Your sport, your views - the results!

Here at England Touch, we aim to grow Touch throughout the country, encourage more people to get involved with the sport so that they can have fun and improve their performance on the pitch. More players, more skills, more fun! To help shape our plans, we ran a short survey to hear your views about developing our sport - with the added bonus of a chance to win a coaching session from one of the top England Elite coaches for your team or club. Here are the results...

The biggest single message from the survey was that the most commonly cited wish for improving your enjoyment of touch is more local leagues or tournaments (73% of respondents wanted this), closely followed by more coaching (66% of respondents). Ensuring that touch remains a social and family friendly sport were really important minority views that came through the survey results too.

Most of you play touch because of the fitness benefits, competitions, the social side of touch and skills. The themes around coaching and local competitions came up in free text comments when you were asked about the biggest thing we could do to help improve your enjoyment of touch. Youth touch, connections between local teams and the regional franchises, as well as bridiging the gap between the England elite players and the 'rest' were strongly held views. My own personal favourite suggestion was that we should 'create an extra day of the weekend'!

Nearly 90% of respondents were members of a touch club, with half of you active in organising teams. 75% of the members of clubs recieved regular coaching, but only 15% of them recieve structured team and individual coaching from a dedicated coach. Lots of you (60%) have a Level 1 referee qualification, but only 20% have a Level 1 coaching qualification.

England Touch will use all this valuable information to shape our plans for the coming years - watch this space for more information!

And the winner is...

Claire Rylance from Warwick Touch was the lucky winner of the coaching session. Tim Osborne, the Head of Elite coaching and England Women's Open coach, will be in touch to arrange a suitable time. Congratulations!

If you want to get in touch to talk more about our plans, or if you want to volunteer, drop us a line at development@englandtouch.org.uk.

I'm looking forward to working with you all to continue to improve our sport for you!

Dave

ETA Development Director