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ETA Annual Report
President (Report)
AGM November 2013
2013 – Our most active and successful year ever
England Touch is the governing body of Touch in England. Our role as custodians of
the game is to promote, encourage, foster, develop and extend the sport of Touch in
England, under the Federation of International Touch rules and guidelines.
About the ETA
England Touch is responsible for the governance and
development of Touch in England. We are a non-profit
organisation funded by membership fees and managed
by an Executive Committee selected by our members.
We provide affiliated leagues around the country with
support and services that ensure anyone wanting to
play the sport can do so in a safe, consistent and
enjoyable environment. This is done in a variety of
ways, from administering referee and coaching
courses, hosting player development days, promoting
events and tournaments, player protection policies,
liaising and working with a number of partners to
deliver the sport, developing and selecting National
squads and working with the European and worldwide
Touch community to grow the game. We believe Touch
is a sport in its own right and the individual skills,
technical and tactical elements and rules make the
sport unique and individually distinct. This is why so
many players come from a variety of other sports to
play Touch.
2013 – What a year!
This has been the most active and successful season in
the association’s history. From the rapid growth of
grass-roots level Touch, in part due to the recent ETARFU Touch delivery agreement, to the success of the
elite level sides at this year’s Home Nations
Championships, 2013 has been a very successful
season. All of these successes are built from the tireless
behind the scenes work undertaken by our voluntary
workforce, and as we continue to expand our sport, a
huge amount of further time and effort will be required
to keep up with the increasing demands and enquiries
for information and action.
(Touch Nationals and NTS), along with developing
grass roots participation (launch of the CTS and
increasing the number of affiliated Touch operations).
OFF field the personnel and positional board changes
made during 2011 and 2012 were embedded and built
upon, with a few new faces joining the committee.
The new structure ensures the ETA is compliant with
current Sport England NGB guidelines. England Touch
is also now a recognised NGB by the Sports and
Recreation Alliance in England. We worked hard
cementing changes to our committee and voting
structure and brokered the provision of Public Liability
Insurance for all affiliated members and laid the
groundwork of a promising partnership with the RFU.
The ETA constitution was updated to include an
important voting right amendment which restricts the
maximum number of votes any one ‘Touch entity’ can
control, to ensure a fair representation of all affiliated
members.
That said, there is still a lot to do. The ETA are keen to
recruit to keep pace with the extraordinary growth in
activity. We, the committee, are a small and extremely
dedicated team of volunteers with grand ideas for
further expansion and as such are always looking to
recruit supplementary board members to bolster the
strength and expertise at committee level.
Additional volunteers are also
required to share the increased
workload and help us pick
up the new initiatives in
our development plans.
2013 has been an important year for the ETA:
ON field we were crowned overall Home Nations
champions, following on from our European
Championship victory in 2012, and continued to
strengthen our elite national competitions
England Touch Association