WNL Annual Meeting 2009

Held: September 26th 2009, Birdlip

In attendance: Lewis Watson, Kevin Ryder, John Fallows, Alan Starling, Ellen Starling, Dave Marshallsay, Les Marshallsay, Ian Fleming.

The following are notes of the primary discussion points from the meeting:

Agenda

1. WNL Organiser/Co-ordinator
2. Events & publicity
3. Funding
4. Handicap system
5. AOB

1. WNL Organiser/Co-ordinator

As no Organiser has emerged it was decided to move to a system whereby each club would be asked to appoint a WNL liaison person. The list of events will be finalised at the WNL Annual meeting each year, to be held in September, with the help of the club reps.

2. Events & publicity

Mike Farrington has had several representations from clubs and there is already a preliminary calendar of 10/11 events for 2009-10 between 7th November and 20th March. The final event at the moment is a SWOC event. It was thought that a more central event would be better from a prize-giving viewpoint and we should aim to hold an event on 27th March - either a new event or swapping another event into this slot. If this isn't possible, we will finish the season in South Wales and maybe it will attract more night orienteers to the excellent events that SWOC put on for us each year.

There will be no team event this season. The Wessex Night League inter-league event will not count as a WNL event for scoring purposes, due to poor attendance in the past which skews the league result.

The aim is to finalise the calendar of events asap and publicise through the usual channels.(The Fixtures have since been published on the WNL Web-site.)

3. Funding

It was unanimously agreed that the WNL should be funded by a 50p levy (since lowered to 25p) per senior runner. This would be requested from the clubs (it has to be voluntary) in order to fund the league. This would therefore mean the clubs forgoing 50p (now 25p) 'profit' per runner and would not involve any additional fees for competitors. It was asked that WNL attendees make this request formally to their clubs. The level of the levy will be reconsidered in September 2010. The levy would fund running the web-site and the annual prizes. Initially any income would be used to reimburse the outstanding monies owed to Mike Farrington for web-site hosting fees. It was decided that the prizes for 2009-2010 would be the following:

WNL Champion
Highest placed female*
Highest placed Junior*
Highest placed Newcomer in first season*
Handicap League Winner
Best Attendance by Individual Orienteer
Organiser with lowest attendance

* based on League table (not handicap).

It was thought that we should appoint a 'Treasurer', but not use a bank account because of the small funds involved. All income and expenditure would be recorded and displayed on the web-site to ensure total transparency. Mike Farrington would be requested to undertake this role, but Dave Marshallsay said he would do it if Mike didn't want the job.

4. Handicap system

It was unanimously agreed that the handicap system will be retained in its current format, although it was thought that it needs to be explained to help understanding of the system. The non-handicap League table will be retained to determine the WNL Champion and most of the end-of-season awards will be based on this table.

5. AOB

Safety: Event organisers are reminded that it is their responsibility to ensure that adequate safety processes are in place, including retaining sufficient manpower, preferably with local knowledge, to mount searches if Orienteers don't return as expected. This has been required several times over the years. The second safety issue raised was that several orienteers ignored a blown whistle at an event last season. This is obviously totally unacceptable.