President

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What the position involves:

The President’s role comes down to two main things:

·         Keep the club running smoothly

·         Making the club better in every way possible

Roles/Duties

  • Organise and chair regular meetings.
  • Reply to various emails from the SU that come specifically to you.
  • Check the Club’s pigeon-hole regularly. It’s in a little room immediately to the left inside the SU building.
  • Fill in any forms the SU send you or make sure they’ve been completed. These include, but aren’t restricted to:
    • Training times
    • Club Coaches
  • Make sure every committee member is getting along fine. Constant emailing/facebooking is essential.
  • Be the face of the club! Be present at training sessions, socials etc. Try to meet everyone. Be friendly!
  • Deliver inspirational speeches… At AGMs, other meetings, trainings, on the bus etc..

Essentially, you are the contact point and face of the club. In order for the club to be achieving and developing it is vital that the committee are delivering their aims – it’s your responsibility to make sure this happens. There’s a lot of delegation involved, as well as making sure that everyone is doing what they are supposed to! It’s great fun though, you’ll look back on it fondly – It WILL fly by!

What follows below is a mash up of separate sections that were written by Will Lawton, Sarah Higginson, Ffion Jones, Jean Fourie, and Jemimia Horsley Downie – who were presidents from 2010 up until last year – and myself (Mike Garbutt).

Lessons Learned from previous presidents:

 

Firstly, and MASSIVELY foremostly, your secretary is your best friend and the best person in the world. Make sure you have a good relationship and you work with them.  I encourage you to read every email, but don’t be tempted to start replying to them all.  If you really want to reply, tell your secretary first.

Get involved with korfball outside of just EUKC. Nothing makes the position easier than being mates with the people you interact with outside the club. Specifically, get to know the SU president and committee, go and meet them with your secretary and treasurer. You’ll inevitably have to go and moan at them about something, and being on good terms will make informal meetings easier and more useful. The same can be said for the SKA and BSKA committees. I’m guessing if you’re president, you’ve probably been around for a couple of years (and you’re probably just the coolest person), so hopefully you’ll know the big characters in Scotland and you can again sort things out in a much friendlier way than a faceless email.  You can learn a lot from other clubs by getting to know as many people around as possible, and the korfball community is actually great, so you’ll make a bunch of good mates anyway!  Also try and keep up with the sport in general online. Have a look at the forums every now and then and just keep up with stuff on Facebook etc.

You’re the person that people look to to make tough decisions and to do difficult things that nobody really wants to have to do. If an unpopular choice needs to be made, you need to make it.  If you need to go to the SU and argue about hall time or something, you just have to do it. If you have to speak to someone at the tournament about their behaviour, you just have to do it. If something goes wrong and you have to say something or send an email that you know isn’t going to go down well, you have to do your best to deal with it properly, but strongly. It is impossible to please everybody when running a club, but as long as you’ve thought the decision through and run it past the committee, nobody will bear a grudge. That being said, you get to take all the glory when inevitably EUKC is the awesome club it has always been.

Learn to talk to people as much as possible instead of e-mailing. That goes for when you need stuff to be done in or out of the committee. Everything is achieved a lot quicker if you speak to them in person.

Read over the club’s development plan, it’s a really good way to get ideas for the club for the future, you can get it from the outgoing president, or it might even be on the website!

Learn to delegate! Seriously, you CANNOT do it alone, and you have to learn to trust your committee, which will most likely be easy – Korfball committees are very enthusiastic and no-one likes a dictator.

Learn who you can ring up at 2.30am to help you out, and who needs to be rung every ten minutes in before they’ll get back to you. No committee is (completely) perfect, but you’ll know its strengths and weaknesses soon enough. Similarly, know which people you can absolutely rely on to get things done, in case you need them. (You will need them).

Read the constitution – it’s not long. Go on, I dare you. Should be available on the website.

From my experience, committee meetings go a lot better when everyone has brought food – As long as you keep control, there’s no reason why EUKC meetings can’t be a mini-social.

Set up the club email account to automatically forward stuff straight to your normal email account – and you may want to do the same for the tournament, treasurer and alumni email accounts. It’s the Secretary’s responsibility to make sure the club account is checked (and it’s a good idea to assume they’re replying to stuff unless you intervene), but it means you know what’s going on.

As soon as you’re elected, or indeed before, go look at the SU wiki. Find out about awards, forms, deadlines etc. This isn’t because there’s a lot to do, but because there’s a lot you CAN do, if you know what’s available.

Apply for some awards! I reckon we’ve got a damn good shot at Most Improved Club this year (awards at the SU Ball are for the previous academic year), and there’s plenty of others out there.

If in doubt, ASK someone. No doubt if you were on committee last year, you’ll know last year’s president. Facebook them.