk from DCU too if we wanted to invite them to the intervarsity there.

Could always offer to advertise the Irish archery suppliers on the webpage in exchange for credit in their stores, help get more equipment.
Offering some sort of national college archery open day when anyone can come along and have a bash would also be a good way to get the other colleges involved, if not at least any interested people from the college would know there are clubs out there they can join later on in life.

Renegade_Archer

Problem is .ie domain names cost a wee bit more, I'll look around, but from iedr.ie they are nearly 150eur / year!! gouging bastards...


How about ivarchery.[com|org|net]?

oscarBravo

http://alwaysamber.ie/

Cheap, and a joy to deal with. Remember you'll have to have formed the association before you can register a .ie domain name for it.

Renegade_Archer

56eur is still a bit steep considering we can get a .com for under a tenner

Reku

www.cage-ie.com? It's certainly available, bit of a double statement what with the whole "... Eire/Eireann-ie" bit but heck whatever...

Aryzel

i don't think abreviations are the way to go, www.cage.ie there is no suggestion of archery, i still think uniarchery.com would be better, it suits regardless of the committee name.

university, to my mind at least, means all 3rd level, CUSAI, BUSA ect, all use 'university' and still represent everyone. www.collegearchery.com is ok too though, but its a bit long.

Reku

Calling it something akin to "3rd level archery" would avoid the arguement over whether ITs count as universities, though to be honest I think that that arguement just seems to be nit picking and slightly elitist. I'm sure the ITs won't end up resentful of it and start their own spin-off organisation... we could encorage it so as to have an excuse for more competitions though.

Also the reason I think an abbreviation migh be better is to keep it short and easy to remember in terms of web address. If you ask someone if they know someone in the F.C.A. they'll probably know what you're on about but even most of its own members don't know what the letters stand for (I know since they're all Irish probably a bit of an extreme example). Also since cage is in fact an actual word people might find it easy enough to remember.

http://www.cusai.ie
I don't see any mention of university in that web address yet you all know about it.

halenger

Originally posted by oscarBravo
http://alwaysamber.ie/

Cheap, and a joy to deal with. Remember you'll have to have formed the association before you can register a .ie domain name for it.

Blacknight are a euro cheaper. 11 euro cheaper if you get hosting with them.

Anyhow. Another reason I don't like uniarchery is it feels incomplete to me. collegearchery is clearer to me. Anyhow it really doesn't matter in the end.

I think a .ie is too much hassle and we'll be months if not longer getting it cause of the way .ies are run. We'd probably need to be registered with the friendly societies crowd etc and perhaps even register the name as a Business Name.

oscarBravo

Originally posted by halenger
We'd probably need to be registered with the friendly societies crowd etc and perhaps even register the name as a Business Name.

Nope - you can register as an unincorporated society. It's not that big a deal, although I freely admit it's not as simple as a .com. I registered kcn.ie because I wanted the Irish identity, a short domain name and the credibility that goes with a tld that's just that bit harder to get.

Renegade_Archer

Right, collegearchery.com seems to be winning it by a mile in the poll.. will give it till Wednesday and then I'll register... any problems?

Reku

With the IAAA AGM in 3 mths the timeline's set as to when this new group representing college level archery in Ireland has to be set up if it's going to have any effect on their funding allocations for sending people to college level international comp.s
Afterall if even the national body for the sport doesn't take any notice of us why should any multi-discipline bodies (e.g CUSAI).
At least with 3 months we should hopefully be able to arrange some sort of shoot which we could tell the papers is a university level competition even though we're just doing it to get some publicity out there, though with this purpose in mind a high attendance would be necessary.

halenger

We wont get a cent from the IAAA but we don't particularly need it either. We're probably some of the best funded archery clubs in the country as it is... Albeit membership fees are a laugh we still get mostly decent grants for equip etc.

Reku

Yes but as they had in the Simpsons, when Fox wanted more funding:
Someone who's name I don't know: "...but it's still not enough"
Rupet Murdock: "NOT NEARLY ENOUGH!"
Afterall if it was people wouldn't all have had to pay for themselves to represent the Irish colleges at the British University Championships. Besides, you know yourself how little time it can take for a club to run out of training arrows if people have a run of bad shots with them.
Also if the actual college archery group, or whatever it ends up being called, got some funding this could either be used to fund further competitions or encourage more universities to set up archery clubs through giving some one off grants or such to the new, fledgling clubs.
I'm sure someone could always figure out something good to do with any money recieved, just think, one day there could be a non college grounds place for members to go shoot and that you could charge extortionate amounts for non students to use... (I know: "yeah like that'll happen";) )

