Organising a tier 3 British Weightlifting competition can significantly boost your clubs visibility and legitimacy while also generating decent income. Local meets are central to the Weightlifting community. It's easy to forget that not every lifter in the country gets the chance to participate in national events and experience the grandeur of the 'big stage'. The reality is that this 'big stage' opportunity is reserved for only the top 10-20 lifters in each category annually. So, for many in the community, local meets are their moment to shine. It therefore goes without saying that running a well organised competition is important for both your club and the lifters who enter!
At the tier 3 level, as long as your competition follows the format of a standard Weightlifting event, you have considerable freedom in how you manage everything else. This allows you to personalise the event and conduct it in the way you think is best. Here in Liverpool, we prefer a rowdier atmosphere compared to a typical British Weightlifting event which tend to the tamer side. We choose a metal playlist, turn up the volume, and encourage the audience to be vocal. It’s definitely a different vibe, perhaps not for everyone, but it reflects our team and represents the coaches and lifters from our club. You can do the same if you choose, or you can do something similar which fits your own clubs identity!
The list below is not exhaustive and only covers what I would consider to be essential for planning a competition. I've tried to arrange this in a bit of a timeline from the furthest out in the planning stages, but you might find that, in reality, some these happen around the same time.
Find a suitable venue
If you're lucky, the gym you train in will be your venue - if not you're going to have to find somewhere which doesn't mind you taking over their venue for almost an entire day on a weekend, you may need to compensate them financially unless they can make up for it via social media exposure or other sales or trade offs. Offering to run a free workshop for their members could be another way to offset the amount you pay.
Be sure to picture how the competition will run when you are viewing a venue. Is there enough room to warm up for the number of athletes you plan to have in each session? Where should the announcer be positioned so that they can both announce what is happening on the platform as well as interact with the back room to input attempt changes etc, how will the audience keep up with the session?
Here's a quick checklist of the things I would look to measure out or place when viewing:
The main platform
Warm up area
Announcers desk
Seating for technical officials
Location of scoreboards
Photographers location
Spectators
Other facilities you will need off of the main floor will include:
Weigh-in area
Toilets
When we were stuck for space prior to moving to the gym we are now based in we contacted Peak Performance, a large CrossFit Gym near by who were happy to have us in and made life very easy for us. Crossfit gyms make for awesome weightlifitng venues, they have a shed load of bumper plates and barbells, plenty of space and all the facilities that you'd expect in a gym. So be sure to delete all of the mean things you said about their technique on instagram before you go pitching the idea to them ha.
A final note on venues - check for plugs! All of the tech you run the comp with relies on having power, so you want as reliable power points as possible!
Pick a date
Picking a date to run your event is one of the easier steps. I'd recommend looking ahead to tier 1 and 2 British Weightlifting competitions and avoiding setting your competition up the same date! Tier 1 and 2s have started to become big draw events based in arenas such as the NEC so you're not going to be getting the most traction around those times for your own competitions, and you should probably be going to these events yourself if you're a coach!
Instead, work backwards from these events. 4-6 weeks is a good starting point, since a lot of athletes will be looking to get in competition prep around this time ahead of important competitions and some qualifying periods will fall within that timeframe which can sometimes make your event a 'last chance qualifier'. Because of the way a lot of students get into weightlifting around September time, the latter works quite well for BUCS qualification if you organise competitions in January or very early February (just make sure to check the qualifying periods!).
Calculate how many athletes you can accomodate
It's really tempting to open the floodgates and let in as many people as possible. However, doing so might really give you and all of your volunteers a headache if you aren't prepared for it.
Start with your warm up area. Calculate how many athletes can lift there at one time, and do you have enough kit to run every platform? As a rule, we have 2 per platform with room for a couple extra overall assuming that there will be beginners warming up and finishing very early, and more experienced lifters warming up and finishing very late. For us, using 5 platforms (with barely enough kit) we can manage an absolute max of 13 lifters in a session, but we prefer not to hit this number if possible as it does become a free for all in the back room trying to gather plates!
The length of the day will depend on the amount of athletes you accomodate. Each athlete equates to around 10 minutes of competition time at a bare minimum. Added to that you might also have breaks of 5-10 minutes between Snatch and Clean & Jerk*, as well as breaks of around 15-20 minutes between sessions to award medals, perform admin, and allow volunteers a rest. Be empathetic to your volunteers and give yourself plenty of wiggle room incase you run into a technical issue.
*If accommodating 7 or more athletes in a session we tend to have no break between lifts unless we are 10 mins ahead of schedule or if we are going to really ruin a snatch specialists day by throwing them straight into their opening C&J after their 3rd attempt snatch.
Entry price
Another very important step to remember, (and if you muck this up you really jeopardise the quality of the competition you plan on hosting), is that you need to account for the basic outgoings first, so get your quotes on the following necessities asap:
Venue hire
Medals, certificates, awards
Tech (cables, monitors, PA systems etc - yeah it's pricy!)
People who should be paid (generally your announcer or anyone putting in a significant shift or playing a vital role in the events running)
If you are running your first event, the overheads can be quite high but are worth the investment if you plan on running more events in the future. However, if you dont have your own venue or somewhere to store what you've bought try and rent or borrow what you can instead of purchasing everything outright.
