British Tenpin Bowling Association

Annual Review 2015

BRITISH TENPIN BOWLING ASSOCIATION

Annual Review

April 2015

1.Introduction

Tenpin Bowling is a remarkable sport with a long heritage that we can all be proud of.

The England teams are respected as equals in the world of Tenpin Bowling, with regular representation at the highest levels. Team England are accepted as a serious competitor in World Tenpin Bowling Federation events and are feared in European events. Our Junior Team England players are pushing the sport onto new levels. We have a junior tenpin bowling Academy that is envied by many, and a national coaching scheme that is available to any member of the BTBA.

The ultimate goal of this association is to provide the opportunity for every member to have access to leagues, local, regional, county, national and international competitions, and the chance for any member to develop their skills and abilities through local, regional or national training schemes.

The British Tenpin Bowling Association (BTBA) has the privilege and responsibilityto drive forward this work and we do so in partnershipwith a diverse range of other interested parties. Our key activities are aimed at helping to grow andsustain participation in the sport from the grassroots upwards.

This document attempts to describe our progress over the past year and provides a glimpse into the near term future of the association. It includes a review of some of our strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities; presents a series of statements relating to our vision, valuesand objectives; and hopefully provides an insight into our proposed strategies and goals. Detailed action plans against each of the objectives will be found within the Strategic Plans laid down by the Individual areas of the National Council responsible for those activities over the next 2-3 months. What you will see here is a first look at some of those ideas.

2.Vision

The British Tenpin Bowling Association was established to promote and improve the sport of Tenpin Bowling. It aims to ensure that all people, irrespective of their age, colour, disability, ethnic origin, marital status, sexual orientation or social status have a genuine and equal opportunity to participate in the sport at all levels and in all roles.

3.Our Values

Focus on our membership

Commitment to equality

Working together with respect

Commitment to excellence

Pride in our heritage

4.Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats & Opportunities

As we develop our longer term strategic goals for each section of the National Council we are assessing the challenges that we face to ensure our focus is where it needs to be. The Examples below have been taken from the early drafts of the strategic plans and help to illustrate our thinking. It is certainly not a full set, but all of the individual strategic planning documents will be made available on the website as soon as they are completed and agreed by the National Council. With one or two positions being up for election in the two or three months after the AGM it seems sensible to make this the first item on the agenda for the new Council.

STRENGTHS / WEAKNESSES
  • Unrivalled position as governing body for the sport
  • A strong core base of members
  • Eager, willing and passionate team at Executive and National Council levels
  • Short term financial stability through sale of house
  • Development of the Inside Line as a communication tool available to all members via email.
/
  • Not seen by members as responsive to their needs
  • Not in touch with grass roots of the membership
  • We are unclear what our members expect of us
  • Bureaucratic interfaces to our members
  • Antiquated, manual systems and processes
  • Poorly defined roles and responsibilities
  • Administration is expensive and a high % of membership revenue
  • Slow to move and adapt to change
  • Financial Reporting is at a bare minimum and must be improved

OPPORTUNITIES / THREATS
  • Reduce costs of HO administration
  • Reduce workload at Head Office by providing online access to information
  • Reduce manual administrative effort with simpler processes
  • Increased revenue through increased membership
  • More opportunities for associate membership for existing organisations
  • Encourage automatic renewal of memberships through online and direct debit system
  • Improved engagement with members and Local Associations
  • Development of new revenue opportunities
  • Additional funding opportunitiesmay be available through an improved engagement model with Sport for England and Local Authorities
/
  • Apathy from members
  • Delays in change program will quickly result in the new council structure being viewed negatively
  • Admin costs continue to spiral as % of total revenue
  • Memberships continue to decrease
  • Proprietors choose not to embrace the sport

5.Objectives

The National Council has identified a number of key objectives which are crucial to the BTBA's performance and they will serve as a benchmark to judge how successful we have been. This list will continue to grow as we develop our plans for the future.

Each section of the National Council will work collaboratively to meet the following objectives:

Improve financial management and long term financial security of the association.

