
11 Nov 2024
For this month's Club Spotlight we head down further south to Lanarkshire where we chat to Alison Ross of East Kilbride Archery Club (EKAC) - thanks for sharing Alison!
To find out more about EKAC, visit their website here.
Please can you give us a brief background on the club?
The club currently has 49 members. We have 3 coaches (two on the verge of completing their L3). We have a large committee and are in the unique position of having so many club members who wish to be involved on the committee. This means we can have a sub-committees, eg. a venues sub-committee, a fun-shoot sub-committee, etc.
The volunteers keep the club the ticking over and we are fortunate to have such a dedicated group of volunteers.
Predominantly our membership is made up of adult members with a few juniors. We are a club with a variety of abilities and interests: from beginner level to experienced archers who have been shooting for over 30 years, with a few members who compete regularly and one County Judge. We also have a wide variety of bow types: recurve, compound, barebow, longbow, flatbow and horsebow.
Previously, there was a East Kilbride Archery Club which ran for many years and disbanded around 2006. From attending Glasgow Archers with my sons, we realised there was a demand to allow us to consider setting up a club in East Kilbride. We started to explore this with support from Alan Martin at Scottish Archery. In 2016 we managed to start a new club, adopting the name previously used by East Kilbride Archery Club, and greatly helped by the Findlay family. Shortly after this we received a Lottery Grant to support startup costs including hall fees for 1 year and to buy equipment.
2. What is your club’s aims and objectives?
Our aim as a club is to make archery as accessible to as many people as possible. Our ultimate ambition is to have a facility space to be able to open our club up to more members as currently this restricts our intake of new people. We also want to develop our coaches to progress through coaching awards and support their overall development. We would like to continue to support the community and development initiatives where we are already involved: such as in supporting school festivals, local school taster sessions, Scout groups and the Soft Archery National Championships.
3. Can you talk us through your club development journey?
We started in 2016 with just 3 members in our first session. Word of mouth was key to building up our membership and attracting people to our club. The help of other archery clubs who signposted to our club was greatly appreciated. Due to encouraging coaches to our club, we were then able to run our own beginner’s courses. We were fortunate that after COVID many of our members rejoined. We aimed to keep members engaged throughout the pandemic by being in constant communication and including opportunities to take part in online quizzes.
Â

4. Have you worked with any particular people/partners?
We mainly work with Scottish Archery: in the past, supporting the 2024 Scottish National Indoor Championships which included club volunteers supporting the tournament organisers: setting up the range, hospitality and anything else required. We supported Active Schools in South Lanarkshire and continue to stay in touch and work closely.Â
Also we are delighted to be involved in the Glasgow Archery League which has recently been set up to provide a casual monthly shoot to bring club archers together with other clubs in the area.
5.     What do you think makes the club unique?
When people come to our club they comment on the atmosphere which is sociable, fun, friendly and welcoming and this is evident in our member retention. Also, with our club being new, we have been able to introduce many new initiatives which have been embraced by our members, e.g. a monthly club target day which means we can try out different rounds. This has helped the club to be involved in the Postal League and has also given us a chance to try a variety of rounds including Worcester, Portsmouth, Bray 1 & 2. Even our Beginners have enjoyed being involved in these rounds, especially because we give out badges for as many of the different rounds as we can. We always have something different going on!
We also subscribe to the ArcheryGB classifications scheme and we have a Records Officer who keeps all the handicaps and classifications up to date. At the end of the indoor season we award certificates and badges for the classifications and badges for the outdoor classifications and 252 scheme.
Our Club Championship is a handicap championship which is named The Oystercatcher. This involves a knockout round with 32 archers being drawn in pairs. As it is based on handicaps it makes it a level playing field.
We have a Grand Prix competition which is in memory of one of our members who, sadly, passed away in 2020. Each month from January through to November the scores shot for our monthly Target Day are handicap adjusted then ranked from highest to lowest adjusted score. Points are then awarded from 10 down to 1 for the highest ten scores. The winner at the end of the year is awarded the Stuart Ferguson Memorial Grand Prix trophy.
We also have a highly competitive ladder challenge: archers are drawn randomly from the bottom to the top of the ladder and can challenge each other, up to three spaces apart, to try and leapfrog to a higher position. The challenges are drawn at random – it could be a 1 arrow shoot-off, Portsmouth round, Vegas, head-to-head and various other challenges.Â
Throughout the year we have fun shoots which include during Halloween, Christmas and various other formats such as Battleships, Darts, Curling and many other unusual games.
We also have an annual Frostbite, American and last year held a BBQ and Come and Try for family and friends around the club anniversary, which we hope will become an annual event.
We finish each session with our ‘Fox of the Week’ challenge. This is to encourage as many members as possible to stay to the end to help tidy away the equipment but (because there are badges involved - of course!) it is very popular. We have a single arrow shoot-off to see which archer can hit nearest the ‘spider’ - the ‘Fox’ and the second nearest being named the ‘Fox Cub’. The fox is our mascot - taken from Disney’s ‘Robin Hood’ animation. We have one that travels around the UK to competitions - Fletch - and one who stays at the club to be photographed with our successful Fox and Fox Cub - Tails.
Â

6. Are there any particular challenges the club face?
The main challenge for our club is venues. We are looking to improve our outdoor venue and still looking for a larger indoor space to accommodate more people. Also we have found a challenge in recruiting and retaining juniors. We did attempt to run a junior only Beginner Course recently and are always encouraging families to attend so parents/carers can enjoy trying archery with their child.
Â
7. Is the culture of the club inclusive and consider the inclusion of participants with disabilities?
We consider ourselves to be a very inclusive club - our coaches have experience of training a VI archer and we have a British Sign Language user at the club on hand in case we have any enquiries form Deaf archers. We also have a number of archers who have mobility issues and encourage them to try different ways of shooting, e.g. being seated at the line, to enable them to continue with the sport. We ensure all our committee members, volunteers, coaches, and all participants create a welcoming and positive environment for every member to promote an inclusive culture.