Happy New Year to all our members and other Go players

The BGA is continuing its regular activities, such as Membership Administration, the Youth Grand Prix and the BGJ, however Council has been discussing what and how to prioritise our development activities for 2012 and this is what we've come up with:

Club Development

Quite a number of our clubs are just about hanging on, a few have given up recently and some are reported as not being terribly friendly to novices.

We will be focussing on trying to spread best practice from the active clubs to less active ones. We also be trying other methods of encouraging clubs not just to play more, but also to recruit and teach new players.

We also need to know what the BGA can additionally provide to help clubs. An online ladder system might be useful, but are there others?

Making the BGA relevant to online players

We believe that the total number of Go players in the country isn't going down, but that an increasing number are only playing online.

We need to understand what they need, over and above playing at servers as they do currently, and set out to provide it!

We also need to market ourselves better and persuade more of them to play in our tournaments.

Membership Drive

Since BGA membership has been gradually falling we thought this quite important!

So, we're starting initial planning for a membership drive this year in September/October, to coincide with the start of the Students' new academic year.

Youth Development

In 2012 we're trying to consolidate where we are. One obvious thing we need to do is to improve on is our communication with school Go clubs.

However, we are really short of people to help in this area and are looking for volunteers to lead some other projects in Youth Go. Help is needed NOW!

Double Figure Kyus

We need to nurture these better, providing specific teaching and assistance to help them improve and also encourage them to play more often in tournaments.

Additionally we want to help tournament organisers focus more on attracting these players to their tournaments.

Your thoughts on these priorities are always welcome, as are volunteers!

Jon Diamond

President