When I first came down to the club in 1957, I knew of the Clydesdale Harriers and was interested in athletics having attended the Singers Sports every year, gone to Rangers Sports a couple of times and watched it on television. Lots of my school friends were club members and it was one of them, Tom McAllister, who suggested that I go along with him at the end of August that year. We went to the Bruce Street Baths, had a couple of training runs over the next couple of weeks. We enjoyed the running, found club members friendly and my first race for the club was in the county cross-country relay championships from St Ninian’s HS in Kirkintilloch. It was a friend who took me to the club. I would suggest that for most of us, it was the influence of a friend that led us to join the club. For Ian Murphy it was Andy Dytch, for Peter Rudzinski it was Jim Wright, for Pamela McCrossan it was Cliff Brown. The question to put to the club members of today is – “How many new members have you introduced recently?”
When we were building the young athletes team in the 1990’s, there was a year when we asked every young athlete to bring a friend. If they all brought a friend we would have doubled the section in size. That was never going to happen but it worked with a big enough group for us to recruit many new members. Away from our club, Alex Brown in Motherwell asked his school friend to come and make up a club team – the friend was Ian McCafferty. When we started to build the senior men’s team almost from scratch in 1984 there was a different dynamic at work.
To start with there were two qualified coaches – Billy Hislop and myself. Billy was coaching sprinters and agreed to look after the throwers too while I had distance runners and jumpers. We recruited as many new members and brought back some former members to build the team but soon found that coaching two groups was very difficult to manage so Billy persuaded Bobby Bell – a one time top class Youth 880 yards runner to take up coaching throwers. Bobby was a real find with an outgoing personality – all coaches do some recruiting of their own and Bobby would even approach people coming in to his butcher’s shop and ask if they’d like to take up hammer throwing (or shot, or discus) and he did recruit a sizeable number of good throwers. he also off his own bat travelled to London to do some work with Alan Bertram of the West London Hammer School – an expert in the event who subsequently came to live and work in Scotland. Bobby also persuaded the father of one of his own athletes to sponsor the section and buy them weights for weight training! He was a real one off and nobody can expect to find a Bobby Bell every day of the week. The point is he did his own recruiting in addition to those who came to the club. The best javelin thrower we had was Tommy Carlin who was brought along by his brother who was a good distance runner.
Bobby Bell with two of his throwers: Ian Busby and Lachie Carter
Meanwhile a friend of mine, Scott Govan, a teacher, offered to help coaching and he became ultimately a Level 4 high jump coach who was also a very good hurdles coach. He had a very good group too but we’ll come back to Scott. He would not have come along had I not been in the right place at the right time. David Gibson came along with his friend Eddie Poole. Eddie had to give up for family reasons but David stayed and did some very good recruiting.
Then there were the activities that we as a group of coaches took to develop our groups. We had three throws coaching days at Clydebank High School in consecutive months for schools from Clydebank, Bearsden and Dumbarton at no charge with specialist coaches that we invited in from other clubs – Hugh Murray from Helensburgh did discus, Gerry Taylor from Garscube did shot, we had a couple of national throws coaches along too. They yielded good results.
Scott Govan, High Jump and Hurdles coach running to crash the photo of Peter Halpin and Grant Graham
We did a separate coaching day at St Andrews School, we were in Clydebank High School every Saturday one summer and generally put ourselves about. The coaches doing this had organised these events on their own: there were three monthly coaches meetings in the different coaches homes to lay out the genral programme for the next season but the coaches were entirely responsible for the coaching of their own group. They were independent. But recruitment was the theme. Then Bill Hislop visited the Clydebank Post office and spoke to the editor Paul Jain about donating a trophy for a competition that Bill wanted to call ‘Search for a Sprinter’. Paul agreed, gave the event some publicity, gave us a cup and the first heats were held in the Kelvin Hall where the winner of the first series was Paul Begley who had been a member of Kirkintilloch Olympians. The competition went on for several years with the final year yielding David McColm who was a member of several very good trophy winning relay teams and a key member of the track and field team for several years.
The big no-no was to ask someone from another club to join ours. That’s called poaching or in football terms, tapping up! Individual club members always brought friends along. That was true of all sports at all times. It is more important in the splintered 21st century. So, as the invites to a party always said, “Bring a friend!”
Bill Hislop, Sprints Coach, nearest the camera with Bill McColm, father of sprinter David.
