As many of you will be aware, we have experienced some difficulty over the last week or so with the publishing of our 2023 National Competitions Draws. As we have already stated, this is something that has been out of our control and something that our staff team at HQ have been working tirelessly, in conjunction with our developers, to overcome. To that end, and in the interest of clarity and transparency, I would like to make clear the position we currently find ourselves in.  

Due to the tighter turnaround times and earlier play-by dates for some our our team national competitions, we prioritised getting these draws corrected and published. These, I am pleased to say have been rectified, checked and successfully re-posted. However, our individual competition draws have presented us with more challenges than we initially thought. Not least due to the sheer volume of entries in these competitions in comparison to the team club and county draws. 

Yesterday afternoon we, with the best of intentions, began to publish our individual competition draws with the view to continue to publish the remaining competitions throughout the course of today, Friday 15th September. However, it soon became apparent that there were still some issues with the draws that we had not foreseen and that we were soon made aware of. Namely these are the automatic shifting of some entries between zones within certain areas, and the issue of certain people being in the same positions of draws across multiple competitions. 

Clearly, this is not correct and needs some further investigating. It for this reason that we, this afternoon, made the decision to unpublish these draws from our Competitions Portal and stop the phased roll out of the remaining competitions. Unfortunately, once a competition has been published, we loose all ability amend, fix or even investigate any problems as the draw becomes ‘locked’ and ‘live’. By removing these competitions from our online system, we can carry out further investigations and look to resolve these issues. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank members of the indoor bowling community for their patience during this time. We are fully aware that this situation is far from ideal and I would like to reassure everyone that we are doing all we can to find a solution. The issue has again been referred to our developers and we have an emergency call booked for 9am on Monday morning, to create a plan of action. I will personally ensure that an update is given as soon as we know more.  

Unfortunately, I feel that I also need to take this opportunity to remind some people that whilst the EIBA is a professional organisation run by employees and a voluntary Board of Directors, behind the professional employees and directors are human beings. Human beings who are working tirelessly to fix an unprecedented, unexpected and difficult problem. I am really disappointed to have to read some of the emails and social media comments that have been directed towards our staff and organisation over the last few days. Including members of staff receiving messages and phone calls on their personal devices and channels late in the evening. Social media and modern forms of communication are wonderful inventions and have made our sport so much more accessible. But can I please urge people to always be respectful and where possible, kind when communicating with other members of our bowling community, for we are all working hard, collectively for the good of our sport, even when sometimes it may not feel like it.