Hi everyone
With the playing year finally over, and a long off-season in prospect, it seems a good time to send an update on our work, and share details of what lies ahead.
2021 membership info
I’ll start with the practical stuff though, and get the request for money out of the way! For those of you that this applies to (i.e. not the honorary life members), could you please send £5 for your 2021 membership as soon as possible. The best way to pay is via PayPal to neil.ormston@gmail.com – if doing this way, could you please send as a ‘Friends & Family’ payment, as this avoids paying any fees (which come to nearly 10% of the membership if using the normal ‘paying for goods’ method). If you’d rather pay by bank transfer, send this to Mr N Ormston, 09-01-28 22728215, and include your name as the reference. There’s no need to mail to say you’ve paid, as I’ll see the funds coming in (but feel free to drop me a note should you wish).
Whilst there’s no rush for the money, prompt payment would be appreciated, mainly as it’s just an admin hassle for me to deal with this, which detracts from the proper work! So the easier this is, and quicker it’s over and done with the better 🙂
The £5 is intended to cover our fairly minimal running costs, and help with some future projects I have in mind (read on for more), and for this nominal fee members have so far had access to our archive of material. From early next year, members will also have access to the “members only” section of our website, which we expect to launch soon, which will contain our first major release of data, being all club records relating to the summer era (again, more info below). Hopefully you see this as good value, and are keen to re-new; don’t forget to mention us to anyone prospective new members too!
Summer era & website update
Huge thanks to Chris Lines who has done some great work with Martin McDonough ‘behind the scenes’ to develop the website; this isn’t visible yet, but as mentioned we’ll be launching this in the new year. This is a major upgrade to the current site, already available at www.rugbyleaguerecords.com, which I knocked together earlier in the year to share details of our work. The ‘new’ site (which will still have the same web address) will be linked to our database, so will allow us to share actual records – i.e. our whole purpose!! – and will be much more dynamic, having members only areas that you’ll be able to log into, and have access to exclusive content whilst we work on refining records before sharing with the wider public. This is a big step forward towards our longer term goals, and is a really exciting development. Watch this space for the big launch early next year.
Before launching, we’re having a major push to check the data relating to the summer era, which will form the basis for the information initially available to members. Having fed in Chris Heinitz’s phenomenal records, we (well Martin!) have done the initial validation on this, and we’re now in the process of getting club statisticians to check versus their own records & sign off. I’ve already had feedback for about half of the clubs, so we’re working through making tweaks to records on the back of this. This should make the data very robust before we publish it. Hopefully we can wrap this work up in the next month or so, so if you’re one of those looking at this, a response before the end of the year would be very helpful.
Other records update
Whilst the emphasis has been on summer, we’ve not neglected the ‘main’ records. We have 3 clubs fully loaded into the database & validated, being the initial test clubs from the records of me, Martin & Chris; we’ve also now got electronic records for all other clubs, which is a fantastic effort in such a short space of time, given many of these didn’t exist 9 months ago. 9 of these clubs are now loaded into the database, but we’ve been wrestling with the best way to check the accuracy of these, and link player records for their time at a club: this proved more challenging than we initially thought, and had bcome a cumbersome process – not ideal with over 70 clubs to work through!! Martin & I got our heads together though, and have now come up with something that should make this work a lot easier, and a number of club statisticians are working with this new process now. It should mean that as soon as we’ve launched the summer records/website, we’ll be able to fly into this, and see a surge in the number of clubs signed off in the database – this is another of those ‘behind the scenes’ tasks that has no real visibility, but is a vital step towards being able to share accurate records, so thanks to the on-going work of all those involved, especially Martin.
2020 accounts
As a finance man in my other job (i.e. the one I get paid for!), it would be remiss of me not to mention our finances. Indeed, the values set out for the RKC mean that it’s only right that I share an overview of our finances. I’ve attached a summary for those that are interested, which shows we are in a healthy position. Membership numbers were much higher than I expected: we ended up with 166 joining, of which 129 were paying members (the rest being honorary life members); together with a couple of generous donations, this meant over £800 of fee income after transaction costs. As expected, our running costs were fairly minimal, relating only to ‘electronic’ costs relating to data storage & the website. As such we generated a surplus of £600.
Costs should remain similar in the future, but without knowing how many people we re-sign, and acknowledging that we’re only charging a nominal fee of £5 for access to a large amount of information not currently available elsewhere, I hope people don’t object to me keeping the membership fee the same. Whilst there’s no intention for us to make a profit, the prudent accountant in me sees sense in us having a few quid in the bank, and this can support with some future projects we may wish to run. From discussing with a few members, I think there’s scope for a publication in the future (maybe towards the end of 2021, possibly 2022), which may involve up-front costs, or run at a net loss, so to me it makes sense to re-visit this after we’ve had another 12 months to see where we are.
All that remains now is for me to get in early & wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy new year. As a Warrington fan, I’m obviously always of the view that next year might offer better prospects (the jibe is now ubiquitously used it seems), however, for all of us, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that 2021 should be a more enjoyable year than 2020! For the RKC I hope it’s just as successful as this one, which has seen us achieve more than I thought possible, even factoring in circumstances from which we’ve probably benefited. As everyone starts to venture back out in the wider world, I think we’ve now got enough momentum to keep going, and I look forward to us being able to share the fruits of that labour more widely.
All the best
Neil
