What can You do for Kilmarnock Harriers

To often club members have the attitude, What can Kilmarnock Harriers do for me ? Therefore, it’s uplifting when you come across the opposite point of view: What I can do for Kilmarnock Harriers? Maybe, we too often take things for granted with the army of volunteers now involved in the daily running of the club and it is difficult to highlight each and everyone’s contribution.

Maybe, that is a good opportunity to convey gratitude to their efforts and invaluable contributions these volunteers have made over the past couple of years. I am sure many coaches can still remember the times when they had to deal with the administrative side of the club like taking the register and collecting money. This took considerable time, time that could have been used more productively for getting on with coaching; an administrative task which is now being performed by our volunteers and we now take for granted.

Another interesting notion is the wide range of skills club members and volunteers bring to the club, each of these skills can make a specific contribution to the development of the club. I would like to take here the opportunity to highlight one particular contribution Brian McCutcheon recently made, which hopefully will have long lasting benefits for many young athletes. I had been searching for a specific pole vault equipment for a while, a kit that helps to lower the starting height, which by default is 1.70m. This starting height is not really suited for very beginners, who need a lot of practice jumping over lower heights, in particularly to help them to gain first competition experience. After having searched the internet for hours and pondered over various ideas I eventually approached Brian McCutcheon asking him if he could assist in this matter. Brian made use of his engineering background and came up with a fine solution that now enables our your vaulters to jump over a proper bar with a starting height of as low as 1.10m. These drop down bars will enable our young vaulters to take part in a proper competition, where they now have the opportunity to jump their way up to higher heights until they are able to clear the standard starting height of 1.70m. To use a better analogy it’s like asking me to do high jumping and have a starting height of 1.50m, which often is my finishing height. So likelihood is that I would struggle with this starting height and probably would not even get one successful jump, which is not quite motivating to take part in a competition.

The first test for our new kit will be the next Ayrshire Harriers meeting on Wednesday 111th June, where hopefully our young vaulters will have a first successful competition experience and any future success will be down to Brian McCutcheon’s genius solution. Well done Brian!