So, how much do you charge?! You want to cover your overheads plus some. Simply multiply what you will make per athlete* by the number of athletes who will compete. Then, adjust the entry amounts accordingly to ensure that you are making enough. I would never assume your competition will sell out, so maybe base this number on 80% of capacity - if you hit 100% you have a nice surplus!
To give you a starting point, for a senior competition I think that its fair to charge anywhere from £20 all the way up to £40, a word of caution though - if you charge £40 for a competition, you better put on a cracking day that's worth a £40 entry! Otherwise those lifters will not be coming back and word of mouth travels fast!
*For every entry British Weightlifting and Stripe will both take fees from your athletes entry. For lack of being able to find the exact amounts and calculation on the British Weightlifting website here is an example of what we came away with. We charged £32 per entry at our last competition, for each athlete £26.24 made it's way to our account. We know that BWL take £3.50, so through some financial jiggery pokery stripe took £2.26. So knock between £5-6 off of your entry to estimate your income per lifter.
Register your event on Sport:80
To sanction your competition you will have to pay a small fee of £35. The set up is pretty straight forward though, the interface guides you through step by step through the essential details you need to input. Before reaching this stage though there are a couple things you should be clear on ahead of time.
The first is knowing when you want your entries go live and when you want them to close. When your entries open really depends on how much time you feel like you need to promote and fill up your event. Ideally I like entries to open between 9-12 weeks out from competition with the entries closing around 2-3 weeks out, as this allows time to put together start lists, order medals and certificates, and anything else that requires me to know the composition of the event first.
The second thing to consider is setting limits for categories. This is useful if you want to manipulate how many entries are available for each gender, and/or category. Almost every competition we have run we have aimed for a 50/50 male to female split, and we achieved this by setting a limit on the number of male and female entries. You may not want to do this if you are unsure where your entries are coming from though.
Something we are considering for our next competition is to limit the number of entries for the most popular categories, namely the women's 64kg, and the men's 81kg and 89kg categories. We have come close in the past to needing to run an A and a B session for these categories due the amount of people who enter. The women's 64s in particular seems to come close to tipping point at almost every competition!
Promote your event!
Use your social media channels and drum up some interest! I personally find this incredibly painful as I'm in no way a social media guy but the effort goes an awful long way in getting entries for your competition. As a rule, we tend to release the competition date with a countdown to the date the entries open. We then update again when the competition entries go live on Sport80. During that time we make a point of contacting clubs who we get on well with to see if there's any interest in entries from their athletes. Clubs often share our ads even if they cant make the event themselves - it pays to make friends.
You'll also be surprised how many people will be willing to step up and help out even if they can't compete so long as they know that your event is happening! Which helps massively with our next topic... recruiting help!
Recruit good help
Having reliable help in important roles will be the difference between a well run competition and one that is memorable only for its flaws. A lot of event runners are coaches, so you'll likely want to coach your own athletes on the day, so you're going to need good people on your side to help run the event, and generally look out for the state of the venue which is not going to take care of itself!
Here are some key roles which we organise in advance that have really made our lives easier:
Announcer - Literally at the centre of it all, if you get to competition day and you havent got this sorted you are in trouble. In our competitions the announcer will have multiple roles including providing updates to the venue, interacting with the spectators keeping interest and excitement high, and communicating with athletes and coaches to note changes to attempts. There is often so much going on around the announcer that we will provide an extra brain to help them out where we can!
Loaders - Honestly a thankless task but absolutely vital. A good tactic here if you are stuck is to ensure you have loaders for the first couple sessions ready, then recruit athletes who have finished there sessions to help out from there. You'll need minimum of two people if you plan to keep to a tight schedule.
Technical Officials - This can be a bit of a pain in the arse, because everyone has an opinion on what a good lift is until you ask them to officiate. You also really need people with a TO licence to be present so you can name them as the official when you update details into Sport80 after the competition. British Weightlifitng do provide Technical Official Courses for free to affiliated clubs to help this issue, so try and get well ahead of your competition and get 3-4 of your athletes to get there qualification, you might need to chip in to help them buy their licence though.
Weigh in officials - we can use the TOs above for these roles, just factor within your scheduling that you might be down an official if they are doing weigh ins mid session.
Assistant coaches - a god send if you have them available to you as a competition organiser who also plans to coach athletes at the event. If you need to run off at any point and sort out whatever needs attention, you dont want to dump an athlete, particularly an inexperienced one with the responsibility managing themselves.
Media coverage
This goes somewhere between good help and organising comp essentials. Having awesome media coverage ensures that the legacy of your competition continues way beyond the last lift of the day and creates a catalogue of content you can use in the promotion for your next competition.
We leave everything that involves a camera to Nick Jones from Grip and Rip, his photography and filming is top notch, pricing is fair and his turnaround is super quick - often posting to social media during breaks in the competition. You can see some of Nicks work here.
