Olympic Funding article

Ed Warner has expressed an opinion, not made an announcement. He's the head of British Basketball which, oddly enough, is one of the sports he thinks deserves more money.

Totally agree on both counts. I rocked up to the AGM one year expecting a couple of drinks with my racing mates and found myself as the VC an hour and a half later and commodore a year or two after that. And much as some of the whining on the forum has made me whine back I did get a lot from being VC and Commodore, and I'm not just talking about satisfaction at putting something back into a sport and a club that has given me so much. My professional career has come on in leaps and bounds since, not the reason I became VC and them Commodore but if you can run a sailing club with a load of excitable members then running a business is easy peasy in comparison. 

The REALLY good leaders I've seen (and I'm not counting myself in this category, I was an adequate VC and Com mainly because I loved the sport and was enthusiastic rather than being a great leader) are great at spotting talent in the club and aligning it to the right role. Some of the sole trader types in our clubs have been great at thinking outside the box and at recruitment, some of the public sector types are great at aligning the club with local influences such as councils, Councillors, MPs, the RYA, local schools etc, and members from a practical background are invaluable for helping us maintain the club at a reasonable cost. To be successful in the dreadful market that sailing clubs are in at present clubs need to use all available talent.

Sorry, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the Data Protection Act are legal requirements not something that is in the gift of the RYA or an individual club to ignore, and affiliation by a club to a governing body (or not) isn't relevant.

 

I can't make any sense of this ?   Altruistic aims ?   Does this mean things the club does that you personally don't support ?   As I find it hard to see what's particularly wrong about a sailing club having altruism at its core, if we agree with the dictionary definition of altruistic as being "unselfishly concerned for or devoted to the welfare of others (opposed to egoistic)".  And who are the people that provide 90% of the finances of the club ?   In most clubs I'd guess the income is perhaps 30% from racing and racing members, 50% from recreational sailors who are rarely seen at the club but whose subs keep it afloat, and perhaps 10% each from social and group members. Feels like there is so much antagonism in your posts you're in danger of missing the point of what the sport and our clubs are about. This isn't supposed to be hard work, it's our leisure time, if you're having such a bad experience move club as you clearly don't like or respect where you are.