According to the recently released ASC/CSIRO report The future of Australian sport, people who want to participate in sport will increasingly do so on their own terms, when it suits them or in ad-hoc groups led by personal trainers/coaches and not necessarily for the purpose of competing but simply to stay fit, and they want to stay active for as long as they can well into old age.
Combined with the expectation that obesity rates will continue to rise (don’t count on governments to take heed of this report and finally enshrine school sport or some other sort of physical activity into the curriculum), and there is a proliferation of adventure sports, this can only mean that our talent pool for athletics, including high performance athletics, will shrink, as will our potential pool of officials. And clubs will also be under more pressure, especially considering yet another ASC report announced today by federal sports minister Kate Lundy, Market segmentation.
All the more reason to prepare for this future, which, if we are honest with ourselves, has already arrived.
We should instigate improvements and pool resources to not only compensate for the effects of the trends identified in the report, but make athletics in all its forms a great experience for people who like to compete against others, or only against themselves (e.g. chip timing), or not at all (e.g. jogging).
No doubt our under-resourced clubs will need to pool resources. The ASC has very recently put the writing on the wall through its Mandatory Sports Governance Principles and called for divided sports to unify. This can only mean one thing for Little A and senior athletics, and not only at governance level.
A unified sport would see senior clubs and Little A centres share venues, equipment and other resources. Unification would allow for a more sensible, long-term career path for athletes and coaches to be established, with a more attractive competition and training system for all involved, which would most likely also lead to an improved retention rate of potential and actual elite athletes.
Stronger clubs could offer local competition where athletes from other clubs are welcome to participate for a small fee. In this way, all available athletics venues would be utilised for training and competition.
But this would only work where all athletes and coaches contribute to the organisation of the competition from time to time.
A little excursion here: I joined a volleyball club a while ago. At the social competitions organised by that club it is a matter of course that teams take turns to set up the playing fields, more experienced players officiate (and the rules of volleyball are way more complicated than athletics rules) and another team puts away the equipment after the last match – it’s simply part of the games roster. Many hands make light work…
These club-based competitions should be coordinated and supported with technology by the state body. Club independent officials/volunteers who perhaps live locally could be allocated and dispatched to these local comps to give them official status so performances can count towards qualifiers for national and minor international events.
This would free up stretched state bodies to focus on organising and hosting championship competitions, a high-performance event or two, and a few weeks of inter-club competition held at a central, high quality venue that can cater for all events.
But I can also envisage athletes and coaches using social media or apps to organise their own competitions (see page 10 of the ASC/CSIRO report), especially if athletes and especially coaches as part of their career path and education completed an officials course (a basic officials course should be included in coach education anyway in my view). This would provide additional competition opportunities when athletes and coaches want them at little or no extra expense and effort for the state body.
Let’s say a bunch of long and triple jumpers decide they are all in great shape and would like to compete, but there are no scheduled competitions for another few weeks, so they use a social media tool to decide on a place, date and time, and which athletes and coach(es) are willing and able to act as officials. They ask the state body for one independent official if they want their performances to count. They might even ask the state body to spread the news and invite others so the cost of venue hire can be shared, or the state body might even partially subsidise such ad-hoc meets. The standard competition sheet would be downloaded by the chief official for that comp, completed during the course of the competition, and sent in to state body for uploading the results. Within a day athletes and coaches could view the results on the state body’s website. There would also be an app people can use to find upcoming competitions in their event(s) anywhere in the country with ease and through which results are available in a standardised format, and which can also be used to graph performances.
Flexibility will also be key when it comes to distributing resources. Michael Johnson, an ardent promoter of our sport suggests a balanced distribution of funds between high performance and participation. In order to provide a great experience to more of our participants, to keep them interested in athletics, and to hopefully see more of them become marketable role models and sponsor-magnets, we will need more qualified coaches.
How about subsidising coaching courses and facilitating mentoring, for instance (learning is most effective ‘on the job’)? How about supporting clubs more directly so they can provide adequate equipment to their members?
Also, coaches should be actively encouraged to join their own professional association (as most professionals do), which would be the current Track & Field Coaches Association. This association already contains a wealth of collective experience and know-how which, if supported by state and national bodies, could contribute a lot more not only to coach education but to continuing education through publications, conferences etc..
There are many ways we can take athletics forward and meet the challenges of the megatrends the ASC/CSIRO report has identifed.
I just wanted to throw a few ideas out there. It might be worth starting a public discussion about some of these pressing issues now.
Declaration: At the time of writing I was a board member of Athletics New South Wales and an editor of the ATFCA’s Modern Athlete and Coach. The opinions I express here are entirely my own.