Running a live stream is an excellent option to provide coverage of the competition, and is a great option for lifters whose families who cant make it to the event. Unless you're trying to make money from it, youtube is great option which is really user friendly and widely used. There's scope to go pretty large with a live stream if you're good with tech, potentially providing names, lifts, scoreboards ect as the competition progresses. Powerlifting competitions seem to do this quite successfully, so it would be cool to see this level of production from both clubs and national governing bodies in the future.
Organise competition essentials
Once your entries close you will have a list of all the athletes who will be competing in your event. This allows you to buy in the right amount of awards, and build schedule around the athletes actually attending rather than a provisional one.
To begin building your start list and schedule, log on to Sport:80 and check the 'lifter entry options' tab, then click into the individual mens and womens categories. Sport:80 will display how many athletes are in each category, so group weight classes together and build sessions around these numbers keeping in mind your backroom capacity. Sessions don't have to be even, they just need to work. You dont 'need' and even amount of sessions for men and women either. Try to organise the sessions on what allows for the best competition over what fits your expectation.
Now is also the time to order your awards! Dont be a stinge here and only do first second and third place medals for 'each session based on Sinclair'. Yes it will cost a lot less but it really goes a long way to make sure you cater for every single weight category regardless of how many people are in it. Best lifter trophies are awesome to add to competitions, and are also a cherry on top, but the last few times we've ran best lifter the winners have left before the competition has ended without their award - so not a deal breaker if you leave these out!
Your start list should come out with enough time to allow people to arrange their travel arrangements and plan their day. It lets coaches and athletes know the actual schedule, composition of the sessions and who they are up against. Your start list should include a list of all of all the athletes in each session, along with their age group, weight category they are in, teams and entry totals (if the information is available to you).
Finally, buy in all the general house keeping bits and bobs! Nothing worse than running out of toilet roll, not having enough bin bags, or having to explain to lifters that you have no chalk!! Obviously if you are running a competition in your own gym this is a lot easier to account for, but if you're renting the space you dont want to be caught short on supplies, contact the venue to ensure that they have what you need, or just bing your own extras if you don't want to rely on other people.
Competition management system
Your Competition Management System coordinates all aspects of your competition, including lifting order, scoreboards, displays, lift timing, and logging scores and results. You can be as simple or complex as you want to be with your CMS, obviously more moving parts is more to think about, but if you're up to the challenge and tech savvy go for it! Below are the CMS options I'm aware of and have experience using or have been in competitions where they have been the CMS. There's definitely more than what I've listed, I just dont feel comfortable recommending something I dont have experience with at all.
The Michael Noonan System: An excel based CMS that requires the use of macros, it doesn't work amazingly well on my MacBook, but most for anything else it seems to be fine. You'll be able to find a users guide on British Weightlifting's website, as well as the download with a quick search of 'competition management system' in their search bar. I think that this system is worth having downloaded just incase anything goes wrong with your preferred choice of CMS. I believe that this is what BWL reverted to at English championships last year when they had connectivity issues! Simple but stable!
OWLCMS: A free application which can be run onsite on your laptop or via the cloud if you prefer not to install. You can do a lot with OWLCMS, which allows you do run simple competitions with a single laptop and a few monitors, or run something huge with multiple laptops, displays, controls for judges, jury, platforms etc. It's a really fancy bit of kit and our choice of CMS for our events. The thing that I like the most about OWLCMS is the ease of use for the announcer, showing all the information that is relevant and needed at that moment without clutter. Get more info here.
Which ever CMS you decide to opt for, make sure that your laptop is up to the job. I found out the hard way that my MacBook pro doesn't do too well with multiple HDMI outputs, so until I get another laptop we are somewhat limited at 2-3 displays at any given competition that runs off of my current MacBook.
Do then Review!
If a good amount of thought, effort and care has gone into the preparation, this is honestly the easy part. No more waiting on kit being delivered, the admin-heavy work is out the way, and you can just let the event play out whilst you cover small roles and solve any problems or questions that arise as the day progresses.
After the competition your admin duties include uploading competition results to Sport:80, thanking everyone who attended and helped out, and sharing the awesome lifting! But after that - the competition is behind you, and you're on to planning the next one!
You should definitely review your competition, even if it's done super informally. We pride ourselves on constantly innovating in our competitions, which is why post competition we make it a priority to evaluate what worked well, what could be improved, and what new elements we could incorporate next time to take the experience to the next level. When you go looking for critique consider the perspectives of everyone involved in your event, if you can gather feedback from athletes, volunteers, spectators, and even the media team, you have powerful information that you can use to ensure that the next event can be at least 1% better in a number of ways!
Summary
So there you have it! 11 Steps to help you run an awesome Tier 3 British Weightlifting Competition! It's not definitive by any stretch but I hope I've highlighted a few things that make your life easier in the planning and execution of your event!
I currently dont write too many articles, so If you have found this useful, or you have a few tips that you'd like to share in return that I've overlooked, please drop us a message in the comments - It will go a long way to convincing me that I'm writing something mildly impactful!
If you do need help planning your competition, feel free to reach out to me at info@liverpoolweightlifitngclub.co.uk and I'll do my best to help any way I can.
Cheers for reading, and hopefully I'll see you at a tier 3 competition some time in the near future!
Joe.
Comments