AGM Report

Shettleston Harriers Ladies held their seventh Annual General Meeting in the Sports Building at Strathclyde University on Saturday 24th January. Once again the turnout was very good, with more than half of the club members in attendance. We also had a couple of visitors! Fran McFarlane brought along her lovely 11-week old daughter, Laurie, while Amanda Sangster put in a brief appearance with her beautiful baby of 5 weeks, Gemma. Future members of SHL popping in for a visit??

The business of the day was dealt with in its usual efficient fashion, helped along with tea and coffee and Anne Marie’s terrific home made scones. This time we also had the added treat of fantastic fruit loaf courtesy of Suzanne McIntosh’s mum! And when we heard it was a slimmers’ recipe..well we just had to have two bits...or more.... No wonder our AGM’s are so well attended when we can look forward to this kind of fare. But just in case you think there was no actual business to the meeting...... The committee were elected for the following year as follows:-

Karen-Ann is a new face on the Committee for this year - a welcome addition - and hopefully she will enjoy being involved. Margaret Hastings also joins the Committee again filling the role of Assistant Secretary for another year. In terms of the club’s constitution, there was scope for a third Committee member to be added and Anne-Marie extended an invitation to anyone who was interested in taking up the post to get in touch. Elaine Mackay later took up the offer and has subsequently joined the Committee, who will all have an interesting year ahead of them with all of the changes being introduced at the Scottish Federation level.

Anne-Marie welcomed everyone to the meeting and gave a brief summary of what had gone on in the previous year, highlighting our ever-popular 5k road race at Glasgow Green which again saw numbers exceeding 200 runners. Margaret and Hsu Min provided details of the performances over the year in Championships and other events where the Shettleston flag had flown particularly well, either because of featuring at the front of the race...or just featuring in great numbers!

The new business plan for Scottish Athletics which was approved at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Scottish Athletics Federation in February will mean a number of changes in how athletics is organised in Scotland. Some will affect us directly, others not so much....we’ll just have to wait and see as the picture clears. One particular change will be the introduction of a membership scheme. This scheme will require all athletes who wish to participate in SAF permitted events to register with the Federation. The scheme is likely to have benefits attached - possibly discounts or something similar - to encourage everyone to pay the annual fee - proposed for j 10 in 1998. Clubs have been asked to provide all their members’ names and addresses directly to the Federation so each athlete will be contacted individually from Edinburgh with details of the scheme and how to register, which must be by 1st October at the latest. As soon as more details are available, we’ll try and get them to you. In the meantime...as they say....watch this space!