While the elite end of the sport continues to evolve, what is it like to be involved at the grassroots level? We asked a number of people at the coalface of the sport

The National Cross Country Championships are always a visceral reminder of how vibrant the club athletics scene in the UK can be. Whether it be Parliament Hill in London for the English edition, Callander Park in Falkirk for Scotland’s finest or Brecon for the Welsh championships, the venues were awash last month with the colours of the organisations that provide the sport’s very lifeblood.

To see a young athlete such as Sutton and District’s Alex Lennon beaming in his post-race interview with AW after under-17 victory in Hampstead was the perfect example of why so many people – coaches, officials, committee members – pour so much effort into keeping the cogs turning.

“National senior strength in depth across the endurance events seems really healthy and advancing gradually. The clubs are right at the heart of driving this,” says David Chalfen of Highgate Harriers, whose track sits at the foot of Parliament Hill and were effectively “hosts” of this year’s English National. “There are thousands of people having a great and fulfilling time in this environment and this pool of athletes will surely form the pipeline for future coaches.”

There are indeed moments when you can scan the athletics landscape and see a sport on the move, making progress. Speak to those involved in the grassroots scene, though, and it soon becomes clear that gaining ground is becoming increasingly difficult.

Last month, we posed a question to club members on our AW social media channels: “What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in club athletics – for better or worse – in recent years and what are the greatest issues facing your club?”

It didn’t take long for the responses to come flooding in and there was a reassurance in the very fact that so many people wanted to join the conversation, highlighting the depth of feeling. While there were some positive remarks and encouraging noises, in general the replies made worrying reading. Some common threads recurring areas of concern began to emerge…

Facilities

“There is an unbelievable shortage of running tracks, especially in comparison to the overwhelming number of football and rugby pitches. We have the wonderful parkruns which create many competitive runners and in turn feed the hundreds of mass participation runs and supporting infrastructure throughout the country. That helps to create the huge profits made by global athletics supply companies selling millions of pounds worth of running shoes and kit. Now, why can't the promoters and manufacturers not plough some profits into at least partnering local councils into building more running and athletics facilities?” - Bill Brown

“Our local facility has gradually lost all throwing areas and last year we lost the long jump so all we have is a decaying track. In the centre is a four-metre high fence for football and we have a constant battle to keep football spectators off the track whilst we are using it. We have to have DBS checks, yet there are unknown adults on the track who we have no control over. It is all about saving and generating money. It feels like the grassroots in our sport has been abandoned.” - Tom Reed

“Some tracks are closing earlier than they used to because of a lack of staff. Tracks are also being prioritised for non track-related events over club and individual training. Throwers and jumpers are not able to train alone regardless of their experience and accolades and being told they must have coaches to supervise them at all times. There are very few indoor facilities across the UK, affecting many athletes, especially in the field events.” - Thekhuwayne

“The gatekeeping of athletics tracks and the cost involved for utilising them is a big problem. Owners won’t have them available past a certain time because they have to put the floodlights on and they’re too tight to fork out the cost. Then they still charge people ludicrous amounts to use them.” - bentumo

Volunteers

“It seems to be getting harder and harder to get volunteers. A lot of officials seem to have been around a long time (hats off to them!) but they can’t go on forever. Where does the next generation of officials come from?” - athletetribuneuk

“There are an increasing number of veteran athletes who don't go into other club roles, such as coaching, officiating or taking up positions on the club committee. More ex-athletes are now bringing their kids down and getting involved in coaching but still not enough to avoid having waiting lists. Officials requirements for league matches is increasing while the number of officials within the club is diminishing.” - Mike Harris, Trafford AC

"The biggest issue nobody wants to talk about? Officials. You can have all the talent in the world, but without qualified, engaged officials, you don’t have a sport. We’re facing a real crisis in keeping events staffed and yet we’re still relying on the same pool of volunteers we had 20 years ago. Burnout, lack of incentives and the slow, painful process of qualifying and progressing through the levels for new officials is putting the whole competition structure at risk. It’s not about appreciation - it’s about action." - Paul Forrest, Brentwood Beagles

"The biggest challenge is that the people who know most about the sport are gradually dropping out due to age, disillusion and even death. They are being replaced by a new group of keen younger more energetic but totally inadequate conscripts. These new volunteers have gone through the woke propaganda machine of the last 30 years and have no concept of what is really required to ensure that the sport of athletics attracts enough people with the right mentality to keep the sport relevant." - Larry Garnham, Kent/Cornwall

Young athletes and drop-out rates

“Failure to modernise and keep up with other sports is making athletics less attractive to young people today. With the exception of the very best, retention of young athletes is poor.