mr potato head

The assocation/group can't really be much more than a body to represent students by giving us a united voice to speak to the IAAA (if they'll agree to let us have someone on their board...), to the media and cusai
The money we get from sponsors and any money we decide to put in from the colleges ourselves will be very small not enough to really make an impact on a clubs starting costs... i'd suggest that is up to individual colleges sports committees to provide most of the money coz every college is different in their policies on that kind of thing, its all politics!
We should create a good source of support and information (Some kind of information pack on equipment, coaching, training etc.) for any new college interested in the sport and yes if we can create a centre for a uni team training but thats a serious amount of work and money and we have too many people in too many places to make it truely feasable for some years to come!
Things like pooling money for competition supplys (faces, pins etc... maybe even refreshments) would be all we might be able to do untill we have a sense of our place in the order of things.
Not that grants/funds are a bad thing for the future of the group but lets walk before we run.

Renegade_Archer

Agreed.

Personally if all we manage to do is get one CUSAI person to turn up to not-run-half-assed Olympic Round, it will be in my eyes a success. Anything else is just a bonus

The Sin

Ewan I'm sorry but you CAN'T be serious about holding an olympic round as a showcase for college archery, can you........?
For starts it's not a level playing field, how many of us can hit 70m to a reasonable standard, and there's no use saying we could decrease the distance to even things out because it'd be a walkover. No offence intended to newer people but whatever chance they have of closing the gap indoors there's very little chance people will even bother trying if the gap seems too wide, which it will in this style of shoot.
A more realistic goal is for the comittee to promote a shoot that shows more experienced people helping the newbies, maybe coaching or giving tuning help/tips, it'd mean we're accessable to the "masses" and not just good shooters setting up an association to help ourselves progress.
If people want to see an OR they should come to Leixlip archers shoot in September, it'll be a mid level international comp and there will be people from abroad there as it's going to be the first shoot in the new Celtic Archery League.

Renegade_Archer

Sinead, if we dont prove ourselves doing an OR, how can we convince CUSAI to send a team to the World Universities??? Its an OR, and no matter how good we are at 18m, if we cant prove we can do it at 70m theyre not going to go *near* us. Off the top of my head, here is a non-exclusive list(i.e if I leave you out dont get offended) of people who could shoot an OR and not make a fool of themselves.


Me

Sinead

Maire

Bolger

Daniel Walsh

Keith Colton

Gary Colton, maybe, he was OK at FITA900 back in the day

Some of you other DIT guys


Probably a couple of others out there I cant remember the names of, thats plenty, given that its prolly going to be 4 to a team.

I know an OR is not the kind of shoot you bring whole teams to, but its to show we can compete at a *world* event, its not just to show CUSAI we have our **** together.

And yes, I will admit, part of the reason Im involved with this is because I WANT TO GO TO THE UNIVERSITY WORLD CHAMPS. I have no shame in saying that. Ive been knocking around intervarsity archery for 3 years now, and in that time Ive shot some seriously good scores, and some seriously bad ones. Ive shot scores that would easily hold their own at a World Intervarsity event. If Im on form, I can win any intervarsity in Ireland. As can you, and Bolger, and others.. But its King of the Sh1tHeap syndrome - end of the day if Im shooting 550+ at FITA18, but only at intervarsities in Ireland, whats the point? If I *honestly* didnt believe I would someday shoot at a European / World champs, Id sell my bow tomorrow.

Of course I want to see intervarsity archery progress. I have no problems with helping out, but CUSAI isnt going to send us anywhere unless they see some serious *concrete* scores.

I personally dont think CUSAI gives a rats if we help each other out or not, I personally think they would rather see some arrows in the middle of a target.

But I would like to re-iterate, Im not just in this to get a ticket to a World event. I want to see a strong, well organised, well coached intervarsity system that will produce more archers of a higher level, at the moment the "elite" are mostly former junior archers who managed to escape from the Schools' system with their sanity relatively intact.



Regards



Ewan

Aryzel

If we hold the competition in september and split it into two competitions, a 70m OR round, that show cases our best, and makes a case for sending someone to world university champs or the like. And 30m OR round for the others that shows how we are developing.

Also even if we did put on a show for the CUSAI showing us helping beginners, it does nothing, we don't get anything more than a pat on the back.