Strengthen communications through enhanced web presence and provide support in developing local information and communication networks

Develop the regional structure so that it delivers improved services at regional level for the benefit of all members

Improve the quality and timeliness of communications from National Council to members

Encourage an ethos of inclusion for all bowlers

Promote self-help through the use of the internet based technologies

Build and deliver a world-class training and education structure that supports, empowers, develops and educates our coaching teamfor the benefit of bowlers of ages and abilities

To provide the foundations and support required for our teams to continue to grow, sustain and improve their performance while representing us at World and European championship events.

Provide an updated version of the Rules and Regulations of bowling that is readily available online and downloadable from the BTBA website.

Continue to develop working partnerships with Bowling Proprietors, Manufacturers and Distributers.

Attract sponsorship to BTBA website and Inside Line

6.The Office of the Chairman

6.1.Current Organisational Structure

The National Council structure is comprised of four separate divisions:

Membership Services

Sport Development

Governance and Legal

Finance and Business Management

Each of these divisions are led by members of the Executive Council who are supported by National Council members. There have been changes to some of the individual positions over the course of the year to improve alignment of tasks and work distribution.

Where these positions are specifically noted within the Articles of Association an amendment will be submitted to the AGM delegates to allow us to continue to adjustour organisational shape in order to better suit the operations of the Council.


6.2.Organisational development

We have seen significant progress over the past year in our ability to work together as a team. The Executive Council now set aside a full day most months for a full day to meet and discuss progress within their divisions. This provides us with strategic oversight of the priorities and the opportunity to monitor progress against our objectives. It has not always worked smoothly and there have been times when we have found ourselves overlapping in our roles and responsibilities but working practices and relationships are now far more effective.

The National Council meet quarterly. Rather than just being a gathering of members this is now a meeting of specialists, each of whom have a specific role and a defined set of responsibilities. Between them they are the ones delivering against the workload of the NGB.Many of the Council members have teams or working groups of their own to assist in the design, planning or implementation of their agenda. Each NC member is accountable to their Director who sits on the Executive Council. The National Council meeting is a general update where each NC member is expected to give an update to the rest of the Council detailing their areas of responsibility and the status of any actions currently in progress.

Communications between the Executive and National Council still needs to be improved. Some National Council members feel that they are not sufficiently informed of activities across the respective divisions and that there is a need for greater cohesion so that they can have greater opportunity to engage in the planning and development of ideas prior to implementation.

Each National Council Member has been tasked with setting out a strategic plan for their work area and over time this will feed into the BTBA Development Plan, which will set out the Organisation’s priorities for improvement. As each plan is reviewed it will help inform the Executive Council about how resources can be most effectively managed within existing capacity and workload. Our target is to have all the plans documented and agreed by the full council straight after the elections for new members has been concluded.

6.3.The role of the CEO

As we have moved through the process of transformation of the National Council the role of the CEO as an independent advisor to the council has been incredibly important. In the first year the main responsibility for the role was to ensure that the appointment processes were carried our fairly and in accordance with the rules laid down within the Articles of Association. This included the development of the job descriptions used in advertising of roles, the administration of the voting process for the Regional Officers by the Local Associations, the receipt of all applications for Executive and National Council positions and the management of all of the different interview and appointment processes.

During the past year the CEO has played a non-voting oversight and advisory role to both the Executive Council and the National Council and has provided management support to the staff at Head Office. It has been important that the CEO has been able to remain totally impartial without any day to day responsibility for detailed strategy or operations within the division managed by the Executive council. It has also allowed the Executives the opportunity to focus internally and to start to develop plans for the future. It is within the spirit of this role that the CEO was tasked with carrying out the review of all Head Office activities as described above. The final version of the report and the recommendations contained within it will be reviewed by the Executive Council at the next meeting, which is planned for April 2015, and we look forward to being able to implement the action plans over the next 12 months.

At this time we believe that the requirement to have an independent CEO will cease and the general day to day management responsibilities for Head Office etc will pass over to the Director of F&B. Responsibility for management of the processes for the appointment of all Council positions will then rest with the office of the Chairman. Other responsibilities that have been managed by the CEO will be distributed across the rest of the Executive council as it best fits.

6.4.The BTBA Tour

The ownership of the two BTBA Tours should naturally lie within Membership Services as these Tournaments are intended for all bowlers, not just the elite. However at present executive accountability lies within the Office of the Chairman. As soon as we can establish a role within the Council that has the bandwidth to assume oversight responsibility for this and other major BTBA events the task will move across to them.

