Spotlight on… Lona Williams
Lona Williams is the Secretary of Dominoes Netball Club, based in Manchester. She deals with correspondence, membership affiliation administration, prepares fixtures, attends meetings and co-ordinates teams and tournaments. She also finds time to coach and is currently mentoring the club's Umpire as she works towards an A Award.
Lona had played for a local club in Manchester for several years, but they didn't have a club and weren't keen to "move on". After sampling another club for a few months, she decided to set up Dominoes Netball Club 11 years ago. She never considered that the club would grow to such an extent. Celebrating a decade of Domninoes last year was a huge achievement.
Driving the Clubmark accreditation process, Lona registered the club into the scheme and liaised with committee members as well as club members and collected the relevant evidence required. She also developed an excel spreadsheet as a "quick glance guide" to show all the courses each member had attended with relevant dates to keep on top of things. She has co-ordinatred the committee to prepare for the forthcoming re-accreditation and is now working with them to update the folder.
Lona is a great advocate of Clubmark. She believes that being a Clubmark club has helped develop a great sense of pride and enabled the club to promote itself with confidence, to children, parents and schools alike.
She said, "Clubmark has enabled us to gain funding from a variety of sources to support the clubs development, enabled us to negotiate a move for the whole club to fantastic new facilities at Wright Robinson College and allowed us to have discounted facility use for the junior sessions. It is also a great tool for promotion and attracting sponsorship etc which we have done successfully."
"Clubmark was the foundation upon which our junior section was built, it provided a good framework upon which to build and help us feel confident about promoting our sporting opportunities to young people, their parents, schools etc. Without Clubmark we would see the club is limited in the work it is able to undertake and certainly the recognition it would receive. Well worth the effort!"
