CEO blog: building performers and building communities

As we enter the home straight of 2025, I have reflected on the past year with great pride and optimism for our sport and the role it will continue to play in contributing to a fairer, inclusive, and cohesive society.

Athletics and running are more than a sport. In all its forms it embodies health and fitness, helps with physical and mental wellbeing, combats loneliness, unites communities, fulfils potential through participants realising personal bests, and promotes teamwork, camaraderie, friendship, tolerance, and togetherness. I am not sure that these benefits were front and centre when the original architects of our sport first dreamt up the concept of running fast, over long distances, jumping over hurdles, or throwing implements a long way, but over time, we have recognised how important this is. What other sport has such accessibility, inclusion, diversity of opportunity and is an activity where you could be training on a midweek evening on your local track, road, or field, next to an Olympian or Paralympian using the same routine or route as you?

A community of volunteers

I was reminded of the powerful impact that our sport has on my most recent club visit to London Frontrunners, an inspirational club that offers participation, community, friendship, and belonging to its 750 members of various backgrounds, professions, and motivations. The club, like many others, is rooted in the local athletics scene and is an active contributor to competition on the road and in the field, enjoying road relays, cross country, and endurance events over varied distances both in a team and individual capacity, but the club is so much more than that, serving as many of our member clubs do, as beacons or hubs in their neighbourhood, providing social benefit and care to many and making a positive contribution to local life in the community that they serve. I was delighted to see London Frontrunners and a host of other deserving individuals, clubs, and groups recognised for these efforts through our recent wave of regional award celebrations and at our National Awards Night at the end of November.

We see so many examples of this selfless behaviour across our sport whether that be in clubs, running groups, at parkruns, a local winter 5k series, a good gym project, or a Personal Best Foundation funded programme. Individuals giving their time to help others but, in the process, gaining great personal satisfaction and enrichment in the role that they are playing to help wider society. Why do we think that countless technical officials keep volunteering their services often for many years after their children may have moved onto new sporting pastures or have outgrown the need for transportation to training or events? They do it because they enjoy the pleasure that helping others provides and in turn it helps them through the friendships developed and the life enhancing experiences gained along the way. I am reminded of a beautiful moment when attending the recent Yorkshire & Humber Volunteer Awards in September of this year when long serving coach Gordon Agar told me that “athletics saved my life”. Yes athletics is a sport but it is so much more than that to so many people.

Track and Field Vision

With the power of our great sport in mind, we are currently working with partners such as UKA, the other Home Country Athletics Federations in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, London Marathon, Great Run Company, The Daily Mile, and parkrun, to create a high level UK wide vision and campaign for our sport that we will talk more about in 2026 and which envelopes much of the sentiment outlined in the above paragraphs, doing what we can to capture what our sport means to so many and the power that it has to move lives and to move bodies.

This high level vision will be a lobbying and influencing tool to persuade government and commercial sponsors to continue to invest in our sport, and to continue to support it when we want to bring global events to these shores, to grow participation, to nurture talent, and to build and maintain a healthy stock of facilities where our sport can be enjoyed. Fundamentally this vision will recognise the power of our sport to deliver upon a number of wider social, economic, and sporting agendas, and to hopefully result in greater resourcing of our sport at a national and local level as has happened in recent times with other activities such as cycling and walking.

A great year ahead

2026 promises to be a special year for our sport. Both the European Track and Field Championships and Commonwealth Games will take place in Birmingham and Glasgow respectively and these major events will surely light the imaginations of many spectators and young people across our communities but without the efforts of the local led structures that keep our sport alive and thriving, then that inspiration will lead to little.

We will be focusing a lot of our work in 2026 on supporting our local clubs, running groups, coaches, officials, and event directors to build capacity, to strengthen their governance structures and leadership capabilities through our Club Support Manager team, to review and enhance our development support offered to coaches and officials and to further improve our digital systems so people can self help and access education and training in the most flexible and user friendly way possible.

