Blog 27 - How the game is run...

I have been involved in two things during the past couple of weeks which have rammed home to me the importance of how our game is run.

A few weeks ago I was at the special meeting of the Union that determined whether or not the Board’s plans for Universal Membership were to be accepted or rejected. I had previously been to six shareholders' meetings in my two years in post (already!) and most of them had been well attended. You may ask who attends. Well, it is full of volunteers, people who give of their time freely for the good of the game they all love; the only people there who are not volunteers being myself and one or two of my staff. The Board are all volunteers who take on onerous legal responsibilities as well as give up days, weeks and months of their lives for the English Bridge Union; the County representatives also spend a great deal of time managing Bridge in their areas.

Unsurprisingly, this particular meeting was the best attended of all of those that I had been at, so full we had to find extra chairs. Remember everyone who was there to vote on the proposals was a volunteer; they all have their perception of the best interests of the game foremost in their minds. Each County was given a brief period to make their views known and then the vote was taken. At the end the vote was not too far short of 2-1 in favour of the Board’s proposals. The meeting resumed its normal agenda and it was delightful to see that its normal good humour was retained throughout the proceedings.

At the end of that meeting the various groups of volunteers went their own way – each to worry about their specific volunteering areas of concern.

Although all our shareholders are club members, the prolific club volunteer group is not specifically represented at the meetings. I very recently was invited to one of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Bristol Bridge Club. Their volunteer committee had quite rightly decided to make this milestone a major celebration of their longevity and success – and successful it is! They have a superb club building, owned now without a mortgage, deep in the heart of Bristol. They have an active membership of over 400 people and teachers who help bring people into the game. My wife and I stayed for two sessions of bridge and we met a lot of friendly and enthused people; a very enjoyable day! This club did not get where it is today without a lot of problems, some disagreements and a lot of hard work; but they reached their current situation anyway and are benefiting from the fruits of many hard days of volunteer effort .

Which brings me back to the first group of volunteers I was discussing; the membership has voted to support the Board’s vision for the future. It will take a lot of hard work and some ups and downs along the way before this vision is achieved. What is needed now is for each group of volunteers to knuckle down and work together to improve the future for all. Every volunteer needs to remember why they are doing what they do – because that is the very reason the other person is doing it as well!

Blog 26 - Duplicate Bridge can't be a sport - can it?

This seems to be one of the questions of the moment. Most of you probably would conclude in a flash that duplicate bridge is not a sport. However, according to the International Olympic Committee it absolutely IS a sport. I quote here directly from the World Bridge Federation’s web site:-

WBF: a 'Recognized Organization'

In June 1995, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) admitted the World Bridge Federation (WBF) as 'part of the Olympic Movement', awarding it the status of a 'Recognized Sport Organization'. This recognition was accorded under Rule 4 of the Olympic Charter".

The list of recognized sports also includes Chess and Boules! Again, taken from the current WBF website, no less than 44 countries' (e.g. Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, China and many others) own Olympic Committees have recognized their national bridge federation and used this to offer them grant money. For example, the Polish Bridge Federation receives their equivalent of many hundreds of thousands of Euros each year as a result of the recognition they are granted. (By the way, it was 37 countries the last time I looked)!

So, you may ask what difference it makes. A lot! If bridge was recognized by the British Olympic Committee we, as the national governing body for England, would have access to finance that is closed to us, money that would be invested straight back into the game at all levels to develop it for the future. Lottery money that is very hard to get at the moment would be easier for us – basically it would help a lot.

We know that the barriers are dropping in this country; the Charities Act 2006 gave Mind Sports the status it needs to apply for charitable status, for which we have started the process. We need to do as much as we can and so we have joined together with the English governing bodies for Chess, Go and Draughts to form the Mind Sports Council; that group will lobby everyone it can to try to obtain for our respective sports the same rights and privileges now available to others.

Finally, the first World Mind Sports Games are to be held in Beijing from October 3rd to October 18th, using the Olympic facilities. Take a look at the brochure. It is hoped that this will be a step towards eventual inclusion in a future Olympic Games.

Blog 25 - Bringing people in...

Last year we reviewed our teacher training courses and developed a much more comprehensive programme including strategies to help teachers recruit new students and how to evolve their development from their first lesson to ‘learn and play’ fun duplicate bridge.

A total of 529 new students have embarked on first year partner teacher’s courses this year and over fifty teachers have graduated from the courses and we are now seeing the first ‘Learn and Play’ clubs being formed from those students.

People like Maggie Hadley who attended a teacher training course in August last year, has gone on to recruit over ninety students and in June this year will be starting her own Learn and Play club in Bristol.

Maggie is among many of the new Partner Teachers who have benefited from the new student course work books, comprehensive lesson plans and an array of free resources to help her develop her own teaching programme. When she starts her Partner Club with her second year students in June, the English Bridge Union will further help by giving her free Master Points, all the stationery she needs for the first twelve months and heavily discounted tables and bidding boxes.

