As per the holding response that went out on our social media pages earlier on today, Bonnyrigg Rose Athletic have not made any submissions to either the SJFA or SFA of our intention to join either the East of Scotland or Lowland League. This response was made to an article earlier today in the Falkirk Herald which suggested that we had and the expectation would be that said journal retract their statement and/or issue a written apology due to the unrest this has caused within the local community.

It is not for me to speculate on the motivation of others to include our club within a list of those that are potentially exploring other options. What I can say is that a journalist did phone our chairman earlier this week asking when we were leaving the juniors as that is what he was told.

What we have done is share our own experience of the SFA Licensing journey with other clubs. We have had help from other clubs in the past for instance when we were going for our SFA Quality Mark (Linlithgow & Broxburn) and we have helped other clubs to share our best practise if deemed helpful (e.g. assisting three other local junior clubs in replicating our successful weekly lottery).

We have shared with other clubs what is fairly well known by most supporters locally; we started looking into the SFA licensing criteria four years ago. Two of those were taken up with achieving our legacy standard Quality Mark from the SFA. A lot of the club policies we have are as a result if that award and are in place irrespective of if we go for a license or not. We had a few ground requirements we had to rectify which in the main have been carried out. However, some 12 months we were told that if we were to apply for a license we would need to join the EoS league and that there would be no guarantee that we would be accepted into the Lowland League if we won it. We didn't go public via the website/social media at the time because there was nothing to go public about. The decision was made at that time not to proceed with a license because of that criteria.

We are in the fortunate position that we could proceed with a license application as we believe we have pretty much everything in place to do so. However we would not do so based on the criteria outlined above without having first held either an E.G.M. or at our A.G.M. if the dates fell kindly as such a decision requires to be made by our members who would be the first people that we would consult with.

We are not as a club in the habit of conducting club business through the press or social media. We will consult with members in the first instance as we have done previously on other matters in the past and then when there is a specific outcome or outcomes we will release it into the public domain for our wider supporter base to review.

We hope that the above clarifies our position on the matter and apologise to any of our supporters for an undue unrest this idle speculation may have caused - none of this has been of our doing.

For any further queries be it media or supporters please use the contact section of the website or pick up with me at any game.

Regards
Brendan Parkinson