The AGM as described below having taken place, the minutes (provisional until the next AGM) are available here.
Please find below the text of an email sent to Club Secretaries and League officers on Saturday 11 July 2020. The mentioned attachments are linked after the message. Anyone with questions can reach acting Admin Secretary, Steve Lovell via the contact page.
Agenda and Papers Updated 16 August 2020
The list of papers below includes notes as to which papers have changed and the extent of those changes.
To Club Secretaries and League Officers (including outgoing officers),
I hope this email finds you well. You may be surprised to be hearing from me about an upcoming AGM. For reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain, we will be holding the AGM as an online meeting, using Zoom or another similar video conferencing platform to be confirmed. Details about how to join the online meeting will be circulated in due course. The meeting will take place on 26 August 2020 at 7:30pm.
Agenda Items and Voting Rules
A provisional agenda and the currently available papers are attached to this email. Clubs and league officers may submit additional proposals for the consideration of the AGM. In accordance with rule 1.2, these must arrive with me, the (acting) Administrative Secretary three weeks ahead of the meeting, so by 5 August. Proposed rule changes should specify wording and be accompanied by a rationale for the change where possible. Together with the existing agenda items, I will circulate any such proposals at least a week before the AGM.
Less notice is required for items of an informational nature to be raised under “Any other Business”, but we still need these to be communicated one week in advance, by 19 August.
Vote allocations at the AGM are as per league rule 1.3, and votes cannot be cast by proxy.
Other BACL Matters: Vacancies/Volunteers and Trophies
We are presently trying to ascertain who among the current league officers is willing to continue in post. We’ve already seen a few resignations over the summer. One vacancy is for the Admin Secretary (I’m only the acting secretary to get us through the AGM), but there are others too. In addition to vacant posts, several people occupy multiple roles due to lack of volunteers. If you would be willing to serve the league in any capacity we’d like to hear from you. The full list of roles is on the league website, although the aforementioned resignations aren’t yet reflected there. Of course, even where positions are not vacant we are open to people standing against the existing role holder. Please ensure this call for volunteers is shared with your club members.
We had a few issues last summer in relation to the league trophies, and although we obviously can’t collect the trophies from you via an online meeting, if you have any of the trophies, we’d like to know. It might be useful to have them to hand during the meeting to allow identification via the video call. If you have a trophy and aren’t sure if it belongs to the Bury League, then please have it ready. There are a couple of trophies which might not even obviously be trophies: the trophy for the Roger Goldsmith is an engraved chess board, and that for the Jamboree is a miniature chess board with a small knight atop.
Kind regards,
Steve Lovell
Bury Area Chess League
(Acting) Admin Secretary
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Agenda and Available Papers
- Finalised AGM Agenda (unchanged, except no longer provisional)
- Paper A – Minutes of the AGM 2019
- Paper B – BACL Chair Report
- Paper C – BACL Treasurers Report (with minor updates)
- Paper D – BACL Internet Officers Report
- Paper E – BACL Congress Secretarys Report (with updates and now including finances)
- Paper F – On the Giving of Trophies (with minor updates)
- Paper G – Changes to Rules 1.4 and 1.5 (with minor updates)
- Paper H – BACL Consultation on Resumption of Competitions
- Paper I – Options for Completion of Season (with minor updates)
- Paper J – Committee to Consider Resumption of OTB Competitions
- Paper K – Possible Online Competitions for 2020-21 (with significant updates to reflect latest information)
- All the above combined into a single PDF (incorporates all the changes above)
Hello Steve,
Thanks for the extensive work needed to produce this agenda. Stowmarket concur with Ely, Linton and Bury when it comes to a dislike of playing in masks, where venue preparation for over the board play with screens as in the photo you sent is not welcomed. Completion of 2019/2020 season is at best unlikely before Christmas as is the start of the probably to be truncated 2020/2021 season.
Stowmarket consider that without a vaccine or a drug that stops the risk of hospitalisation then the risk of Covid-19 infection during OTB chess and all the contacts surrounding venue preparation, clear up and travel to our majority elderly membership is just not worth taking.
I will be available online as the Stowmarket rep at the AGM but I guess there is precious little I can add apart from reporting that the SCCA have suspended their AGM for 2020 and have declared the 2019/2020 season null and void by 9 votes to one with the only objection coming from a committee member acting for his club as they had a good chance of promotion.
Regards
David Green
Paper I offers two solutions for completing the 2019/2020 season; extrapolation or cancellation. Neither of these is ideal. The author acknowledges that extrapolation can be inaccurate and cancellation would be unfair to teams who have worked hard towards achieving promotion. Is there not another, more acceptable solution?
Given that it is likely to be January 2021 before we have any real prospect of returning to OTB chess, I would suggest that it is more logical to cancel the 2020/2021 season and continue the 2019/2020 season when normal service resumes. At least this way, the matches played to date won’t have been for nothing. Furthermore, starting the 2020/2021 season in January (February, March?) will make it difficult to complete a normal season – two seasons messed up instead of one!
…cont.
The paper does acknowledge this option but dismisses it on the ground that when play does resume, the teams might bear little resemblance to those that started the season. So what? In other competitions that happens all the time. Players leave football clubs, get injured etc.
There is no perfect solution, but that is no reason to restrict the choice when it comes to voting.
Cheers Dick. I agree that an “over the board” continuation would be the ideal arrangement, but tend to also agree with the comments in the paper that it wouldn’t really work. If the chair feels there is support “in the room” for such a continuation, I’d expect them to include it amongst the options for voting upon.