Gear that has to last a season, not a weekend
Club buying runs on committee approvals and grant rounds, not impulse. Everything here is built around that: prices you can budget from, quotes you can attach to an application, and no pressure to decide today.
The four things that come up every year
Timing. SPORTident stations, cards, and readers. The single biggest capital item a club buys, and the one most often paid for by a grant. Worth quoting early so the numbers are ready when a funding round opens.
Controls and flags. The steady replacement cost nobody budgets for. Flags fade, stands bend, and spikes disappear into long grass. Buy them in a batch and the per-unit price drops.
Event consumables. Marshal vests, flagging tape, bib pins, first aid kits, storage crates. Individually trivial, collectively the reason someone drives to Bunnings the night before an event.
Club uniform. Custom kit through Trimtex or Oland. Six of a garment minimum for Trimtex, four for Oland, and six weeks lead time on Trimtex, so this is the one to start early.
Book your control box batteries at the same time as your SIACs
Clubs send us SIACs for battery replacement all the time. Almost nobody sends the control boxes, and the boxes are the ones that matter. A flat SIAC is one runner with a problem. A flat BSF8 or BSF9 is a control that stops recording partway through an event, and you usually find out afterwards, from the results.
They are on similar cycles, so send both together and you pay one lot of freight and lose the gear for one window instead of two. Tell us roughly how old the boxes are and we will say whether they are due.
Why there are no prices on this site
What a club pays depends on the account and the size of the order, so there is no single number worth publishing. A public list would also put every club's arrangement in front of every other club, which is not ours to share.
Request a quote and you get the real figure in writing, dated, itemised, with GST split out. Larger orders can go further than the standard rate, particularly where there is something in it for both of us, such as a mention in your event comms or permission to use a photo.
Freight is included in the quote, as a flat contribution rather than a per-item calculation. Larger orders ship free.
Most club gear gets paid for by somebody else
Gaming trusts, community trusts, and regional funds all pay for club equipment, and each has its own rules about what counts. Some will fund a capital asset like a timing system and not the consumables around it. Some fund programmes but not gear at all.
The club funding guide sets out which funds pay for what, and what to have ready before you start writing. The quote is the part we can help with directly: dated, itemised, GST split out, in the format applications ask for.