About Support Our Sport

Support Our Sport is a grassroots, non political initiative that helps the shooting community understand issues, access evidence and speak for itself.

It grew out of something very simple. Too many people across the shooting community were unaware of things that could affect them until they were already well under way.

Support Our Sport exists to help raise awareness, make it easier to find out what is happening, understand what is actually being proposed or changed, look at the evidence and decide for yourself whether you want to do anything about it.

We do not represent the shooting community. We help individuals in the shooting community speak for themselves.

An organisation, however many members it has, is still only one voice. Hundreds of thousands of individuals speaking for themselves are hundreds of thousands of voices, which is much harder to ignore.

And that is a powerful message in itself. It shows that people care and are willing to engage in decisions being made about their livelihoods, lifestyles and businesses.

Why I started Support Our Sport

I started shooting about two and a half years ago (at time of writing). Before that, I’d never had any reason to be interested in legislation, policy or the various things going on in Parliament that could affect shooting.

To be honest, I was far more interested in getting out to the ground as much as possible, learning the skills and trying to get onto the Welsh team in as short a time as possible from a standing start. That was the challenge I’d given myself.

Then in 2025 I started seeing posts being shared online. Most were copied and pasted and said things like “Write to your MP” or “Oppose S1 and S2 merging”.

But there was absolutely no information about what was being talked about, why it mattered or even how you were supposed to do anything about it.

So I tried to find out.

I asked people I knew at shooting grounds and they didn’t know either. Or I’d hear things like “Ah, it’ll never happen.” “Just like the lead ban will never happen in our lifetime.” “It’ll be fine.” “It’s nothing you need to worry about.” “It’ll all blow over.”

Those were actual things that were said to me.

I went looking for somewhere that had the information together and couldn’t find it.

I remember commenting on a post saying that what we really needed was a central hub where people could find all of this information in one place.

As soon as I’d posted it, I thought, Oh shit. I’m going to have to do it myself.

So I did.

And that’s how Support Our Sport actually started.

I never expected many people to join. I was hoping that maybe 100 people would come into the group.

Then hundreds were joining a day.

It became extremely obvious that I wasn’t the only one looking for information and there was nowhere really for people to talk about this particular issue.

And it wasn’t one little corner of shooting either. People joined from all over the shooting community. Clay shooters, game shooters, gamekeepers, farmers, muzzle loaders, deer stalkers, wildfowlers, people involved in pest control and reenactment, grounds and businesses. You name it.

People actually commented on how unusual it was to have so many different parts of shooting talking in the same place.

And I spent a huge amount of those first few months talking to people. I wanted to understand people’s views, thoughts, fears and opinions rather than assume I knew what everybody thought.

It quickly became about more than Facebook

Even with thousands of people in the Facebook group, I was talking to people outside it, particularly people who weren’t on Facebook or social media at all, who had absolutely no idea any of this was going on.

And that is still happening.

Eleven months on, I still speak to people every week who have very little idea about some of the current issues, what is being proposed or even changes that have already been made.

Not everybody is online. Not everybody belongs to a shooting organisation or reads the shooting news. And even when people are online, it doesn’t mean they see this stuff.

Most people just want to get on with their lives and enjoy their shooting. They might compete, shoot recreationally, work in shooting, run a business or enjoy it for the social side. They don’t necessarily want to spend their spare time following legislation, consultations and policy.

I completely understand that because I didn’t either.

So reaching people away from Facebook became just as important as putting the information together, and that is still one of the main objectives of Support Our Sport today.

Who is behind Support Our Sport?

It’s me.

It has always and only ever been me.

There isn’t a big organisation sitting behind Support Our Sport. There isn’t a policy department, communications team or lots of people doing the research and putting everything together.

I’ve asked for help. But the reality is that it’s not an easy thing to do and there is a lot of work involved.

Support Our Sport doesn’t pay me. I get no financial help for this at all. It is something that I do because I believe so wholeheartedly in the importance of people having the opportunity to have a say in the things that affect their lives and businesses, that I’ve put hundreds and hundreds of hours into this and fit it around my work and everything else in my life, including shooting.

When I first started, people offered me money and I said no. It was really important to me that Support Our Sport was independent and that nobody could say the information I was putting out was being influenced by whoever was funding it.

That doesn’t mean I work in isolation.

I’ve been extremely lucky to have some amazing support from people in strategic positions who saw Support Our Sport come into being, watched it grow and saw how I dealt with those initial months when emotions, comments and discussions were running incredibly high.

They respected the way I dealt with things and relationships grew from there. There are things they can tell me and things they can’t, and I’m just so grateful that I have them on pocket dial.

The trust that grew from that has opened doors that would never otherwise have been opened for me.

People were angry, frightened and frustrated in those early days. There was a huge amount of negativity and some people left because of it. But when people don’t understand what is happening, don’t feel they can do anything about it and are worried about their sport, their business, their livelihood or something that forms a huge part of their life, the emotion has to come out somewhere.