I think that realistically, for the short term at least, there are only three types of outside assistance we will get:

1) sponsorship by a company of the league, and that is unlikely to go much futher than covering the cost of prizes of end of year of the league, but might extend to partial funding if we're sending someone to an internation competition.

2) CUSAI and IAAA: the most we could expect is permission to send someone to an international competition, to get that we need to demonstrate someone is at that level. And if we are very luck partial funding of the cost of going to the compeititon.

3) Publicity. The other main use of outside organisations is to gain publicity so to try and get more funding from colleges and sponsors.

---

Publicity is for funding.

Internation competitions require demonstration of international level scores.

Developing newbie archers, we're going to be pretty much on our own.

---

Reku

I'd say the only way a sponsor would be willing to fund international competition entries would be if they were an international company or were going to get serious P.R. points through media coverage so I'd say the media coverage should definitely in fact be first on this list

Reku

I was out at ‘Shooting Style’ earlier today and Jim was quiet in favour of the idea of a committee to represent all the college archery clubs. He had a lot of advice and input regarding things they’ll need to/should do and ideas for the clubs themselves. I’m afraid he was very much against the OR idea though Ewan. ;b
Firstly he felt that we should try to put more pressure on the IAAA both for funding and for coaching, he suggested that the top 9 or 10 archers out of all the clubs, who are willing to put in the effort and time required to represent us internationally, could receive this extra training and to try ensure funding for international competitions for these archers so that they aren’t stuck paying for it themselves. Even partial funding would be a start.
He seems to put great faith in coaching and felt that each club should pressure their college to pay to have some level of coaching.
He felt the idea of booking up somewhere like Delphi and all the college teams going there for a few days practice on the archery range and just inter-college socialising was a good one and that it would help keep things fun.
The other bits were more for each college’s own archery club to deal with, for example he felt they should all run a continueous internal league system to encourage competitive shooting, he also suggested that each college’s team make the odd trip to a local club both for shooting practice and to observe how others outside the club shoot and possibly pick up some advice on their own shooting technique.
He said a guy named Ed Lawlor from Trinity had been in contact with him about setting up an archery club there so either the eventual committee should give Jim their contact details or try to get Ed’s from Jim (both would probably be best), maybe get another club to join the fray. Think he had more bits and pieces of advice but I just can’t remember them at the moment, the committee when formed should definitely get in contact with him and get his opinion on what needs doing and hopefully his help in getting them done.

Renegade_Archer

Originally posted by farohar
I was out at ‘Shooting Style’ earlier today and Jim was quiet in favour of the idea of a committee to represent all the college archery clubs. He had a lot of advice and input regarding things they’ll need to/should do and ideas for the clubs themselves.

>>> Oh Im sure he had plenty.

I’m afraid he was very much against the OR idea though Ewan. ;b

>>>So how exactly are we supposed to convince CUSAI to send us to an OR if we dont shoot one?


Firstly he felt that we should try to put more pressure on the IAAA both for funding and for coaching, he suggested that the top 9 or 10 archers out of all the clubs, who are willing to put in the effort and time required to represent us internationally, could receive this extra training and to try ensure funding for international competitions for these archers so that they aren’t stuck paying for it themselves. Even partial funding would be a start.

>>>The IAAA has trouble funding itself, never mind anyone else, no harm in trying, but dont be suprised if you dont get a penny off the IAAA


He seems to put great faith in coaching and felt that each club should pressure their college to pay to have some level of coaching.

>>>Its hard to get a college to shell out for coaching for a minority sport... also the question of who would coach us?

He felt the idea of booking up somewhere like Delphi and all the college teams going there for a few days practice on the archery range and just inter-college socialising was a good one and that it would help keep things fun.

>>>Agreed, although might be cheaper to do it on our home turf in one of our universities - maybe an extended intervarsity.

The other bits were more for each college’s own archery club to deal with, for example he felt they should all run a continueous internal league system to encourage competitive shooting, he also suggested that each college’s team make the odd trip to a local club both for shooting practice and to observe how others outside the club shoot and possibly pick up some advice on their own shooting technique.
He said a guy named Ed Lawlor from Trinity had been in contact with him about setting up an archery club there so either the eventual committee should give Jim their contact details or try to get Ed’s from Jim (both would probably be best), maybe get another club to join the fray. Think he had more bits and pieces of advice but I just can’t remember them at the moment, the committee when formed should definitely get in contact with him and get his opinion on what needs doing and hopefully his help in getting them done.

