British Foosball Association

29 May 2006

I thought it would be helpful to provide an update on the activities of the BFA and the various initiatives that the committee and various working groups are involved with.

New Executive Committee

A new committee was elected in February 2006 and progress has been made on kick-starting the organisation after a quiet 2005. I think specific mention should go to the three new members of the committee:

• Dave Oates - Expert Challenge and sponsorship coordinator. Dave has done a fantastic job generating extra leads, in part through his Corporate Opportunities presentation that is now on the site for all to download. Dave has generated too many leads to mention here, but one item of particular note is the sponsorship for the BFA team to the World Cup from Business and Decision. This enabled us to suitably kit out our guys and gals in team uniforms for the event, and substantially covered costs.
• Rob Moss - taken on the unenviable task of webmaster. Rob has been working on a number of important site improvements that he hopes to be able to release soon, including not least a revamped events diary (long overdue). By its very nature, such work is largely in the background until released and even then people often don't know the amount of work that has been required, but I think it is fair to say that this is very important work and much appreciated by all.
• Mase - press officer. For the first time, the BFA has a good link to the press, through a press officer actively seeking high level publicity for table football in the UK. This is a big step forward for the association. One particular opportunity that has arisen is to get a mainstream magazine to feature our little game in the near future. Watch this space!

ITSF World Cup

We fielded a strong team for this year's foosball world cup in Germany and positioned very respectably in the end. Reports will come through in the next couple of days, but it is clear that this was a fantastically organised event by the ITSF.

Special thanks go to Rob Atha, for captaining the team and stepping forward to make what were at times extremely difficult decisions. I need to also thank the team organiser Rhys Roberts, the team coach Martyn Harris, and the BFA representative at the world cup Dave Oates.

Grass roots initiatives

It is clear that the tournament scene over the past few years has developed very substantially, and the numbers of top players has definitely shot up (particularly on Garlando). However, we need to kick-start initiatives to stimulate the novice playerbase. I identify two specific items below:

• Reading Doubles series - Bill Donne and Stumpy are working hard to run a regular, monthly, doubles competition in Reading. These are more like mini-national tournaments than local events, with many tournament-standard tables on freeplay all day. Please be sure to support these important initiatives.
• No-snake event - I am probably going to be shot for citing this "controversial" move as a grass roots initiative, but I don't care. Geoff Brice is running a large "traditional table football" event in just over a month that will hopefully see the largest influx of new players into the national tournament scene in the last 4 years. With good sponsorship and I am sure top quality organisation, this is certainly a very positive move and one that I hope will be repeated.

Upcoming Initiatives

• Tournament Coordination Committee - newly set up body to oversee coordination of tournaments. Once up to speed, this group should greatly facilitate the coordination of tournaments whilst reducing the administrative burden on potential tournament organisers. More to follow soon
• Merging BFA and BritFoos membership - we are working on a way to simplify joining the BFA, through a single membership list. It is anticipated that this will be implemented before the end of the year, and will lead on to integrated events / rankings and potentially profile enhancements.
• Website rewrite - making no promises on timing, but good progress is being made on integrating the BFA and Britfoos parts of the site, increasing the amount of dynamic content (enabling the site to be maintained more easily), and giving the site a facelift.

There are bound to be items I have missed and apologies to the people I have forgotten to mention. Finally, as always, if you think you can help out and want to get involved please PM me.

Many thanks,
Richard

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