Since pulling the original ideas together at the beginning of last year we have had mixed success. A lot of comments have been raised about the scheduling of events within the broader bowling calendar and we must assure you that we do try to avoid conflict arising but it is not an easy process. Especially when the number of centres willing to host the events seems to be diminishing. The existing process of requesting previous Centres or Tournament managers to apply to host the events receives very few responses, even from places that actually do want to run the event. There is clearly a flaw in the process and a communication breakdown.

Qualification levels for the 2014 Masters were much lower than we had planned, especially within the Adult sections. Improved communications around the concept, the potential prize fund that was available and the fact that Storm sponsored the event by providing the winners of each section with new bowling balls will help. Hopefully we will be better placed this year.

Once again the 2015 calendar has caused problems scheduling the events and at the time of writing we are still unclear where some of the Adult PTBC events are going to be held. Additionally the fact that we were not able to run an event in February as planned and the clashes with a number of Senior European events has required us to amend the qualification requirements for Seniors to 5 from 8 instead of the normal 6 from 8. Hopefully this will allow more people to make the qualifying number of events and encourage them to enter.

Storm will be supporting us once again, and are providing some new bowling balls for worthy winners, so we can look forward to a really successful event at the end of the year.

As we start to look forward to 2016, we are considering trying to open up the Tours to even more bowlers by introducing a Handicap section into the events. Players will be able to select which stream they wish to be entered for. In the Case of Seniors it will be a choice between Age Bonus and Tournament average. For Adults it will be handicap or scratch.

Before we can make this a reality we need to find a way to accurately record bowler’s averages from the results provided at the end of all sanctioned Leagues and Tournaments. Where a Tournament average is not available a League average might be used but may have to be subject to a discount. For example you could get 80% of the equivalent handicap for Leagues rather than Tournaments. But this is early days yet and we will make an effort to get a broad spectrum of opinions on this before we make any changes.

6.5.Elite Bowling

6.5.1.ICC events.

There has been much discussion recently about YAC bowling since the removal of the YAC Triple Crown event from the calendar. The planned changes to the age grouping for Juniors to include Under 21's are also nearing approval with a new U25 Tour about to be published.

ICC secretaries either have been appointed for the 2015 season or where vacancies exist adverts will have been placed on the website over the past 2 months. Current appointments are shown below.

Team / ICC Secretary
Under 15s / Vacant
Under 18s / Vacant
YACs / Colin Laing
Adults / Jo Cundy
Seniors / Paul LeManquais

We need to significantly improve the co-ordination between the management of the events and the administration of the logistics surrounding the events. There have been a number of problems reconciling our preferred bowling venues with what we consider to be acceptable hotel facilities capable of hosting our prestigious Awards Evening. For example, booking hotels in advance without being able to commit to firm room numbers has become increasingly difficult..

We are going to investigate the possibility of combining the rooms and the dinner as a total package up front to see if we can get an improved deal for our members but we will have to see how this turns out. If we start early enough we should be able to get a good idea in time to make alternative plans as required.

Changes to the playing rules will also be considered again this year and a Think Tank will be organised in the month of November so that any adjustments can be advertised in advance of the invitation letters being posted in January 2016. These events will then continue on a Bi-annual basis.

6.5.2.Team England

2015 is seen as a development year for the Adult Men's team. There is no qualification from the Euros this year. However next year both the Men's and Ladies European Championships are qualifiers for the World Championships the following year. Making that a need not just for development but attainment and achievement.

The calendar for the Adults over the next few years will include the following.

2015 - Men's Europeans, Ladies Worlds, Triple Crown, ECC

2016 - Men's Europeans, Ladies Europeans, Triple Crown, ECC

2017 - Joint Worlds, Triple Crown, ECC

The seniors compete in the World Championships every 2 years and in the alternate year weare introducing an opportunity to qualify to play in a European Team Event. We are also in conversations with the ETBF on the establishment of a Senior Europeans event.

Sponsorship of the teams has been arranged with Brunswick for the Juniors and with Storm for the YAC's Adults and Seniors. This is a very important area of our business plan and will save us considerably in terms of uniforms for the teams etc. However in addition to providing us with shirts they also provide a number of bowling balls for the teams. Most recently they have also started to get engaged within the coaching and development programs that we are building.