When it feels like your whole way of life is looking to be extinguished, of course there’s going to be emotion.

I tried to give people somewhere they could talk about those things while keeping the discussion respectful and stopping it descending into what I call Pitchfork Party activity.

I’ve had to remove people from the group for crossing that line and I hate doing it, but sometimes you have to.

How I approach the information

When something comes out, the first thing I try to do is find the root source.

I’ll read it or watch it myself, digest it and then research around it. I’ll talk to my contacts where that’s appropriate, ask what they know and whether there have been any updates. I’ll look at what other people are saying and I’ll share useful articles and different perspectives too.

I also notice how I’m feeling about something myself.

That’s important because I have my own opinions and biases like everyone. Sometimes I’ll read something and have a very strong reaction to it. Other people probably will too.

But my personal opinions and Support Our Sport are two different things.

I don’t want to take my reaction to something and use SOS to make everybody else frightened or angry about it.

I do my best to put everything into context, go back to the evidence and give people enough information to understand what’s actually happening so they can make their own minds up.

That doesn’t mean getting everything perfect.

Support Our Sport has changed enormously since those first few weeks and I’m still learning. In the beginning it was a bit of a tsunami. Thousands of people, huge amounts of information and me trying to understand it all while getting useful information out as quickly as possible.

It’s much more organised now and this website is another big part of that.

What Support Our Sport does

Support Our Sport started because of one particular issue around S1 and S2, but it has grown considerably since then.

Its focus is specifically shooting and the issues that affect the shooting community. Things like firearms licensing, consultations, proposed changes, legislation and other issues people involved in shooting may need to know about.

It doesn’t try to cover every countryside or rural issue. There are other organisations doing that work brilliantly.

I’ve been in contact with large shooting and countryside organisations and smaller ones too, and I’ve always been happy to support useful work and help information reach more people.

I’ve actively encouraged people to contact the organisations they belong to and ask them for more information and clearer information.

And I don’t particularly care whether somebody gets the information from Support Our Sport, their shooting organisation or somewhere else. What matters to me is that they get it and feel that they can actually do something about it.

And if they need help doing that, I’ve created ways to help. I’m also always available to help somebody personally, which I’ve done many times over the months.

I put together an extensive information pack which took me a couple of months to produce. It included information from government sources about how consultations work, how to prepare for them, how to write to your MP and what you might want to include.

I created a custom AI email helper. I’ve personally helped people write emails and I’ve written emails for people, including some of the top competitive clay shooters in the country.

Because sometimes somebody knows exactly what they think but doesn’t know how to put it into words.

I don’t think people need to be constantly beaten over the head with “You’ve got to sign this” or “You’ve got to oppose that”.

People get tired of it. And if they don’t understand why they’re being asked to do something in the first place, it’s very easy to switch off completely.

I’d rather give somebody a reason to want to find out more. Help them understand what’s happening and what they can actually do about it if they want to.

And doing something doesn’t necessarily mean opposing something.

It might mean asking your MP a question, emailing them with your own perspective or opinion, responding to a consultation or asking for more information.

Or it might simply mean talking to somebody at your club or ground to find out if they know what’s happening and pointing them towards somewhere they can find out more.

Whether that’s Support Our Sport or another organisation doesn’t particularly matter to me.

I want people to have the information, understand what’s happening and know that they can do something about it if they want to.

I’ve had so many messages, emails and conversations with people saying thank you for giving them the information, helping them understand what they can do and making it accessible without all the fear-mongering and pressure.

And I still get that regularly. Every shoot I go to, there’s at least one person who comes up to me and talks about things.

Where Support Our Sport goes from here

Support Our Sport was initially set up around one specific issue and has grown from there.

There are consultations, licensing issues, proposed changes and decisions being made that affect different parts of the shooting community, and there are still far too many people who don’t know about them.

So Support Our Sport has to keep evolving too.

I want to get much better at reaching people away from social media. I want the website to become somewhere people know they can come when they hear something and think “What’s actually going on here?” I want to keep making complicated information easier to understand and give people practical help when they want to do something with it.

And I want to be able to do more of it.

There is a huge amount more that I would love to do with Support Our Sport. I have the vision. But the actual work of building it has to compete with paid work, which means things have developed far more slowly than I would have liked.

At some point I would love to be able to pay somebody to help me with this and some of the other initiatives I’ve set up. So I’ve had to think seriously about how Support Our Sport can be funded and supported financially in the future without losing its integrity and the independence that has been so important to me from the start.

And I know that independence matters to other people too because they tell me it does.

That could be through funding, sponsorship and strategic partnerships with people and organisations who understand what Support Our Sport is trying to do.

The important thing is that financial support for SOS can’t mean somebody else deciding what SOS says.