I recently went and shot at another club. I paid for my shoot (not cheap) and then had the slowest session in the world while a group of beginners were coached. It wasn’t really the coaching that I minded (we’re all familiar with that and I can hear a lot of you thinking ‘oh my goodness, please say you’re providing member only sessions’) what bothered me was that the instructors weren’t giving the beginners any encouragement to speed up or get back over the shooting line. On their last end the beginners stood around on the range snapping photos of each other with the targets and their arrows which took at least 5+ minutes.

So, why am I writing a blog post about this? Well, it made me think that as we have a lot of beginners through the club we could do with laying out our position on how this ought to happen. A kind of contract between the club and the members if you like. So, here goes.

• The usual / main indoor round shot is the Portsmouth (60 arrows at 20 yards on a 60cm target face). Club members should ALWAYS be able to shoot a Portsmouth with 6 sighters (72 arrows). We hugely encourage scoring and we keep a leader board of member shooting on the website here. We’d love to restart leagues or club competitions – if you’re interested in co-ordinating this please shout!
• If possible a club member should be nominated to either score during a session or count their arrows (I have a knitting row counter that I use to count my practice arrows). It’s helpful to have an accurate idea of how many arrows are getting shot.. not just for an idea of what you get for your money for a shooting session but for your own practice records.
• Club members should feedback to the office if less arrows are being shot than this – if numbers drop really low for whatever reason (saving act of God / Downside / Schools Plus!) we’ll refund the cost of the session.
• Instructors should do as much as they possibly can on the safe side of the shooting line. We won’t tolerate instructors standing on the range pontificating at beginners while club members stand around.
• The only really unavoidably slow bit will probably be teaching beginners how to pull arrows. Club members are always welcome to go and assist the instructor, help to supervise the arrow pulling and help beginners to collect their arrows.
• If the instructor is encouraged to always think – how can I be faster and allow more shooting time? Then club members are encouraged to think – how could I help the instructor to make this faster?
• If you are interested in learning about coaching please tell us! Pretty much every club except ours has volunteer coaches who assist beginner club members. I’m not sure why we don’t have this. We’d love for more of our members to go through Level 1 / 2 training and help other club members to develop their shooting. It wouldn’t be a paid position but learning how to coach can be enormously helpful for your own shooting. Everyone coaches each other when learning to coach so you’ll get a lot of free feedback (including from the senior coaches leading the course).
• We all need to remember that we need beginners – they are the life blood of the club and the fact that we run lots of beginners courses is how many many of our club members got started in the first place. BUT, we need to be respectful to our club members and appreciate how much they are paying to shoot.

OK so that’s it. Please do remember to tell the office if things go awry at the club as we may not know. Multiple reporting is better than everyone thinking that someone else will do it.

We’ve got a whole load of wonderful members and our constant flow of beginners lands more on our doorstep every month. It’s up to us to lay out what we expect but I don’t think we tell you what we’ll deliver in return often enough. And really – do think about coaching! Here’s a link to the Archery GB Level 1 course page.

Thanks so much to everyone that responded. There are a few things that arose from the consultation that we think it’s worth sending a group answer out for. Apologies that this is a long post but we want to address as many things as possible. We’ve given different sections headings so you can skip through as fast as you wish.

January blues

January is busy! January is always busy as lots of people decide to return to archery / shoot more in the New Year. In hindsight it wasn’t the best time to have reduced sessions but before Christmas we had a few weeks where we literally had 3 people in the 3pm Saturday session so something had to be done. The shooting line always calms down after the January rush subsides.

Overflow shooting

We’re happy to organise an overflow list so if you do wish to shoot on a Saturday or Sunday and there isn’t space please email into the office saying “Saturday overflow shoot DATE” or something of that nature in the subject line (if there are 2 of you please write “Sunday overflow shoot 9th Feb – 2 people”). If we get enough people who want to shoot we can schedule an extra session – we will need around 15 people for us to book an extra session at Downside. This weekend there is no possibility for a Saturday overflow but we have good availability for a Sunday overflow. Please email in if you’d like to put your name down.

Sunday should be easy to put on an overflow shoot on the roof pitch at the same time as regular shooting (or 12-2pm). The easiest slot that we’ll usually be able to find on a Saturday will be 10 to 12. Please specify if there are times you can’t do if you want an overflow spot. The more flexible you are the better the chance that we’ll be able to put on an extra shoot. This will also work for MONDAY shooting as we can book Downside – but not Wednesday.

24 hr notice period for cancellation

We expect 24 hrs notice if you can’t attend. For now we’re going to chase people for payment if they come up on our no-show list. If you’re on Direct Debit we also expect you to give 24hrs notice of cancellation. If you book and don’t attend while on the Direct Debit programme we will remove you from the scheme – we offer DD at a discount but this is on the basis that suitable notice for cancellation is given.

Informing new members about cancellation etc

We’ve realised that not enough people are aware of our cancellation policy, probably because everything is a bit overwhelming at first. Our cancellation period is set out in the new member welcome emails. As very few people seemed clear on the system we’re going to send out a follow-up email to the welcome one a month after people join the club.

Junior club / set up for 12pm Saturday shooting

Every session listed includes set up and take down time. Most shooting sessions will allow for around 1 to 1.5hrs of shooting time. This is the same as every other archery club that I know of with the exception of the very rare shops etc that have fixed ranges. The session times indicate when we have rented the space for the shoot i.e. we enter at that time and we leave at that time. We are better off than most clubs as we can often leave things set up from an earlier session. I’m afraid that we can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to shoot a full Portsmouth every time.. if you arrive and shoot 6 sighter arrows and then shoot 3 arrows every end you should be able to manage it.. but we can’t guarantee this. We have actively made some changes to try and get junior club out of the hall while members set up.. although a 20 minute set up time is actually pretty good. The more people that arrive early i.e. 12 o’clock the faster shooting will start. We know it can be slow on week 1 of a beginners course.. or if there’s a weekend course in but we do our best to keep the club moving. Again, the amount of weekend courses will calm right down later in the year – you can check starting weeks / whether a weekend course is scheduled etc on the website.