Maggie wrote to us and said, “It seems a long time since I attended the Partner teacher course and your help so far has been crucial to us becoming established here in Bristol”

The original "Partner Club", Aylesbury Vale Bridge, which provided a blue print for the Partner Club model has now been in operation for four years. It attracts over twenty tables a week and has 100% EBU membership. They provide two teams for the Wessex league (county league) and the products of their learning academy provide ongoing refreshment to other clubs in the area with competent club players.

AVB Club proprietor Sue Maxwell says, ‘our policy is to provide our students with a development structure from the first lesson to club bridge and beyond. It is a continual process, from student recruitment to county league, with plenty of resting places in between.’

The next EBU Partner Teacher course will be held at West Midland Bridge Club on 11-13 July.

We are undertaking a lot of events to raise the profile of bridge. In mid-April we are involved in a special "Games Day" at the National Railway Museum in York on 13th April. We are using this day as a trial of a planned number of Awareness Days for bridge around the country. Non bridge players and bridge players are very welcome to come, watch and play. Click here for more information.

Very shortly John Pain, our Education Manager and a National Tournament Director, will be visiting the African state of Botswana to train a number of local people as tournament directors, at the request of the Botswana Federation. Quite apart from helping a developing bridge nation (and they apparently have lots of young people learning and playing) we hope to interest the media in what is a quite unique experience for the EBU!

If anyone has anything they think will help promote bridge please do not hesitate to contact Matt Betts at the EBU office (matt@ebu.co.uk) or on 01296 317215.

Website Waffle

Blog #24 - Web site waffle……

After the end of March we will no longer have Anna Gudge (of ECATS) as our web master. She has looked after our web site for quite some time, but now that we have capable resources in-house we have decided to have a go at doing it ourselves. Many thanks to Anna for all she has done for us and although this facet of our involvement is over, we have many other areas that we work with together, for example Simultaneous Pairs.

We already have had a fairly large involvement in the day to day updating of our web site, which is extremely active. The site receives a daily average of nearly 59,000 “hits”. A hit is a relatively inaccurate description of volume as a hit can be the act of downloading a photograph as well as text on the same page, but it provides a guide to activities, so you can tell that we have quite a busy web site.

As with most things in life we struggle to please all of the people, all of the time; we do appreciate that there are many things we can do to improve our web offering and Michael Clark, who takes over as our Web Master from April 1st has many ideas for adding to our already busy and informative site. In the recent past Michael has added a new Calendar facility, which utilises Google Calendars, an available utility from Google. We now have in one place all of our events, including county events and there are facilities available for much more.

For example, Michael will be working on a plan to completely revise our events and results service. This will include direct links from the EBU scoring software to our website making it much easier for quick updating of results. Those results will be stored in a new form, so that when wanting to know something about a particular event, or a particular persons results, all will be available with ease.

Michael, who will be aided by Matt Betts, our Communications Officer, has constructed a programme of improvements which he will work on as soon as he can. I am hopeful that these changes will make our site even more useful and more accurate than it is at present.

This blog is the first that has been written (almost without any technical assistance, I am pleased to say) on the new Blog facility that Michael has set up, again using Google facilities. We will be setting up other blog areas for other aspects of our organisation in due course.

We do have lots of ideas for improvements, but if anyone has any suggestions please feel free to email Michael at his usual email address.

P.S. There are some fascinating things happening on the publicity front - I hope to be able to provide more information very soon.

Barry's Blog 23

It has become clear to me that not many members understand the way the EBU is structured, so I thought I would take some time to provide that information. I hope I have got my history correct!

During the 1930s a number of national bridge organisations were created to represent bridge players in England and Great Britain. Exasperated by the conflicts between these bodies and by their lack of representation, various counties and groups of counties set up the English Bridge Union in 1936 to look after duplicate and other competition contract bridge in England, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. However it was not until the end of 1946 that the EBU finally achieved complete control of Duplicate Bridge in England. The governing body was its Council, made up of representatives from the counties, the number of votes proportional to the number of members in each county. A different body, the English Bridge Union Limited, was formed in 1940; the Board of this company was also the Executive Committee of the English Bridge Union. Confused? Well, you will be glad to know that the two were merged into one limited company in 2005.

From the beginning the EBU, together with the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Unions, was part of the British Bridge League which was the national bridge organisation for Great Britain. In 2000 the countries split up and each became their own NBO.

The shares are held in the company by the Counties - not quite the same as the geographic versions - of which there are currently 39. There is no financial benefit for the shareholders but the shareholders are now the body to which the Board of Directors are responsible. The profits of the business - if any, and there is rarely a large amount - are not distributed to anyone (we are not allowed to distribute profits under the company’s Articles of Association) but retained within the business for investment into the development of bridge in England.

The shareholders, currently once a year, elect a Board of Directors, and after that election, vote for a Chairman, Vice Chairman and a Treasurer. All of the Directors have the full - and very onerous - legal responsibility of being a Company Director; for this they get paid the incredible sum of £0.00 pounds per annum. Many of them, the officers in particular, do as much as any full time employee for no salary. Along with the rest of our many volunteers, they receive a reimbursement of their out of pocket expenses.

