Meetings

It was an early start for me yesterday from Yorkshire - on the road at 3.45 am  - but some very good talks with our friends at Get Kids Going!, BOOST and Crystal.

It's always good to see Jane at GKG! they do a fantastic job and their offices are always a real hive of activity processing entries for events all over the world. They still have some Great North Run places left, but be quick as the closing date is coming up really fast. If you are not already running for DSUK, then get on the phone to Jane and her team for an entry - 020 7481 8110.

Get Kids Going! have committed to helping us out again this year and are planning to come out to Russia with us to see Sochi in February. We will all be there looking at the future paralympic venue together - our great supporters are always made very welcome at our competitions.

- Jane Emmerson and the Team from Get Kids Going supporting Great Britain in Whistler last year.

It was a pleasure too to meet again with Robert Houston and Lucy Till of BOOST. They are very enthusiastic supporters of our work in athlete development and helped us to be able to run our programming with new skiers last season, funding our camp in Austria.

Fiona and I rounded off the day with Tea at the Grosvenor Hotel where we had the pleasure of picking the brains of Geoff Keeling and Liz Hawkins from Crystal on ways in which we can work better to increase the funding appeal of DSUK to a wider market.

This very long, but productive, day ended back up in Yorkshire at 10pm last night.

Back in the office....

It has been a busy few days. Meetings Thursday and Friday.

Friday was a UK Sport led session for Paralympic Stakeholders. A number of talks and workshops down in London for Managers and members of the NGBs for the various sports. There were some particulalry interesting points on athlete monitoring and reporting - something that is super critical to success these days and being able to track and plan correctly - and an interesting session on the attributes of elite level paralympic coaches. This second talk and workshop is particularly timely for us.

Quite an industrious office day today as there are a number of items going along. Examples are race entries for New Zealand, race training organisation for Hemel Hempstead, talking to Nik Diaper of EIS to look at options for Team Doctor provision and some much needed website work.

On Wednesday it is back down to London again to talk to a few of our key supporters to discuss our plans for next season and look at some possible corporate sponsorship options.

New media, new race league

Back from the conference yesterday with Company Solutions. Some very interesting stuff that, if only I had time to do it all, I am sure will really help the Team to raise profile and gain more supporters.

Fascinated by many of the messages from the corporate side of the conf. (it was corporates in the morning, community and events issues in the afternoon).  One thing that was a clear message is that apart from there being some small easy things we can do to make ourselves more visible, most of these involve the effective use of new media. Looks like I will be needing to set up a Twitter account for the Team - I can hear Anna saying "I told you so...".

Everyone can race!

Today - telecon. re. some aspects of the proposed indoor race league and trying to make it all inclusive.  The end objective of this is to have an indoor race league running in the Snow Domes which pits able-bodied alongside paralympic type and special olympic type athletes with time factoring to make the FIRST truely inclusive race league anywhere in the world.  The league would be a great opportunity for some of our budding racers (such as Ben and Asif below) to get some more mileage indoors, to help us find new racers of all disciplines and to generally raise awareness of the fact that everyone who wants to race should be able to give it a go!

We know we will have great help from our good friends Crystal in this, but any potential partners that would like to get involved please get in touch. We could do with lots of willing volunteers, prize suppliers and finanical partners to help us bring this to reality.




Later today: A meeting over in Manchester with Sarah and a new volunteer over there (Sara) who is keen to help out the team with our fundraising. Thanks Sara!

Clearing the office - Conferences

I shall be out of the office today. Travelling up to Glasgow for a couple of training conferences on fundraising. Back in on Wednesday - if anyone needs to reach me they can get me on my mobile number today but it'll be switched off tomorrow.

This is also my chance to clear the team kit that has been filling my office for the last 2 months! All going up to storage in Aviemore.

Mission Sochi

Today is one of those "bits and pieces" days.

Main task to finish is the first BDST entry onto the Mission 2012 (for us "Mission Sochi") database at UK Sport. This is like a sport "health check" where we work with Mitch Hammond - our Performance Adviser - to take a snapshot of where we are right now - the red flags, the green lights and the ambers - for all aspects around the sport.

Other tasks for the day are to come up with some ideas for a new Team based pull up banner, housekeeping on our strategic documents and photo library [remember if you have some good photos you want me to use then you need to send them to me!] and working on getting all the team gear out of my office and back up to Aviemore. Other items: preparing for a conference on corporate funding (Glasgow Tuesday 14th), deciding what modules to attend at a Paralympic Stakeholder conference (London Friday 17th). And yes, these are some of the highlights of my day.......

Welcome to the Team Manager Blog!

This blog is to give you all an idea of some of the activity that goes on behind the scenes to keep the ski team running - a day to day record of what the Team Manager is currently working on.

Topic for today: Snowboarders - Adaptive snowboarding racing, "Para-Snowboarding" is on the way to becoming a paralympic sport. You can read up about it here. As with some other sports, Para-Snowboard does not have a National Governing Body. DSUK are now working to be the representative NGB for this sport to help it develop and begin to lay the foundations of a future pathway for the sport.

We hope that by getting into the sport at an early stage we will be able to help the athletes progress into competition and become a world class nation.