Women’s football is a huge threat to women's athletics because it's exciting, it's modern, it's empowering. For some reason, in athletics most of the progress seems to be happening outside of the governing bodies with initiatives like the BMC, Podium 5k, Night of 10,000 PBs and so on.

It would be great to get this energy, creativity and innovation at all levels in the sport which at times feels as if it’s strangled by umpteen layers of administration, bureaucracy and committees, with all the different boards and associations just trying to keep things going as best they can.” - Susan Edwards

“Over the last 20 years, we've lost the advocates for athletics at both school and grassroots level.  There are no longer those within schools who drive the athletics participation rates up and spot the next potential Olympians. There's too much emphasis on team sports, with athletics being seen as an interference to them.” - Darren James

“I suppose I'm resigned to the fact that young athlete age-group changes are not going to disappear, so one of the challenges will be club and county records. The steadily increasing criteria to get a track licence for a small county like Cornwall with limited officials is a challenge. But we do have a good base at our club, including an active committee, so we are trying to cope with getting new officials and coaches through the system. Many current officials are old but I was pleased with the latest (Cornwall) county AGM and a few new younger faces getting involved, so, I suppose, overall I'm cautiously optimistic that things are going in the right direction locally.” - Dave Varney, Newquay & Par AC

"We’re seeing a steady drain of talented young athletes moving away from our sport. The system simply isn’t built to keep them engaged. They hit a ceiling too soon—either due to a lack of structured pathways, underwhelming competition opportunities, or, frankly, more lucrative and better supported options in other sports. We can’t keep pretending this is a numbers game where you just ‘get what you get’… other sports actively develop and retain their best talent whether that’s athletes, officials or coaches." - Paul Forrest, Brentwood Beagles

Club divisions and standards

“The divide between traditional athletics/harriers clubs and newer distance running clubs seems more entrenched and so it seems that the vast growth in membership numbers of the latter is not matched by the former. Participation/get-you-round long distance running is vast but has close to zero ‘transferability’ to interest in track and field athletics bar the occasional parkrunner who moves across and eventually thrives at national level. Indeed the word ‘athletics’ isn’t really used in the 'recreational' running world.

“I’d argue that there may be too many athletics clubs for the scale of the sport as it currently is and thus the ‘shop window’ of inter-club track and field leagues and competitions looks threadbare and is slow-paced in delivery compared to, say, BMC meets or sprints-only meets.” - David Chalfen

“The standard of league events has fallen off a cliff in recent years. As soon as they combined scoring for men and women rather than just the men’s team standards, interest and participation numbers have fallen dramatically across youth, junior, southern and national leagues. The days are so much longer and pointless if your team has a weak section on either men’s or women’s side. Athletes are now not bothering with these and going to much livelier and competitive open events to fill the void.” - Rob McTaggart

“There’s a lack of interest from younger athletes in competing in the leagues due to a feeling that those events lack the level of competition the athletes seek. Instead, they almost exclusively compete in open meets, which means that clubs are always sending skeleton crews to compete in the leagues. That lack of interest in competing then puts pressure on the athletes that do compete to perform in multiple events, often with very little recovery time, meaning that injury risk is high and inevitable." - Luke O’Gorman

"As an athletics club committee member we have great numbers and are financially buoyant. Disappointingly the standard is way off what I experienced through the 1980s as a junior. I think for children we are way off providing a healthy and sustainable model for physical activity – of any kind. The facilities, caretakers, sports leaders, cultural model for sport as fun (not suffocated with competition) are not sufficient and show no signs of regeneration." - Jim Buchanan

Tackling the problems

The good news for athletics is that there are still so many people out there who can see and are experiencing those issues but doing their utmost to turn the tide. There are clubs who are managing to thrive in the current climate and Harborough AC – awarded England Athletics’ club of the year at the end of 2024 – is one of them.

“We're conscious of problems and challenges, but we don't dwell on them,” says Club Secretary Howard Crabtree. “It is much more about: ‘What are we doing?’ and it’s a very positive atmosphere. If you're a club and you've not got many committee members, I can understand how you might feel beset with issues, but that isn't the way it feels at Harborough at the minute, and hasn't for a long time.”

“It starts with a good committee,” says club chair Jill Roginski. “We've had a [five-year] plan that has given us a focus on what we needed to do, and because we're a club without a track, we've had to be really flexible in our thinking.”

