ECF Members at the end of 2017-18 totalled 12,280. The number of renewed or new ECF Memberships at 19/10/2018 was 7,641, i. e. 62% of the previous figure. Uptake of ECF membership for 2018-19 among Yorkshire league players is currently about 76% of those who have played so far this season.

Players can pay subscriptions on line, or through the ECF office. In the latter case they are presumably then added to the on-line membership (Azolve) database.

Each membership on the new system needs to be linked to any existing grading reference for the player, in the absence of which the player is allocated a new grading reference. Somebody, somewhere has had the job of processing in the order of very roughly 100 memberships per day in this way. This is probably the ECF Membership Director, who recently apparently hasn't enough time to answer e-mails, but it may have been a member of the ECF office staff who has recently been off sick with stress. This should all be simpler next season, when people can renew under their previous membership number.

A full list of 2018-19 ECF members-to-date is published periodically in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, usually showing both the attributed grading reference and the membership number. This seems to form the basis of membership numbers shown on the on‑line grading database, and also to determine the “non-member” player lists for organisations on ECF LMS. There is clearly no direct electronic feed from one system into another.

There is a look-up function available on the on-line Azolve ECF membership database, but this is not always helpful as players are not required to enter sufficient data by which they may be identified. In particular, club or location is not required, it seems, and names are often not entered in full. For names which are not unusual, a club is desirable.

Since the Azolve look-up function isn't too reliable (which John Smith is it who is listed as a member?), the Excel spreadsheet seems the only fairly reliable, primary source for checking congress entrants' membership and hence fees paid, though the Azolve look-up offers clues.

The manual match-up of members to grading records means the above system is not error-free. A certain new Sheffield league player had attributed to them the grading code of a similarly-named Midlands player who was not the same person. A certain York league player was listed in the membership spreadsheet without his grading reference, meaning he was listed in the “non-member” player list on ECF LMS. A Leeds/York area player with a pre-existing grading code seems to have become an ECF member and been given a new grading code. There are also a few examples of simple miskeying of grading codes.

It is possible, apparently, for LMS users to enter membership numbers into players' records, but this in itself seems not to exclude the player from the non-member list, which seems instead to compare any grading reference in the LMS player record with the grading references in the membership spreadsheet. Thus a “non-member” list may actually show a player's membership number!

Thus, documentation of ECF membership is at present as much an art as it is a science.

My wildly inaccurate estimate of the number of new ECF (mainly Bronze) members which is likely to result from local leagues adopting ECF grading is 350, or £5,600.

Steve Mann