There has been a very positive response to the new online registration process. General feedback confirms how easy the registration process is.

The timing of the introduction of the new process was mainly because of the need for a 12 month rolling membership period to enable smooth upgrades from the recently introduced Recreational status to full British Wrestling membership.

An already excessive burden on the volunteer membership secretary of gathering payments and liaising with Club secretaries is now smoothly handled on-line.

On-line technology puts British Wrestling at the forefront of membership management, alongside some of the major sports. The system also puts the power back into the hands of the membership.

You can now dynamically update your own contact details as home and e-mail addresses change!

Implementation
As with all new systems there have been a few teething problems, and thank you for bearing with us. But these have been successfully overcome with the assistance of parents, coaches and clubs who have been willing to make the new process work and together have helped to address the problems.

The new system has the facility for secretaries of Clubs, Nations and Regions to access the details of members registered within their Club/Nation/Region. This gives easy access at any given time to know who is registered and who isn’t and provides E-mail distribution lists – recently used to promote the Southern Region Junior Tournament.

Membership subscriptions
With no rise in the past 4 years, subscriptions have been adjusted to 2010.  Also, an e-payment admin fee has been incorporated – this goes towards the the company doing the processing and guaranteeing the payments as commonly happens with pay-pal etc.

All this makes for an apparent significant rise, but this should be a one-off.  As a reminder, membership of British Wrestling benefits members with: –

• Insurance of clubs & coaches
• Competitions – organisation of national competitions (many of which are loss-making after provision of prizes) and support for Club/Regional competitions
• Delivery of child protection, equity and codes of conduct
• Organised coaching sessions for athletes
• Progressive structures of coaching awards, personal wrestling awards (e.g. following the new FILA colour scheme) and progressive structure of competitive opportunities
• Training & support for volunteers and parental helpers, coaches and officials.
• National Governing Body and Government liaison
• News and results via the British Wrestling website

End of Last Minute Registration
Whilst on-line facilities were provided at Southern Region and Midlands competitions, this facility prolonged the weigh-in and delayed the start of the actual competition. Therefore,

THIS FACILITY WILL NOT BE PROVIDED AT ANY FUTURE COMPETITIONS

It is the responsibility of the Coach/Club secretary to ensure that everyone is registered prior to any competition to avoid the disappointment of being unable to compete.  In future anyone who turns up at a competition, and is not registered, will not compete.
 

Current Status
We are now eight weeks into the new process and the membership numbers stand at a healthy 370.  Only 20 of the membership are in the new ‘Recreational’ group.

Recreational membership is for those who regularly train but who do not wish to compete. This follows on from the initial block membership period which only covers the first 6-8 weeks of training.

It should also be noted that, after a deduction for admin only, subscriptions from Recreational membership go directly to fund the Nations and Regions.

And what next…
The next step is to trial competition-entry managed via the on-line database. It is expected to become the norm and for all Competition Registration and Entries to be paid for on-line, with the system checking for membership and prompting, where necessary, membership registration.

Please look out for this in the future when the closing date will have to be strictly adhered to.
 

Thanks to Trevor Hoskins and Yvonne Ball for their tireless work in making this significant progress becoming a reality!

• Access to membership database
• Information about new database