Little Athletics was originally formed to provide athletic track and field competition for younger children because the senior clubs did not cater for children younger than 12 in their regular events. Little Athletics is not essentially here to produce highly skilled specialist athletes, but to provide the basic athletic learnings and competitions for that large number of children not adequately catered for by any other body. Generally, it must be accepted that specialization is unwise until at least the mid-teens. Specialists also can be better serviced if they are trained and perfected by specialist coaches. Our Centre, and Little A's in general, cannot claim large numbers of these coaches and probably never will. Nor should we invest our few coaches on a few specialist athletes at the expense of the majority.

Thus, we will be attempting to provide many events for many children and will attempt to teach as many of those children as many of those things as we are able. We will do a better job if we get more parental support to help supervise/coach the very basics with us on training days. Small groups behave better, learn more, and get more turns at practising a set task. As a result, when these children reach an age where their physique starts to stabilize, they may then start to specialise in the events in which they are good and to which they are physically suited. The Ipswich & District Athletics Club has a good record of helping these older athletes. The Ipswich & Dictrict Athletics Club has a web site at: http://www.ipswichathletics.org.au.

Competition is the driving force behind sports people trying to improve and improving is the glue that keeps together the effort that any one person may require to stick with the sport in which they are currently involved. Therefore, any sport requires a mixture of "Family, Fun and Fitness" and "Competition" the level outgrows the basic "family, fun and fitness" concept. We should as parents or as committee members, guide all the children to their own level of needs and as long as they are enjoying themselves we have been successful.

We must also provide competitions sufficient to cater for the better athlete who constantly strive to improve his/her performance and thus feed the natural wish to succeed. By providing this level of competition, we are in fact character building and this is important and provides the springboard from which the senior athletes of tomorrow may be drawn. However, we are aware that the greater the degree of competition, the greater the discimination in favour of a specialist minority. As parents, you are free to choose all, some or none of the competitions provided.

Our Friday night and Saturday competitions are designed to encourage self-improvement as the important yardstick and we would urge parents to explain to their youngsters the meaning of such a system. Encourage them to collect their tickets, enter them into their books and watch the steady improvement in each event. We may also need to help them to cope with not winning some of the time or even never winning. We believe it is important also to help some children to cope with always winning if they are to develop a personality acceptable to their friends.

All children benefit by parental involvement. Our Centre cannot succeed at training or in conducting the Friday nights or Saturday competitions without parental involvement. WE ARE NOT A CHILD MINDING ORGANISATION but a co-operative community project to provide an organised fun sport for a large group of children. Let's adhere to our motto of "FAMILY, FUN & FITNESS"