There are also three “Standing Committees” of the Board, also elected annually by the shareholders. These are the Laws and Ethics, Tournament and Selection Committees. Each of these elected members are also volunteers.

Each County has its own constitution which must be approved by the EBU and elects their Chairman and officers each year. These people are all volunteers, and they too work extremely hard for bridge in their areas.

Finally, there is a paid team of staff at EBU headquarters in Aylesbury, who provide all of the services required of a national membership organisation. We work out of an office that a previous Board wisely purchased when property prices were relatively low, more than 20 years ago. Many of the staff are bridge players who love working in the bridge environment, which is why they do not go elsewhere for more money!

Barry's Blog 22

I have been asked a couple of times what we are doing at present, so here goes….

I am sure that most of you know that the Board’s proposals for change will ultimately be voted upon at an Extraordinary General Meeting on June 4th. The final document will be released by April. We are still gathering and analysing the data and ask any club that has not returned their form to do so as soon as possible as this information will allow us to create as accurate a figure as possible for the proposed pay to play fee.

However, there are many more areas that we are working on, for example….

We are working on “bridge awareness” days; these events, which will take place around the country during 2008, will be put on with the help and assistance of a willing club (or clubs) in the area we are in. We will be inviting dignitaries, the press and TV to come along and see what we are doing and will attempt to show people who do not play bridge what it is all about and how it helps everyone in many facets of their lives. The first of these days is slightly different, as it is at the National Railway Museum in York and is a “Mind Sports” day and is being put on in association with other mind sports. This will be publicised very soon indeed.

We have been working on plans for a bridge related TV programme, something approaching the Holy Grail to many, and something that is constantly suggested by members. No money has been spent but we have produced a proposal for such a programme, perhaps best paralleled to “Countdown”, and we are now seeking funding for the production of a pilot programme which is necessary for the very hard job of selling the idea to a TV channel. Thus far the work has been done by one of our members, Matthew Baylis a stand-up comedian and Basingstoke Bridge Club member and Matt Betts our Communications Officer. If you know anyone who may wish to fund this pilot programme we would be VERY interested to know about them!

With the Board’s unanimous approval, I am involved in detailed discussions with a specialist legal firm and we are working on plans to turn the English Bridge Union into a Charity. New laws now in place permit such a change and, although there are (as usual) many complexities to over come we hope that we can get there within a year or two. Once it is done it will save the EBU substantial tax costs each year and will allow us to receive legacies and donations for all aspects of our activities without tax implications. At the same time, I hope that we can develop a model constitution for membership owned affiliated bridge clubs to become charities in their own right, which will also provide benefits to those clubs.

We are about to commence work on an online teaching system based on the teaching software available on the ACBL web site (http://www.acbl.org/). This will provide a free and intuitive way for people to self-teach themselves the basics of the way we play in England. We thank the ACBL for granting us permission to use their software for this purpose.

We have just published our first “Club Focus”, which will be a bi-monthly electronic newsletter for clubs around the country. It is available on this website for downloading and we can email it to anyone who wants it. Please let the office know if you wish to be placed on the list to receive it by email.

There are numerous other activities taking place now or will be fairly soon – more news in due course...

Barry's Blog 21

We are fast approaching that time of year when we look back on the current one and forward to the next. For the EBU and me it has been a year of discovery….

I have discovered that working for a membership organization can be very difficult. My staff, the Board and I have tried very hard to improve things – with a reasonable measure of success. However, there are huge numbers of things that remain to be done in order to make our organization sleek, efficient and worthy of the 21st Century. Naturally that requires change; unfortunately, change in any area of our workings seems to be anathema to many people.

Of course, for the latter half of the year many of us have found ourselves immersed in the proposals for changing the way that the EBU funds itself. After seventy seven years it was no surprise that there is resistance to change from some, especially the noisy minority. Whatever happens next year our members should remember that this is the first time EVER that the EBU has consulted its membership, has listened to what they have said and absorbed as many of their suggestions as possible.

The shareholders who are representatives of the counties will eventually determine the way forward after they have consulted their county’s membership. What is sure is that whatever they agree for us to do, we will not please everyone; but it will be the shareholders that make the decision, not the Board but the shareholders. This is why we have embarked on another round of consultation and enquiry with our clubs, through our counties, and this will result in a decision being made on June 4th 2008 at an Extraordinary General Meeting that will be held specifically for that purpose.

So next year promises to be full of discussions and decisions that will affect the future of the English Bridge Union and to a large extent organized bridge in England. With all of the emotion that this will create I want to say please remember that everyone does care, each in their own way, each for their own reason, but we all want to improve things for all of us.

At this point in the calendar I would like to wish season’s greetings to all of our members, to all of my staff and especially to all of the volunteers who work at all levels of bridge administration and without whom not much would happen.

I look forward to a happy and healthy new year for all, and above all, I wish for harmony and tolerance in our decision making.