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In November when Ken shut down the scheme as we had run out of badges I promised that I would make a full statement about the demise of the AAS. A copy of the published letter about AAS closure was sent to the Chairman of the Board of Directors, the Chief Executive of GNAS and the Chairman of the operations committee. Not one of the people to whom the letter was addressed could be bothered to respond.
The Secretary of the AAS offered to meet with GNAS. This offfer was not taken up except to ask one of us to attend a meeting at 48 hours notice, hardly a viable course of action to those of us in full time employment. At the same time we were told that the number of schools taking part in archery was increasing. Not one of the schools joined AAS. It can only be assumed therefore that either the people involved with these clubs were being told 'do not join AAS' or the numbers were being artificially inflated for some reason. One of the reasons that AAS has closed down is that we were doing far more work for GNAS clubs than school clubs and we felt tht this was not part of our remit and that GNAS refused to help us or co-operate with us in our work.
Unfortunately the chair of the Junior Committee then chose to be less than honest in a report to the operations committee about contacts with the AAS. Is this why the minutes of those meetings are no longer published? Again a letter sent to GNAS about this matter failed to elicit a response.
The AAS was not asked in any way about how to run the new GNAS scheme nor asked to attend a conference about juniors in archery, when we submitted our comments we were not, yet again, given the courtesy of any response at the time. Eventually I was told that as AAS was closing we were irrelevant. At the time no final decision had been made.
Over the years AAS has striven in a variety of ways to support both school and non school archers. A look at the number of badges etc. issued will attest to this fact as does the number of junior archers who atteneded our shoots. It was hoped that we could transfer the work carried out by AAS to GNAS but as is now evident GNAS did not want to do this and wished to do exactly as they wanted without consulting the members in particular those of us who have worked in schools for many years (and indeed who have served on the Junior Committee).
There seems to be a strange similarity between this situation and the change to 'Archery GB'
In closing I would like to thank all those who have supported AAS over the years and who have worked hard for Juniors through the AAS. The many letters of thanks and support from archers were much appreciated. It would seem that many people working with Juniors felt as I did that they were being massively let down by GNAS.
since 10.06.99
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Final update 30.11.08