Late arrivals / staying on for 2^nd Saturday Session

If you arrive more than 20 minutes late you may not be able to shoot. There is obviously VERY limited availability on a Saturday now so :

• If you are booked in for session 2 STAY OUT OF THE HALL until 2pm

• If you are booked in for the first session and wish to stay for the second session please inform Diccon during session 1 and VACATE THE HALL at 2pm until all of the session 2 people have arrived. If there are still gaps at 2.20pm these can be filled by anyone that has stayed on.

• If you arrive for session 2 later than 2.20pm and your spot has gone you need to leave again! Please don’t embarrass people by demanding ‘your’ spot, it is now ‘their’ spot.

One or two people said in their response emails “Archers need to have more respect for other archers”. I think this is something that we all need to pay heed to at the moment.

The result of the consultation

The final results of the consultation were very evenly divided between chasing no-shows and implementing a pre-pay system. As the club seems to be split so evenly we’ve chosen to start moving towards a pre-pay system as this seems to have the easiest admin for the office. Systems with more admin effectively cost more as we need to pay office staff to do the chasing.

Pricing

A number of people have noticed that if we charged more we’d be able to have quieter sessions. We wholeheartedly agree. For now we’re starting with trying to collect all the money from bookings made but basically at £10 per person we need pretty full sessions to make it worth us doing. Remember that as a small business we lose 20% of all session fees in VAT.. we need to pay for target faces, maintain the bosses (each target costs about £300 and they need regular replacement) and to pay instructors to open and close up. I expect that we will gradually increase prices on an annual basis – our session fee has stayed the same for the 6 years that 2020 Archery has existed. We’re not implementing this anytime soon… but if we charged £15 per person we could give over half the shooting line to ‘gaps’. Our intuition is that more people would prefer less space and lower costs… but just to put it out there, there’s a direct relationship between the two.

We are in a very unique position – which is that we have a brilliantly convenient central London location… because of this our club is busy.. and our costs are high… this mean we need to take in a lot of beginners to help pay the high rental fees.. and we are one of the only clubs that doesn’t expect any volunteer assistance from our members. We know that we’re trying to do something a bit different but we also believe that we have something great. It just needs fine tuning occasionally.

Huge thanks to those club members that wrote supportive emails. We really appreciate it.

We’ll keep everyone updated as change slowly starts to happen – please do get those ‘overflow shoot’ emails in as this will ease a lot of the pressure on the shooting line.

Best wishes,

Heidi and the 2020 Archery Team

Hi everyone, we are going to send a more fun email newsletter soon with details of our inaugural handicap competition / shoot during March – we haven’t forgotten.

We want to ask YOU as a club member to try and help us work out the current problems with the target booking system.

We are getting a huge amount of no-shows. The record for no-shows on a Wednesday evening is 7 (out of a usual 16 spaces available) so almost half the pre-booked people didn’t turn up one week. Last Saturday we had a fully booked target list for both sessions but 10 people didn’t turn up. This is a quarter of all the spaces available! This has 2x negative impacts.

1)   the club is affected financially – the less viable each session is the less able we are to offer extra sessions.. if we fill the sessions that we offer we have more cash to spend on rent for opening extra sessions.

2)   we’ve got loads of people hoping to shoot who are not coming because they think the session is full.

Basically what we think is happening is that people are pre-booking all the sessions they think they may want to come to in order to hold a space for themselves. If they can’t make it on the day they just don’t turn up. We need to address the problem and we think there are 3x ways forward.

Possible Solutions

1)   Make the booking system pre-pay so in order to get your name into a square you’ll need to go through some sort of pay-wall. Hopefully we could set this up so that you shouldn’t have to repeat all the details every time.. but I’ll need to look into technical aspects of this. This system is the best one for us being able to open up an ‘overspill’ shoot which is definitely usually possible on a Sunday and quite often possible on a Saturday. Overspill shoots will be on the roof pitch.. once the existing sessions are fully paid for we can open an overspill list – if we get 12 people signed up we’ll book an overspill shoot.

2)   ask everyone that wants to shoot to sign up to Direct Debit. We don’t really want to do this as we know that some members can only come sporadically and it will effectively make us quite a ‘closed club’. Lots of similar London activities do work on this basis – some yoga clubs, martial arts clubs etc. It’s a possibility but isn’t one that I favour personally.

3)   Ask no-shows to pay the missed session fee unless they have a really good reason.. if they don’t / won’t pay the missed session fee then we’ll remove them from the pre-book system so they’ll only be able to attend if they pre-pay or turn up on the day with cash without pre-booking.

We really do need to sort this out soon given the reduced number of sessions. We want to see full sessions (in reality down at the club not a virtual ‘booked out’ target list), once we get this we can book more sessions for the club to shoot.

We really value everyone’s input – please do let us know if you feel strongly about one option over another. My feeling is that a pre-payment system would work best for us in the office… but might be unpopular and unduly punitive for the majority of conscientious club members that very rarely ‘no-show’.. but if we go down the route of paying for a missed-session this might not actually change people’s attitude towards booking and not coming which won’t open many more spots…

Either of these options should work so it will pretty much come down to a vote.

Please please let us know – cast your vote on how you want the club to develop!!

Best wishes,

Heidi