This was our first time organising such a big event and it felt like the Club Champs had been a bit of a “training run”, which gave the small Events Team some experience in event management.
The best decision we possibly made was online entries. This heavily cut down the amount of admin and made compiling the start lists pretty straightforward. Thanks to Bob Dowie for seeding all the entries and setting up all the track and field cards. This was a huge task, 20 field events and 53 track events which with heats and finals meant a total of 109 races to add athletes to!
The other big task was recruiting officials and volunteers, both are vital to the running of events. With the Field Events Grand Prix and Pertrofac Final on the same day, plus Edinburgh AC at both the Upper and Lower Finals, and the UK School Games also on, we were lucky that so many officials were able to commit to coming to Pitreavie. We have to thank them very much, in recent years the number of Open Graded and other T&F events mean the officials seem to be more in demand than ever, and our own number of Pitreavie officials has dwindled.
We are lucky that we have lots of people in the club willing to assist on the day and this means that we can successfully run an event of this size. The rule that no one should be stuck helping all day at these events seems to be working and on the whole, we have enough volunteers (although we can never have too many!).
It would be really useful to have a couple of new volunteers join our team to coordinate officials and volunteers. It’s pretty simple – we have a list of roles/timeslots and it’s a case of allocating the appropriate person to each one until all timeslots are complete. If someone focussed on these two tasks, it would be so much easier.
We also get a lot of email enquiries leading up to the event, and this could perhaps be a role for someone who could manage the email account.
Obviously there are a lot more tasks (in fact the list is huge); applying for a permit, booking the track, negotiating costs, risk assessment, first aid, numbers, trophies, engraving, working out the timetable, laying out the program…setting up for declarations…the list goes on. I don’t like to think too much about the time spent organising this one event, but then I guess the satisfaction comes seeing it all run smoothly.
I guess the purpose of this wee report is to say that we have already had a fantastic amount of feedback from athletes and parents from across Scotland who have been in touch to say they thoroughly enjoyed the event, but we could make it even better if more volunteers could help with the prep work. Same rule applies as on the day – if we have more people then it shares the workload immensely.
I hope this gives a little insight to the role of the Events Team, if you would like to be involved then please get in touch. You can help with as little or as much as you can offer, there are plenty tasks big and small to choose from!
I hope you all enjoyed the day, next year is the 25th Anniversary and we are looking to do something even more special, so if you have any suggestions/feedback/offers to assist then please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Many thanks to all who helped,
Nicola
