Entry forms for the Club Championships will be available from this Monday in the club house.

The entry deadline is 25 August so hand your form in to one of the coaches or pop it in the post box when you’re next at the club.

Best wishes and good luck!

As you are probably aware, we are hosting our annual Summer Open at the club week commencing Sunday 18 August.

Below are details of the times and dates when there will be reduced court availability due to the matches.

The referee will be releasing the courts during the day as the tournament progresses so keep an eye on the booking system for court availability if you wish to play.

MON, 19th – FRI, 23rd – play commences at 9am

SAT, 24th – 9am start

A huge thank you to the volunteers who gave up their time to support both the second Nature Valley British Tennis weekend and the Littledown Family Fun Day. The main aim of taking part in these events was to attract new members so that we remain in a healthy financial situation and continue to improve the club .

More help is desperately needed in the following areas:

• fund raising energy ,expertise and enthusiasm
• fund raising ideas e.g. one off donations, annual giving as part of membership renewal, founders fundraising ball, £100 club, your ideas please
• maintenance – Peter Richardson is no longer able to co-ordinate this crucial element of the clubs’ responsibility. We need someone to take this on. There is a small team of volunteers who undertake the work but we need someone to oversee the work and ensure that the club is maintained to the high standards that we expect.
• Kitchen health and hygiene – another plea. Please ensure that you not only wash but also dry up and put away your used crockery. From time to time there are whole bowlfuls of washing up waiting to be done by the first person who arrives in the morning.

• We have finally submitted our application for charitable status. This required many hours of work as we had to provide full details of all our documentation including accounts, annual report, memorandum and articles of association,business plan etc (see later) .The Charity Commission will appoint a specialist caseworker to consider our application: however, they have a backlog from February 2019 so we are unlikely to hear anything for some time.
• The Committee held a meeting with the team captains to discuss a number of issues with them but also to ensure that they and the regular team members receive the recognition that they deserve for the major contribution that they make to the excellent reputation that Southbourne Tennis Club enjoys. Whilst we are rightly extremely proud of the fantastic programme of community tennis across the whole ability range that we offer we need to equally acknowledge the people young and older who turn out all year to represent the club.
• Clubhouse – you will already have spotted a few small changes to the layout of the clubhouse. This is largely due to the ‘Members Experience Working Group’ arising from the Club Business Development Plan ably chaired by Richard Dear. He and his team have been meeting regularly to explore how we can improve the overall ‘feel’ of the club and continue to ensure that it is attractive to existing and potential new members. They are seriously considering purchasing a coffee machine, buying new chairs and tables to create more of a cafe style space and altering the notice board layout to make it more user friendly subject to sufficient funds being available. We hope that you will all feel that these small scale changes will be an improvement. We are also hoping to engage with a student from Bournemouth Arts University to develop a plan for the redesign the overall interior of the clubhouse.