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Wednesday 24 September 2008

Team Manager Volunteers wanted

Stirling Swimming is looking for parents to volunteer to be trained as Team Managers to accompany swimmers to galas and swim camps.

There are 2 levels of role required:

Team Manager – Local Competitions/Camps. This will not involve an overnight stay, but will involve the following duties at a gala or camp:

· Appropriate supervision of the swimmers – dependent on the age of swimmers attending.

· Being the main point of contact between parents and the swim team – a club mobile phone will be provided for this.

· Assisting the coach with organising the activities – e.g. marshalling swimmers for their races at a gala.

Team Manager – Overnight Stays and Travel Abroad. This is a more extensive role that involves accompanying groups of swimmers of a variety of ages to various camps and galas that involve an overnight stay, both in Britain and abroad.

Although these are volunteer posts travel expenses will be reimbursed, and in the case of overnight stays, the cost of the Team Manager’s accommodation and travel is spread amongst the swimmers attending. So no-one doing this role will be out of pocket. Also, we do not expect anyone to volunteer for events that their children are not at – so you will be doing a job at a gala that you would probably be at anyway.

We would like parents from Bronze to volunteer for the Local Team Manager roles, whereas we need some parents from Silver upwards to volunteer for the Overnight Stays roles. When on overnight trips, we need both male and female chaperones for a mixed group, so we need to have both mums and dads in our pool of volunteers.

We hope to be able to set up a reasonable pool of parents able to perform these roles – if we can get a few volunteers, no-one will have to cover too many trips. It is also important to recruit some parents of younger swimmers as the parents who currently carry out these roles have older swimmers and it is likely that a number will end their involvement in the club over the next couple of years.

Training

Training will be provided for these roles by Scottish Swimming as follows:

All recruits will attend the ‘Safeguarding & Protecting Children’ child protection workshop and the Team Manager’s workshop for Local Competitions/Camps. Those volunteering for the overnight stays will attend an additional workshop specifically for this type of trip. The club will meet the cost of the workshops.

Each of these workshops is approx. 3 hours long, and can be run at weekends or evenings, and will be at the University if we can get enough volunteers to have a course run specifically for us. If not the courses are run at various locations around Central Scotland. These courses are not sport specific – so if your child take part in other sports, this training will be equally applicable.

We can also provide opportunities to shadow other volunteers.

A full Enhanced Disclosure check will be done for everyone taking on these roles

If you are interested in these roles or discussing anything further, please contact Fionna McKenna (Fionna.McKenna@lineone.net, 01786 474586) before 12th October. I will also be at the AGM on 29 Sept and the club day on 4 Oct if you wish to volunteer or discuss any of this.