UK Athletics and Youth Policy (UK Youth Policy)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	UK Youth Policy
Date:	31/08/01 (124 review reads)
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Firstly apologies, this is written from a track athlete's perspective, some of the terminology ignores field events, this isn't because I don't like them or am biased against them merely because I am used to speaking about myself and my events and so track athletics comes naturally. No offence meant.

Originally I wrote: 'Once again I am writing this review and placing it in a category not truly suited to it. I think it probably belongs in speaker's corner somewhere but in the sports section it's all football, I will see if Dooyoo create a new category for athletics in general or youth development or something but until then here it can stay. Sorry.' Dooyoo have done just that and here it is. Thankyou Dooyoo. Also once again I am writing a review on UK athletics in general (a general topic) with reference more specifically to the parts of the UK I have experience of namely the South West peninsula stretching into the Southern counties. Right, that's all the explanation you're getting. (Smart move Matt insult your readers, great way to get good ratings.)

Right, I began running with a local athletics club in Somerset when I was about thirteen, seven years ago. I had always been active as a child and had taken up judo at a younger age but after some trouble with my knees I stopped and never went back. When I reached secondary school I had some success as an athlete and decided that I'd try it properly. We approached the local sports organisation and they said that there was a council run session on Sunday mornings and the local team was called Wells Harriers, if I wanted to get involved call this man here. I began my illustrious (hehe) career as an 800m runner, well so I thought.

The local leagues which teams enter all over the country tend to be arranged in ways similar to the one Wells entered, there are a certain number of meetings per season and they either run all the events at one meeting (rare) o
r split the events into two groups and alternate from one meeting to the next i.e. 110m hurdles at one event and 400m hurdles at the next (much more common). Athletics is run in age groups; under thirteen (U13), U15, U17, U20men and Senior. The cut off date is August 31st for all age groups apart from U20men where it is December 31st (and maybe U17women is the same, I'm not sure). I didn't decide it so don't ask me why. This means that you get two years in each age group and some men get three years at U20 (and women three at U17). Because team events at small leagues tend to be for all age groups this means there are a lot of races to be run in one day (U13 boys 200m, U13 girls 200m, U15 boys 200m, U15 girls 200m, U17 men 200m... you get the picture) and thus there is the need to split the events into two groups. This is furthered by the fact that there are two races run at each age group an A race and a B race. The A race scoring 4 points more highly than the B. 12 points for first place, 11 for second and so on down resulting in 1 point for last (8th) in the B race.

I happened to join Wells either the year they entered the league or the one after. They were in division three at the time and started a meteoric rise to fame (hehe) by rising a division a season. The meeting is won by the team with the highest number of points at the end of the day and then match points are allocated in the same way as race points, 8 points for 1st, 7 for second and so on down. The division is won at the end of the season by the team with the most number of match points, not necessarily the team that has the highest combined points score. This means that the most successful teams are the ones who have an athlete in every event even if they're not very good at it or haven't ever done it before. This resulted in me running the 200m very soon after beginning at Wells and I was, to put not too fine a point on it, successful. Importantly a lot more successful
than I was at 800m and so I was categorised as a sprinter and my true athletics career began. The joy of this system is that people get to do all sorts of things, I have long jumped, triple jumped, pole vaulted, thrown discus, javelin, shot putted, high jumped all sorts of things just to gain points because the club had no specialist, or only one specialist in some events. Janine Whitlock, the British women's pole vault record holder started her life as a sprinter and did the pole vault for points at a club meeting (albeit a slightly more illustrious club than Wells City Harriers) and liked it so much she took it up as her main event and look where it got her.

