28th February 2001,

A letter from the Chair, on behalf of the committee.

To all members,

April is fast approaching and with it the start of a new season for CCC.

As club we face a challenge, we do not have enough adults members. Why is that important? It is important because we train our coaches from our adult membership. Without coaches we cannot run the club in its current form.

Today our membership is made up of well over 60% juniors, a growing trend. We are barely train 1 coach every 2-years. This not enough to replace natural wastage.

Why has this happened? There many reasons, I see the following as key:

 • personal skills qualifications require 2-craft, which takes longer;
 • qualifying as a coach is significantly more time consuming and costly;
 • the new-ish PaddlePower syllabus consumes a 40% of our coaches; and
 • as a club we take members from an early age, relative to other clubs.

We need to take urgent action to rebalance the membership. To start this process, your committee is recommending that for season 2011/12, we replace our junior and adult membership with an individual category with voting rights at 18. This would mean that the membership fees would be:

 • Membership £20,
 • Family Membership £60 - 3 or more family members, with a maximum of 2-adults.

Please feel free to let me (chair@clitheroecanoeclub.org.uk), or any member of the committee, know your thoughts. Please note membership renewal forms will need to start going out in the next few weeks.

The committee would also welcome and any alternate suggestions. Ones we have been considering include:

 • limiting the number of members U18; and or
 • setting a minimum age for members; and
 • look at incentivising active coaches in various ways; and or
 • scrapping weekly PaddlePower sessions for separate periodic (monthly) assessment.

At this time we anticipate session fees staying the same as they have for around 9 years.