We will be working proactively to get more young people aged between 10 and 12 taking part in age-appropriate developmental competition through promotion and roll out of our new funetics Multi Challenge format and also by working closely with our partners at Sportshall Athletics to ensure more clubs and schools are embracing this well established and proven indoor competition model.

Schools

We will continue to work closely with bodies like the Youth Sport Trust to ensure that all school aged children can enjoy our sport through the government funded School Games Programme and will continue to play our part in influencing government around the formation and implementation of the new school sport partnerships that will come into being from Autumn next year. We will ramp up our focus of steering the new age groups for competition into place effective from 1 April 2026, working alongside bodies such as the English Schools' AA as it has now agreed to adopt age group change effective from 1 September 2026. We will of course work with them during the coming weeks and months to ensure that athletes are given as consistent an experience between club and school competition as possible during summer 2026.

Talent

We know that we are producing very talented young athletes in our sport, but we need to work on retaining more of them and seeing them through those tricky transitional years when exam pressure and moving from secondary to university education can be so challenging. We need to broaden the base of the pyramid and deepen the foundations of our sport in the teenage years and to do this we all need to keep an open and creative mind on how best to offer our sport to our youngest participants. They are the future of our sport, both as performers but as administrators, coaches, officials and volunteers so we need to do all we can to involve them in shaping the future of their sport but also to keep them running, jumping, and throwing for longer in what is also a late development sport.

The recent publication of an independently led review into track and field participation, co-chaired by Olympians Steve Cram and Steve Smith, will directly inform our thinking and action in this regard and I would encourage as many clubs and organisations involved in the delivery of our sport to read this and to consider what this means for them and how they evolve the sport in their own communities to this audience.

We have a great opportunity to reimagine aspects of our track and field sport, and we will do all we can to create an environment where people can seize the mandate and drive the change for themselves locally. Change can be challenging, it can stir emotions of fear, particularly of the unknown but it also requires an open mindset and a leap of faith. Change can also be exciting and can stimulate innovation and creativity. I am confident that there will be many people who share this ambition for change and ongoing progression in our sport.

Places to participate and perform

I wanted to thank everyone for all that they have achieved in our sport during 2025. It feels that we are moving in a positive direction in many aspects of the sport but that there are always areas that need further focus and attention. We are in the process of updating our facilities and participation strategies as an organisation and this work will conclude in the Spring and will directly inform how we continue to support our volunteer-led structures in these areas of work.

I was delighted to see the recently published Sport England design guide on athletics facilities that our Facilities Manager Ed Hunt was instrumental in shaping. I would encourage as many clubs and competition providers as possible to view this as there are some creative 21st century fit concepts in this document that may help you at a local level.

Coaching

During summer 2026 we will be introducing a new learning management system for our education qualifications, and this will provide a segway into a more coherent coach development programme across England including the possible introduction of a coaches membership offer.

Our Coach Development Manager Scott Grace is working hard on developing a more methodical system for coach development, at the same time that we are making changes to the content of our existing qualification pathway. Some of this progress was included in the first edition of Coaching Vision, our new coaches' newsletter that we think will help to improve the connectivity between England Athletics and our licensed coaches.

Thank you George

Finally, I must pay a personal tribute to the great George Bunner MBE who sadly passed away recently. The architect of Sportshall Athletics, and a leading authority on youth development in our sport, George was a selfless, energetic character who gave so much to so many. He was always friendly, creative, and enthusiastic about the potential of what could be achieved in our sport and those qualities are important now if we are to continue to meet the opportunities and challenges that we face in keeping our sport prominent in its popularity with the young people of the future. George was open minded to change and was always looking at how things could be enhanced or improved, never standing still. They are qualities that will serve us all well as we look towards 2026. Rest in peace George and thank you for all that you gave and left for us.

Have a peaceful holiday season everyone and thank you.

Best wishes

Chris