Now the point of this review is to tell you of the way the league has developed over the last seven years and the general way children can be introduced into athletics. It will very likely include some of my athletic history but that should hopefully not bore you too much. The South West league has now, in 2001, got two divisions, a reduction from four that happened over two successive seasons a few years ago. This is due to a lot of clubs dropping out. There are very few tartan tracks (that's the red plasticy type stuff you see on telly) in the South West and so the meetings tend to be held at the same places a lot. I was lucky (am lucky) there are two tracks close to where I live and I even have the privilege of training on one of them. The tracks are further restricted by politics and league rules. A track may only be used by a division if the one of the teams in the division is affiliated to that track. For instance no meeting that doesn't involve Yeovil athletics club can be held on the Yeovil track. In each division there are two or three tracks and if all of these are at one end of the region, and there is a club in the division from the other end of the region this could involve a long journey to each meeting. Clubs tend to hire a coach for the day. This is obviously expensive, a b
us fare is collected from the people competing and spectators who wish to travel too. It also means that for what should be a relatively low key, relaxed event some people have had to get up at six on a Sunday morning to deliver their children (or themselves) to a bus stop for seven to be at the meet for eleven. This means they won't be home until about ten that night and that's a very long day out. This in itself may put a lot of children off and many parents may be unwilling to continue this for a long period of time, four to six times a year for X number of years. Doing a sport seriously without parental support when you're young is incredibly difficult.

Another problem is that due to the lack of tartan tracks most people have to train on grass, or make a trip to a track to train. Once again this causes the same problems, demanding a huge commitment from parents which they may be unable to give and is unfair to expect from them. I understand the idea of driving for 40 minutes, watching your child train for an hour, not the most exciting thing in the world, and then driving home for 40 minutes is an entire evening given up and for a 14 year old who takes their sport seriously they will want to train twice a week at least. The same thing holds true for adults wishing to participate in athletics but they tend to take the lack of tartan to train on as a blessing, it'll harden ye' type thing, if you can do it on grass it'll be easier on tartan. Obviously this is only true of track athletes bar hurdlers, it's impossible to train for many field events without the correct equipment and/or surroundings, like a long jump pit and runway or a pole-vault mat or whatever. When I was younger training on a 'proper' track made me feel more serious and as if the world would take me more seriously too, many children would be encouraged if they could use high quality equipment and a tartan track. All in all this has led to the demise of
several small clubs and the shrinking of the league to two, or more like one and a half divisions. Admittedly I have chosen close to a worse case scenario to use as illustration but the point remains the same.

What happened to Wells Harriers was very similar, eventually we amalgamated with a larger club in the region; Yeovil Olympiads and now run in the Southern England leagues. A team is still entered for the South west league but it isn't taken quite so seriously and if a full team were entered for it we would win very easily. Quite a few clubs in the region do similar things to this, Bournemouth, Wessex and Bath and a few others have either amalgamated or opted to place one team in a southern league and one in the south west. Now in some ways this is a good thing. It results in there being more races available in the season. Two places in southern league and two in the south west. Yeovil operate a policy which chooses the best available athletes to compete at the larger league in order to score points and stand a better chance of winning and then giving priority in the south west league to those athletes who haven't competed, those left over. I am lucky enough to be good enough at the 200m to be chosen for Yeovil's first team as it were but there are many athletes, especially younger one from Wells who only get to run in the south west league, which, despite everything, no longer has the appeal. If you are with a club in any sport you always want to be competing at the highest level your club does and if there is the perception that one league 'doesn't really matter' then you won't feel as useful or fulfilled competing in that league.

Another thing the amalgamation of small clubs (or the swallowing of them by larger clubs) means is a loss of identity. Wells was a relatively small club where I knew everyone at least well enough to talk to, and most well enough to insult if you know what I mean. In fact after a few yea
rs on the circuit, as it were, I knew a lot of people in the league, especially those in my age group who I'd competed with right through. Joining Yeovil has meant for me that the standard of competition is higher, which is good, but also that the league is much larger and less personal, that's the price you pay. I'm 19 and have nearly seven years of athletics behind me and that's a decision I can cope with but if you're younger and/or haven't the same amount of experience then a less personal league could very easily put you off. I still cling to my Wells vest with fond memories and many of the older athletes are more attached than me. I will never get to wear it officially again.

One answer to this is that there need to be more tracks available and that the equipment on those tracks needs to be available too. More realistically we need to increase the accessibility of the tracks already in existence, and in some cases take better care of them and be willing to relay them when it becomes necessary. A school based public transport scheme for children who want to join athletics clubs would help some people but others still wouldn't have the time to travel and train after school or college.

