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Return to Play Update - 12th MarchFurther to recent announcements by the UK and Scottish governments this update
Throughout this announcement we refer to our Phased Return to Play framework . The infographic has also been updated to reflect the below.
We also want to take this opportunity to provide reminders about the following general points:
Schools As schools reopen this month, they are also now able to start playing more sport: both within the school and potentially even inter-school matches or competition. We have created a short School-specific appendix to our Return to Play guidance.
<< UKU Club Guidance Appendix - Schools >>
Scotland Following this statement by the Scottish Government:
You must check the local limitations on travel which we understand to be more restrictive for adults than they are for young people aged 12-17. There is an indication that more detail about future changes will be published next week.
This particular change was made at relatively short notice, and unsurprisingly we have not yet had any update or contact from sportScotland. It is possible we may receive information from sportScotland that requires us to make further last minute changes to the guidance.
England Following the UK Government’s Roadmap announcement:
We are still hoping to receive some guidance about Government’s expectations or requirements as regards close-contact during play. We are also monitoring what other team sports are planning to do.
Wales and Northern Ireland There are no changes to the current guidelines in either Wales or Northern Ireland, and so effectively no club or group training is permitted.
Longer-term outlook For the time being we will have to continue to manage variations between the home nations, but presumably the removal of restrictions will align increasingly over the coming weeks and months.
In the outline below we have used the UK Government’s four-step Roadmap as a preliminary framework for what our Return to Play timeline may look like, provided government guidance does not change
We are working on more details for all of the following, but felt it was helpful to provide a limited update now:
Challenge League (name TBD) We are finalising plans to create a competition framework that tracks the results of any and all matches between “registered teams” - along the lines of an idea we called the Challenge League when we published some limited information last year about how it might work. We assume that games in this structure will be possible from Step 3 onwards.
It is our goal that this approach will become the mechanism for determining UKU Rankings so that individual matches and smaller, local competitions can factor towards the national club rankings structure, as well as traditional weekend UKU Ranking events when play returns to normal.
GB Futures Whilst, sadly, there are no GB teams competing during 2021 in any age-group, there is continuing work to set up the GB Futures Scheme and more announcements and details will follow this month. This will create some additional training and development opportunities for players in the 14-24 age-range over the coming summer, and we want to emphasise that Futures is a long-term, permanent programme.
Club Nationals 2021 The club National Championships series will go ahead, and will be open to all clubs. We are expecting that the structure for qualification will not be the same as it was in 2019, and that we will have to adapt to an approach that does not rely on a weekend Regional qualifier at the usual time (end July / early Aug).
We are planning that Nationals will act as a qualification mechanism for WUCC 2022.
European Competition There is no EUCR-West in 2021, but there may be an European Club Finals on 30th Sept - 3rd Oct. We do not know what the general entry procedure will be for this event, if it goes ahead and so we are not able to specify how this will be done for UK teams. It is reasonable to assume that either it will be based on 2019 results, or qualification will be handled at Nationals.
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