Reku

Probably the best way around the issue of the OR shoot and impressing CUSAI would be have something akin to an outdoor intervarsity league, with differant distances available and like in the indoor once you shoot above a certain points level on the one distance you get moved up. Obviously the more confident archers can start on a further distance than the newer archers if they want. This way the whole thing of preparing for an outdoor shoot shouldn't scare off any of the less confident new archers and we can show that there are enough archers who're more than capable at the distances required for OR shoots. Also since each university's outdoor team may not be the same people as the indoor (either through them not being interested or someone else being better for outdoor if there are limited places) this would help give more people a chance to shoot in competitions. It would also improve the crossover with field archery and so hopefully help draw a broader interest since it wouldn't always be indoor shoots.

Renegade_Archer

Wee problem with the weather there meladdo - hard to do an intervarsity in the summer as everyone and their dog is spread around the country / world. And doing outdoor shoots, in Ireland, in anytime other than summer is asking for a kick in the teeth. Have shot at competitions where it rained so hard we had to stop shooting more than once, it sucks.

So thats why I wanted to go for *one* OR, with CUSAI present, in September, when everyone is (hopefully) back in Ireland and the weather hasnt turned nasty yet.

halenger

Originally posted by farohar
He felt the idea of booking up somewhere like Delphi and all the college teams going there for a few days practice on the archery range and just inter-college socialising was a good one and that it would help keep things fun.

I'm sure it would be fun alright but I want it to happen because I wanna improve.

[deletes waffle n crap]

Make me better. No seriously. A weekend of fun intermixed with small competition perhaps and just a LOT of coaching and training. To help everyone. I realise this is of little help at all to the top archers but the rest of us need YOUR help.

Renegade_Archer

I rely on the voices inside my head to coach me, have since before I started university. Read the "Simple Art of Winning" by Rick McKinney. Damn good book by a man who won more than one World Champs. Have a gander online, download some video of good archers. Watch them. Video yourself. Compare your form to theirs. Improve. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Buy a formaster. Use it once a week for 30 arrows.

Video yourself at least once a month.


Learn to *feel* your shots. I can tell whats wrong with a shot before its hit the target. Do lots of close up eyes-closed shooting. Start by getting to know what a really good shot feels like, that work out what causes arrows to go in paticular directions.

In a competition situation, especially when you dont have a coach, quick self-diagnosis is important, if I have an arrow go 7 clock in the 6 at 70m 9 times out of ten it was becuase I didnt use my back and the release stalled. Thats just an example.

I was at the Bavarian State Champs, was shooting against the Bavarian State team, I shot an 1110(Mens FITA) and came 9th(out of 25 male recurve archers, top score 1255), these guys had their coach standing behind them the entire shoot offering advice. I had the voices inside my head

Reku

Ewan hears voices... explains alot really...
With me I just try to let my mind go blank other than keeping track of my drawgrip and where exactly my sight is, sometimes I'll have part of me worrying about previous shots but I'm working on that.
Checked up the price for delphi and I see what you mean about it being too expensive, anyone know of a cheap alternative?

Aryzel

we've a ton of italian kids in the college at the moment, one of them was pestering me for a go at archery, so let him shoot a couple, turns out he has done archery before. And his better than me, so for about half an hour i was getting coaching from an 10 year old who can't speak english, the humility. However i did set a new personal best at 30m, 298, nothing brilliant but nice.

I agree with ewan that by and large you have to learn to coach yourself, pretty much everything i know i learnt myself, from web, the Rick McKinney book ect. and pretty much the whole ucd team has been taught from what i know, so it works. Still a real coach is probably better but hard to get hold of.

Its ok to listen to the voices, you only need to worry with they start disagreeing with each other.

Aryzel

on a coarching/competiton, a decent format could be this:

The competitions could be a series of small head to head tournments. Just 8 people at a time. basically quater finals onwards. 18 arrows for each round, 12 for the final maybe? It would only take 30min probably for each tournment.

Could also have a final tournment with the top 2 from each sub tournment or something like that. or give people points for there positions in each tournment

anyways while these tournments are going on, they would only need 4 targets at most. People can train on the rest of the targets and the experienced archers can give coaching. There can be a tournment for the coaches near the end too, or 1 coach can go into each tournment ect.

It would be fun, coaching going on throughout and lots of little practice tournments. no pressure, great learning chance and lots of fun.

I suggest possibly one or two of these during the indoor season probably on the sundays of some of the intervarsities.

halenger

Sounds good...

Preferably a competition for those who go out in the first round too or something like that.

So they would get to shoot again later in the day perhaps.