Page 37 - 2018 AMA Summer

MEETS UPDATE
By Ryan Lang
Another blink of an eye, another few sleeps and I have the AMA Journal Editor chasing me for this article!
It was agreed that constantly writing about meets in the same diary of events fashion was due for a change, so here it
is. There are still a few meet reports in this edition of the Journal from the various meet organisers that we have had this year. It will always be important to report on what we do, so that we can all remind ourselves of how good we were all those years ago! Not only will the reports act as a reminder of what we did, but they also demonstrate to new and potential members what is on offer for the small sum of £20 a year.
I am always looking for keen volunteers to help run a meet. One question I am constantly asked is where and when can they take place? The answer is simple, pick a month, pick a location and go for it! Since the last journal we have had five meets in three locations run by four different people. The future is looking equally good in that we have another three meets in N Wales, a meet in the Peak District, the Isle of Skye and Bosigran to look forward too. As the AMA Meet Officer, I try and ensure there are about ten meets a year, roughly one per month with a gap over December and January. This is not a hard and fast rule, we have successfully run two meets in one month in the past, we even managed to run two meets over one weekend in different parts of the country. The moral of the story is if you are keen to run a meet, the location and date is completely up to you. There is no set template to follow, well apart from the annual Wye Valley meet of course! I promise you that running a meet is not complicated, there is help available and you will benefit from the experience. Once you have run a weekend meet, the process for arranging a week long climbing meet in the Costa Blanca is very similar indeed!
I think it is worthwhile to remind ourselves the true value of a meet in a monetary sense. If you were to book into Plas-Y-
Brenin on a weekend course to conduct walking, scrambling or climbing, the costs are soon going to mount up. By the time you have paid for transport and the course you are looking at an average of £300 for the weekend (beer not included!) The cost of an AMA weekend meet is £20. The accommodation we use is not as plush, you may have to feed yourself, but the value is second to none.
Attendance over the last six months has been high. Over 87% of meet spaces have been filled, the 13% non-attend- ance can be attributed to service life, last minute change of plans and the other-half putting his or her foot down! It is always encouraging to see new faces on the meets, out of the 92 attendees over the last five meets, about 50% of the attendees have been new to the AMA which means we are advertising what we do and when we do it quite well. There is always room for improvement though and we won’t rest on our laurels.
“It has been encouraging to see meets start to move elsewhere and lesser visited areas too”
I have attended the vast majority of meets in the last three years and have noted that participants can be broadly pigeon holed into one of three categories. The first is the novice, who is happy to be instructed in whatever activity they choose (Instructor dependant). The second is the Instructor who is willing to take novice members out, thereby using the qualifications to best effect. The third is the person that has a qualification but lacks the experience or confidence to use it. Most meets have all three categories and it seems to work out fairly well. There is now a drive to help the less experienced instructors by pairing
them up with an MIA or MIC so that they can learn from experience and develop as the weekend progresses. Therefore, if you are reading this and place yourself in the third category, please come along as you will receive some professional input which will enable you to be a better instructor. This will help AMA meets thrive in the future as you progress into the second category.
There are a lot of instructors that don’t have the time to attend a five-day JSAT course which means they will not progress to the next level on the Military system. Please remember that all is not lost as you are able to use your Standard Learning Credit for Mountaineering courses as long as the same award is not available from Service sources. It is possible to do many courses over split weekends if you can’t attend a continuous five-day block. MIA, MIC, RCDI etc are all eligible for SLC use. If the acronyms mean nothing to you, please look at the Mountain Training Website mountain-training.org.
If you have been a member of the AMA for long enough, you will see repetition in the meets calendar. There are numerous N Wales meets because there is so much to do in a small geographical area. The winter meet will always be in Scotland for obvious reasons. It has been encouraging to see meets start to move elsewhere and lesser visited areas too, Loch Lomond being a great example of this. If you have an idea, don’t keep it to yourself as it may be the seed that needs to be sewn that turns into a fantastic idea for the next meet. Wild camping in the Scottish wilderness, a weekend of climbing in Lundy or a sports climbing meet are all within scope and just need to be arranged by a willing volunteer. If you are interested in helping out, please contact me, my details are in the contacts at the start of the journal.
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