Harborough is based at the local rugby club and, outside of hiring their nearest track for weekly Saturday morning sessions (which has attracted growing numbers on both the junior and senior sides), there has to be a creativity about where to train.

There are ambitions to build a compact track facility of their own and making sure the local community knows all about the club – whether that be through park run takeovers, support of local races or shouting about what they do – is key not only to attracting potential sponsors but also council support as well as prospective members.

“We try and keep a very high profile on social media and in the local press, radio, papers and so on,” adds Crabtree. “People see who we are all the time and focus very much on what the achievements of the athletes are.”

Roginski adds: “It helps people to understand that the sport is very popular in the town. The awards have helped bring that home. It's establishing a two-way relationship. We've got to give something to get support from the council.”

Making wider connections in the community has also helped Kilmarnock Harriers, Scottish Athletics’ track and field club of the year.

“For us it’s about the people, the partnerships and the place [our facility],” says chair Donald McIntosh of the outfit that is based at the Ayrshire Athletics Arena. “I’m passionate about the people in the club. It’s not just the coaches or the officials, it’s the work put in from everybody across the board. Partnership working is also key, you can’t do it in isolation. We have strong partnerships with East Ayrshire Leisure and East Ayrshire Council as well as Ayrshire College.

“Our facility’s location also massively benefits the club. When we moved to the new arena in 2012 – it opened with the Olympic Torch Relay – we became very visible. The site was picked for that reason. Our visibility helped attract members and, because it was an Olympic summer, everyone wanted to be an athlete.”

Clubs being able to attract big numbers of young athletes, especially in an Olympic year, is not a new phenomenon but few are in a position to be able to cope with the demand. At the other end of the junior scale also comes that aforementioned issue of losing athletes who either step away from the sport or move away to university. Crabtree admits that being able to recruit athletes in the 20-30-year-old age bracket is an ongoing issue.

“We've never really recovered that position from COVID,” he says. “It was always a big fear and that group hasn't really come back. We're trying to think of some new ways of doing that and we're even more vigilant about how we're looking after those athletes that are approaching 18, going from junior to senior status.

“For the older ones, we've established a road running group that prepares them for the kind of training they will do [with the seniors]. Occasionally they’ll train with a senior group, too. It’s about making sure we stop them feeling: ‘If I finish on Monday night training as a junior, I've got to start afresh in the club on a Tuesday, and that's all very different, and I don't want to do that’. They've had that acclimatisation within the club. We start to treat them as adults, get them to take responsibility for their training. That's the kind of culture we want.”

Again, all of that takes time and effort. So what suggestions would Harborough give to any club officials out there who are feeling overwhelmed by the number of tasks in need of attention?

“Do what you can do, do it well, and you'd be surprised that, bit by bit, more people will get involved,” says Crabtree. “Small steps of success lead to bigger ones. I also think we've been fortunate throughout the club’s history that the people we've had leading and chairing the club have pretty much always been creative, very enthusiastic people. Jill does inspire and cajole people across the club and it is important to have a figurehead that’s always going with an optimistic and positive view.”

“Tap into what you've got in your club,” says Roginksi. “What we're learning is that most people are happy to give a bit of their time – they're just overwhelmed when it's all of the time. I think that is the way that people are going to actually manage to get things done.”

Governing bodies offer support

Each of the home nations governing bodies offer club support schemes. "Our Club Support team provides digital and face-to-face support to our network of clubs on a daily basis,” said an England Athletics spokesperson. “We have seen clubs come to us for advice on subjects such as youth participation drop-off; facilities; volunteer recruitment and retention; and funding; with increasing regularity recently, and our work allows us to link clubs in with England Athletics' wider strategies in these areas, ensuring that clubs can and do benefit from the work going in to address these sport-wide issues.

“Following the pandemic, we introduced our Club Improvement Fund, which provides grants to support clubs to overcome any challenges or barriers they may be facing.

"We are constantly looking to identify ways in which we can make the lives of our clubs – and those who work tirelessly to make them a success – easier. Our Club Standards – seven guiding principles which we believe showcase good and effective governance – is an example of this. This was designed following an increase in safeguarding, misconduct and compliance-based issues.

“This support is aligned to legal legislation and the Code for Sports Governance, and is part of our wider objective of empowering clubs to have the confidence in making decisions around the running of their club.

“Another aspect of this work is our Club Leadership Programme, which is aimed at supporting club leaders and committee members to achieve our common goal of providing the best possible athlete/runner experience.”

Get in touch

Have your say on club athletics. Get in touch via our social media channels or email [email protected]