Another problem facing a lot of sports, and athletics is definitely one of them, is the 'grass roots', getting people started in the first place. As anyone can see, tennis becomes more popular for a few weeks after Wimbledon has been on television, rugby after the world cup is shown etcetera etcetera. Athletics is shown on television quite a lot. I like this but for many people the pace of the coverage isn't really fast enough and I understand this. It's easy to read a book and keep an eye on the athletics, concentrating for the individual race or throw or jump. Also the pessimistic attitude that has become predominant in the British press for all sports has hit athletics hard. At the recent world championships in Edmon
ton all the focus was on the fact that we only won two medals a gold and a bronze. This melancholy slating of British achievement used to be exclusive to the papers, originally only the tabloids, but now has spread somewhat to the main coverage on television. Instead of promoting the fact that British athletes were running some of the best times of their lives, which were in the world's top 10 or whatever we say 'Didn't win a flippin' medal, not flippin' good enough' and that is not the kind of thing that encourages anyone let alone children who haven't tried the sport yet.

The two sports for boys that do brilliantly in this country are football and rugby. Football because it gets a huge amount of TV coverage, but both of them because they are supported in school. This is the real secret in my mind. The press coverage is the same, especially at national level -'They didn't win everything, not good enough.' but the leagues shown are presented more positively (partly because it's always a British win) and thus are more encouraging. At school football is pretty much compulsory, rugby is the same and it's fashionable to play rugby or football outside school. Athletics, at least when I was at school (I sound old now, school, obviously, wasn't that long ago), was almost optional, and it wasn't taken anywhere near so seriously. There were regional rugby trials and football trials and loads of people went. The regional trials for other sports weren't pushed so assiduously and the main reason I went for them was through the club telling me I should go.

The schools system works like this: Anyone who wants to can compete at their district school trials in the relevant age group as long as they attend a school. If you leave school at 16 you can't compete after that, ditto for 18. The district can take four athletes from each event to the county championships. There is a qualifying time cut off so
that if in one district there are six very good athletes who all run the qualifying time then they can all go to the County's. In counties like Somerset this doesn't happen but I think it becomes useful more often in large cities or more densely populated areas. The County's is run a while after the District's, usually on a Sunday and here the times and personal bests are recorded for the county team selection. There are two further competitions from here, the larger regional championships, for us the South West's and then the Nationals; English schools (or Scottish or Welsh...). For the Nationals there are qualifying times called national entry and a guide to the standard called national standards. These are high, very high; for instance the U17 men's 200m national entry time is 22.9 seconds. The national standard is more like 22.2 seconds and that, if you'll excuse me, is like s**t off a shovel. Compare: I'm not the fastest guy on earth but I win the county adult 200m or come second (it depends on whether they're including Avon at the time) and I've only just run 22.9 (please excuse my egotism). The fastest man in the county runs 22.5 on a good day and the national standard is 22.2 for a 16 year old! (The winning times are usually somewhere around 21.8)

Each county is classed on population A, B or C, A being the largest and C the smallest. Unsurprisingly Somerset is a C class county. There is a limit to the number of athletes any county can take, C class counties, the last time I was sure, had 22 places at the Nationals, although it won't have changed much. An 'place' is an entrant in one event, so if the same person goes for the 100m and 200m or the long jump and the triple jump that counts as two places. Any athlete who achieves the national standard before the deadline can go as a free place, but there aren't very many of those.

So you go to the county championships and run. Winning isn&
#39;t good enough, you have to win with at least a qualifying time (or distance or height) and then maybe, maybe you'll get chosen to go to the Nationals. You do have a second chance, a squad of more like 120 athletes per county (on the same system) are taken to the larger regional championships where you have the chance to run your qualifying time. The county selectors have to try and be fair and so what they do is try to take those athletes who they think have the best chance of winning anything to the Nationals. There is a points system and a team competition, the A, B and C class counties with the most points get trophies. There are age group prizes as well. This means that a county allowed 22 athletes may deliberately take those in one age group over another because they stand a chance of winning that trophy. This means athletes are being discriminated not by talent but by age, or maybe sex.

I would suggest that the entry times need to be a little higher and that the national championships need to be a longer event instead of just a weekend. The rules should be changed so that anyone who runs the qualifying time, which would be a little harder, would go to the Nationals. There would be more athletes there and the more people we take to the Nationals the more will come through to the adult ranks. This requires more money, fine; we need to spend more money on sports in this country. Everything I've said is applicable to countless sports I just happen to know about Athletics. It's worth mentioning here that children tend to do one of two things at the Nationals: Either they are so nervous they don't perform to their ability or they knock chunks off (or on for field events) their personal bests.

