Baseball and Softball
Baseball and Softball
South London Engagement:
BaseballSoftballUK (BSUK) is the development agency for baseball and softball in the United Kingdom. BSUK is working doubling the number of teams playing the sports by 2013, working through four key areas:
- Setting up new adult leagues
- Developing teams and leagues in Higher Education Institutes
- Developing teams and leagues in Further Education Institutes
- Increasing the number of teams playing in existing clubs or leagues (adult and youth)
Our four priority regions are London, the South East, the North West and Midlands, where all four of these areas are being worked on by regional staff members. BSUK also works across the rest of the country, mostly supporting existing clubs or leagues.
Further information available at: http://www.baseballsoftballuk.com/
Here at BaseballSoftballUK, we've been reviewing our development progress after nine quarters of delivery. So, I thought I'd write to you with some of the highlights.
The number of adult baseball and softball teams has increased by 34% since 2009. 168 new adult teams have been set up taking our adult total 665.
We have already hit our four year targets for increasing community youth teams from 85 to 195.
We are on target to reach our Satisfaction (SQSE) target of 80 by the end of this Whole Sport Plan cycle.
Although the latest Active People results show lower results than expected, up to this point, we're the fasted growing sport (relative to size). From our proxy measures of increase in number of teams playing (see above), we have confidence that we are growing rapidly.
Our targets for this are extremely challenging. Over the course of this Whole Sport Plan, we intend to double the number of teams playing our sports from 574 teams to 1,010. We are doing this through a combination of HE and FE programmes, by setting up New Adult Leagues and increasing the number of teams in existing clubs and leagues, within four focus regions - London, South East, North West and Midlands (East and West), where we have concentrated our regional development staff. (There are modest targets for the rest of the country.)
But we still have work to do. Over the next few weeks, we'll be firming up plans to increase our delivery up to the 31 March next year. Specifically, we will be looking to:
- Prioritise development work within HEIs, with a particular focus on intra-mural co-ed softball. We believe we have a strong offer in terms of a social and easy to access IM sport for men and women to play together. We are making many approaches to HEIs, as we speak, and will be in touch as and when we need support and help.
- Develop our work with Wickes and other companies for corporate softball and our charity softball work with Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research. There are currently 54 charities playing in a league in London and 70 Wickes stores playing softball.
- Formulate a plan to further increase the number of teams playing in our leagues and club.
Please keep us in mind as opportunities present themselves, either contacting Joint CEO and Head of Development John Boyd (john.boyd@bsukmail.com), our National Development Manager Chris Rawlings (chris.rawlings@bsukmail.com) or the relevant regional members of staff.
Useful links
London Contacts:
London and South East
Patrick Knock
Interim Regional Development Manager
patrick.knock@bsukmail.com
0789 447 9917
