Queens Ladies Boat Club-Improving Outcomes

Aim

We want to improve the opportunities in rowing for our female students. This can range from participation, to travel, to competition.

QUEENS ROWING
Rowing first took place at Queen’s in May 1864 when several students who intended to stay in Belfast for the “long vacation” founded the Queen’s College Rowing Club. The Queen’s University of Belfast Boat Club came into existence in 1931 but the Queen’s Ladies was only formed in 1973, providing competitive sport for female rowers.
Today, both Men’s and Ladies’ Clubs operate under the joint name of Queen’s University Rowing.
As a club, we are proud to have a several of our students and alumni representing both Ireland and Great Britain on an international stage. Our first Olympian was Danny Taylor in 1948, and we have had a further five since; most recently Philip Doyle and Rebecca Edwards at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (in 2021). At the World Championships, we have had over 30 rowers competing at Junior, U23 and Senior level; half of these places have been earned since 2000 – most recently: Hugh Moore, Ciaran Purdy, Ross Corrigan, Nathan Timoney, Konan Pazzaia and Molly Curry.

Today, rowing is one of the University’s Academy sports and the club strives to achieve the highest possible performance outcomes (regionally, nationally, and internationally) whilst simultaneously providing opportunities for all - even for those who’ve never even picked up an oar before!

Last year the Club had 100 members, over 60 of whom are involved in competitive rowing, whilst others played an active and equally important role away from competition through volunteering and committee membership to support the work of the club. Our goal is to double this.

Community impact

Queen's Rowing supports projects that reach outside of university rowing. From kids summer camps, to team building days for organisations  and experience days for juniors who might have Queen's on their list of possible universities. Our coaches also play a part in keeping the river clean by removing debris and on occasions rescuing people from the river. 

Why are we crowdfunding?

The Covid-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on many aspects of our club. With only a hundred or-so active members in 2019, losing almost two full years of recruitment and participation through the pandemic has resulted in a drop in both predicted membership numbers and club income today - particularly for our women’s squads.

It is well documented that young women and girls already face many barriers in sport – with only 4 in 10 teenage girls continuing to participate through puberty (a huge 64% having quit by the age of 17). We saw this trend exacerbated by the pandemic; a lack of supportive, safe and fun active outlets over those two years has had a particularly detrimental effect on our female members and prospective members physical and mental wellbeing, meaning that fewer have returned to/tried out our sport.
In a ‘normal’ year, over 60% of our beginner recruitment would feed into our women’s squads, with only about 30% feeding into our men’s squads. Unfortunately, despite more girls than boys trying this new sport in their early university years, only a very small percentage will remain a part of the club until their graduation.

While there are several strong female athletes contributing to the club’s success - it is clear to see that there is still an imbalance when compared to the number of our male athletes. We want to level the playing field. Fewer of our female athletes reach the highest levels in the sport, for example this past summer – of our 6 international athletes, 5 were male and only one female. Even within our coaching team, team there are only 4 women and 10 men. This lack of female role models in the club almost certainly has a negative trickle-down effect - all despite attracting more female rowers into the club in the first place!

Another vital part of club affected by this is the social aspect. Multiple lockdowns and restrictions on numbers/facilities/training opportunities affected our ability to hold any form of events – whether an informal social or an important fundraiser. This meant reduced opportunities for valuable social interaction between our current members and new students, limiting their chance to widen their social circles, develop skills and make new friends. We believe this too is having a knock-on effect among our members and preventing potential members from having the confidence to give it a go.

The Covid pandemic also cost us the opportunity to run our summer camps in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Traditionally this would have involved up to 90 children the opportunity to try rowing for the first time.  These summer camps were a good opportunity to let us showcase both rowing and our club to non-rowers and proved to be a longer-term recruitment tool when the participants eventually got to University age. A significant number of new recruits would tell us they had tried rowing at a summer camp at Queens. As part of this project, we want to reinstate the summer camps with an additional focus on 16–18-year-old females within 2 years of finishing school.

How we’ll spend the money raised

We want to address the issues facing women in sport today – using the funds we raise to boost their numbers, their success and overall well-being through involvement with Queen’s University Rowing.

We want to specifically recruit and maintain more female athletes at all levels of the sport. We will do this through a new targeted advertising and recruitment campaign, aimed at school leavers who will be starting University in 2023 and 2024. This is something we have not done before. During the summer of 2023 we will run a number of ‘come and try it’ opportunities for this group over a 3-4 week period in advance of the start of term. We will deploy a coach specifically to lead the coaching at these come and try sessions. We would plan for each beginner to have 3-4 sessions on consecutive days. They will be run as part of a wider relaunch of our junior summer camps.

In addition, we want to support at least one part-time coach, whose role will focus on providing increased support to our new female members, particularly those in their first and second year of university. We can then measure the impact of this by monitoring the number who continue to row in the later years of their degree.
On top of that we want to support and inspire our existing and recruit at least 3 new female volunteer coaches. We will do this by adding additional resources to coach education and providing new opportunities to coach at events that they may not have experienced before, with the support of our full-time coaching staff.
 Furthermore, we will invest additional resources to upskill all our coaches (new and existing) in recognising and openly tackling the physical and mental barriers our female athletes may face through training/workshop opportunities with internal and external support.

 We want to invest in up-to-date equipment that is specific to women’s rowing - oars, narrower handles, smaller shoes, adjustable seats. The ability to change these things may seem small but make a real difference.

 We want to grow the number of female athletes we have competing and succeeding at the highest levels - offering support to take advantage of fresh opportunities that are available to them on the performance pathway. This will be addressed by allocating new resources to make sure that affordability is less a barrier. 

How you can play your part

There are four simple ways to help us reach our target, and make this project a reality:

1. Make a pledge: Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word: Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards: Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. If you want to run your own fundraiser to support us, maybe a sponsored activity or similar, use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!

This project successfully funded on 28th November 2022