Media and social views gear children towards the short term outlook: "Success now", and children naturally want to do well immediately. Not taking anything away from the children who achieve at young ages but very very few of th
em are as good comparatively when they reach adulthood. The current exception could be Mark Lewis-Francis who ran an incredible 100m at English Schools when he was 14 (10.64 seconds) and is only improving but usually the people who win the Nationals at young ages are those who mature very early and peak very young. If you run a time at 15 and it's brilliant but then don't improve on that time much for the next five years it won't look so good at 20. Just check the record books, those names you see with records at the lower age groups are rarely names you know. The names you recognise almost always crop up at the U20 level when the person achieving them was 18 or 19. Steve Backley, until 1998 (I think) held the national U20 javelin record but there's no sign of him at U17 unless you go back to the regional records or the county records. What we need is more regional championships, more inter-county competitions to allow those athletes not good enough to go the Nationals more chance to represent their county. I was so proud to run in the county schools vest and I only got to do it once a year for three or four years and that was it. We only ever give credit to winners and this is a very short term outlook. The potential champions of the future may well be those kids who gave up athletics for rugby because playing rugby for the county is regarded highly and they get a lot of games, whereas if they'd stuck with athletics, they only get a few meets in a county vest and no one really pays them much attention.

Maybe I'm just bitter because I was never good enough to go to English schools.

To present a balanced article I suppose I should admit that there are things integral to the sport that put children off on their own. Going to an athletics event takes the whole day, they start around 11am and finish around 5.30pm and most people only do a few events and even if you do loads there's still a lot of waiting around. Also the sp
ort is perceived as being very individual, which on one hand it is. Only you can change how well you do in your race but this attracts some people, no one else can ruin your performance either. What you often don't see until you are already involved with athletics is the community spirit. Because the events are individual there is little aggression anywhere other than on the track, teams will help each other and athletes tend to get on very well together. Athletics really is a good way to meet people, even though you have no team event, honest.

The other thing that needs to be said is that a lot of people give up a lot of time to make the events I go to work. Each field event needs two judges, one of whom must be qualified. The track events need a qualified starter, a qualified track judge and at least three qualified time keepers. Most clubs fund their members to become qualified for judging and time keeping but it still requires a lot of people give up a lot of time and for this I am truly grateful. Maybe this is another reason for the demise of smaller leagues, the fact that a lot of officials are required. At a football match the only qualified person necessary is the referee, and then two linesmen for rugby and they only have to give up 90 minutes on a Saturday as opposed to their entire Sunday.

My favourite example to use for sports is this: My family took me on holiday to Ireland a few summers ago and my dad and I got really hooked on the hurling, I'm sure most of you know what it is but for those of you who don't it's a major sport in Ireland. They take it at least as seriously as the football is taken over here, I would say more so. It's played on a county basis and the coverage is huge. Anyhow we were driving along listening to the radio and a Hurley match. The commentators were obviously excited and were reeling off Irish names faster than we could follow. After the match they interviewed some players and did an anal
ysis and looked to the next game the winners would have to play. Only when they reached the interviews did we learn that this was an under 15's game. There was a large enough crowd that the noise was indistinguishable on the radio and the coverage it was given gave us no clue that this wasn't an adult match. The recognition of the players was exactly the same as it would have been if they were all ten years older. This is what we need to do in Britain. If we take our young athletes (from all sports) seriously then there will be more of them and consequently as a group they will perform better. The Regional championships could have highlights on regional television, maybe only show the finals, whatever as long as it was something. The Nationals should surely be given some space on the news. Channel four had some late night coverage of it a few years ago, at about 3 in the morning. Woohoo. A few years ago we had some success at the World Youth Games, at least two gold medals, more I think and Dwain Chambers (of adult fame now) ran the World Junior Record for the 100m. Did anyone hear about it? I saw it in an Athletics magazine but no mention of it on television.

Until we respect our young athletes and take them seriously how can we expect young people to want to be athletes? No athletes = No medals. Need I go on?

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