Each month, What's the Score? will shine a spotlight on a specific department within England Lacrosse, giving details of the work the staff in that department are doing.
The inaugural spotlight is shining on the Events team consisting of Abi Merrill and Helen Amos.
Can you give us a general sense of your role?
Abi: Simply put, my role encompasses the organisation’s events programme. During the pandemic obviously we didn't run any events so I took on the role of Wellbeing Officer.
Within this new role, I'm currently working on the England Lacrosse People Strategy with several other staff members as well as just double checking that people are generally OK.
It's been a bit of a wild few years and part of my role is to ensure the team is happy and functioning well.
Helen: I work with Abi on events but focus on the competition side of things; that's more the lacrosse and technical aspects of events.
During the pandemic, without competitions to run, I focused more on the sixes game and the ‘Playground to Podium’ strategy and the interventions that sit alongside those.
In a nutshell, my role is a bit more project management and operational delivery alongside the competitions.
Abi: It works well having the two of us working on slightly different things within the events department; having someone who has technical ability and focus on the competition like Helen is great and she doesn't need to worry about logistics as that’s more my area. In that respect, I feel like both of us work quite well together.
Helen: I totally agree. When you're running events, you’ve got the event as a whole which has got all of the logistics of everything that comes with setting up and dressing an event and running it.
And then you've got the competition which is the teams and the officials and everything that sits inside that. When you're looking at big events like the National Schools Lacrosse Championships, that's too much for one person so splitting it works.
Ryan [Griffiths] helps us out before and during events from an officials’ point of view; he recruits the officials and communicates with them while we tell him what is required for each of the competitions. He also gives us updates about what's going on within the officials’ space.
What are the big projects you work on every year?
Abi: Since I joined the organisation, the number of regular projects I work on has expanded as when I first came in it was mainly the National Schools Lacrosse Championship.
That competition used to be run by volunteers and schools but, when I got my job at England Lacrosse, the organisation was in the process of bringing the tournament in-house.
So, the National Schools Lacrosse Championship was always my first priority but different projects have been added over time.
I was lucky enough to be involved in the 2017 World Lacrosse Women’s World Championship, hosted by us in England, but the regular projects I work on include the National POP Lacrosse Championships, National Club Finals, BUCS Lacrosse Sixes Championships, School Challenge Cup, and, the major one at the moment, The Fly.
But that's just the events side of things; I’m also involved in the People Strategy, and I work closely with the Renumeration Committee (RemCom) as part of me starting to help out within the Human Resources (HR) space.
So yeah, it's quite busy.
Helen: I work on all the national events mentioned by Abi and obviously during the last couple of years The Fly has been added.
I also organise the England Lacrosse Mixed Lacrosse Leagues and the Further Education College programme (also known as the Lacrosse Accredited Colleges Scheme).
In addition to this, I lead on our relationship with BUCS, the Youth Sport Trust, and a couple of other organisations such as AOC Sport and the Association for Physical Education (AFPE).
What new projects have you been working on more recently and what are you doing, or have been doing, to get them off the ground?
Abi & Helen: THE FLY!
Helen: That one’s new; we've been doing everything to get that off the ground.
Abi: It's interesting because, obviously during lockdown, both our jobs changed dramatically because we couldn't run competitions and events, so we focused heavily on planning and the future.
During lockdown, we actually had time to sit back and reflect on the events that we run at the moment as well as the new sixes format and what we were going to do with that.
Helen: That's kind of where the ‘Playground to Podium’ strategy came from: by discussing the sixes format and how we at England Lacrosse were going to integrate sixes into the lacrosse landscape alongside the existing traditional game.
That was a big chunk of planning work which then evolved into the delivery side of things - The Fly being at the top end, the educational resources at the bottom end, and the FE colleges and the new ‘Hub Programme’ in between.
Are The Fly and the ‘Playground to Podium’ strategy the first projects you have taken from start to finish and built from scratch?
Helen: The ‘Playground to Podium’ strategy is probably the biggest and most promising project that I've been involved in from scratch.
From not having any sixes at all to now hosting The Fly and thinking about the potential of the format in terms of the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, it’s incredible.
Abi and I have done a lot of thinking around how we can improve and develop existing competitions and events, but before the pandemic I feel like we were just so in the routine of getting the regular annual stuff done that there wasn't much time to do new things. It’s obviously a double-edged sword but the pandemic offered us the space to be able to discuss and start to implement new things.
Abi: From my point of view, being involved in the organising of the 2017 World Lacrosse Women’s World Championship set me up really well as I can take learnings from that and transfer them into new projects like The Fly.
At the end of the day, The Fly is almost like a mini–World Championships because you have the budgets, steering groups, working groups etc. So, I suppose it’s trying to transfer a lot of those skills which I've learned during previous projects into new projects.
Has your role changed during the pandemic and if it did, then how?
Helen: My role has changed more than a little bit since the start of the pandemic!
I started out as a Regional Coordinator; pre-pandemic most of my work was based around my region and doing regional management of lacrosse in the South-West.
Between me supposedly leaving the organisation [to travel the world] to then staying put because I couldn't go anywhere, my role changed an awful lot and I now don't do any regional work at all.
Now, my role is all based on national initiatives and stuff that we're doing especially around the sixes format and competitions.
Abi: I think it was important to try and have someone within the organisation who had an eye on people during the initial lockdown period at the beginning of 2020 because we were all just like ‘What is going on?!’.
We all moved online which we've never done before and people were working out of bedrooms, so it was important that as an organisation we tried to focus on the staff.
With no events to plan for, I was tasked with checking in with the staff, making sure they were all alright, and entertaining them; you think the number of quizzes I put together with help from staff members. We even walked to Spain and back!
It was all about trying to ensure that everyone was in a good space because it was really hard. I thought it was a good move from us as an organisation to focus more on this stuff.
Finally, as a bit of fun, if you were stranded on a desert island and you could take just one item with you, what item would you take with you and why?
Helen: I was thinking about this (probably a little bit too much) but you either want something that is going to help you get off the island or something that's going to make your stay there more enjoyable.
So, I landed on a penknife, because I feel like that would be really useful.
Abi: My initial thought, and I think I might stay with it, was a cup of some sort because I could use it as like a scooper to make yourself a toilet. And then I could like use it to eat out of and drink out of.
Helen: But Abi if you’ve got a pen knife, you can make your own cup.
Abi: Very true, but then I thought, oh, do I just want a picture of people that I love? That's really lame, but then I could see them all the time.
Helen: No, no, no, no. I would find that really hard because you’d just sit there staring at the picture. Maybe a pillow?
Abi: That was the other one, yeah! I could go on.
Helen: There you go, there's a list for you.
Abi and Helen have nominated the Marketing & Communications department to be interviewed for March’s edition of Spotlight on…