Charlie Blair gives us the lowdown on the meeting of London Women's Ultimate Forum a couple weeks ago.
Ten years ago London was host to a mere 24 female Ultimate players. The establishment of the women’s Tour opened the door for growth by providing the opportunity for women not merely to play at a competitive and athletic level against one another, but facilitated both the incentive and necessity for other teams to strive to regularly train at such a level. As such we have witnessed Tour participation swell from only seven teams in 2004 to twenty-one in 2013, four of which represented the capital.
Whilst on the surface this may seem somewhat impressive, a simple comparison with the growth in Open and the fact that only Iceni and SYC attended Nationals highlights the lack of sustainability that London clubs - indeed clubs nationwide - outside of the top tier appear to be suffering from. Thus, despite a steady increase in female participation, our club infrastructure, and thus our development, remains weak.
It is why at the beginning of this month, representatives of London based women’s clubs and those interested and/or affiliated to their development gathered for an open forum to evaluate the current situation. They included: Iceni, SYC, Crown Jewels, Curve, Discie Chicks and a new team, so nascent yet to be named! In addition there was university representation from Kings, UCL and Imperial. It was incredible alone to have a whole cohort of women representing their interests in London, a decade since Alia Ayub and Laura Pearce encouraged women in the UK to talk about what they want from Ultimate for the first time, which led to the inception of the Women’s Tour and the appointment of the first ever UKU Women’s Coordinator.
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| Representation from all over the London club and university scene. |
The enthusiastic reception of such a forum itself was inspiring. It demonstrated a genuine concern and passion amongst so many. More importantly, it gave an insight into a real and existing demand for women’s Ultimate. Based on the figures provided, we can estimate the London female player base to currently be between 150-200 women, easily. That in itself is at least 10 Tour teams! However there remains women’s teams wanting to compete at Tour events that aren’t getting enough players, whilst at the same time, there are clubs who boast 70 Facebook members, yet too often can only field a handful of players at trainings.
In learning that the capital bares so much promise before we’ve even considered recruiting afresh, it is therefore more important than ever that we engage with the ‘needs-gaps’ hindering our clubs.
