Club News

Please note that this year’s Spring Open is now open for entries. As ever, it’s always good to see lots of members taking part so do sign up via the LTA competitions website or talk to Sally or Dave if you’d like to take part.

Thank you to everyone who took part in this season’s Box League matches. We will be doing our social evening where we hand out medals over a drink or two on Thursday, 25 April, 7pm in Ludo Lounge.

For next season’s Box League, we are planning to change things slightly and are looking for your feedback. If you have any ideas on how we can run this to encourage more people to complete their matches please do drop us a line (sarah2midori@gmail.com) or chat with Sally and Dave. Some ideas that have been discussed are:

– shorter deadline to play, possibly with more than one round
– more movement of players between boxes
– a small fee to cover the umpire’s costs and medals, some to be returned upon completion of matches
– a point system with bonus points for members who complete their matches within the deadline

All ideas most welcome. We don’t want to make it too complicated but are open to trying new ways of running this.

New coach Sally is running an introductory offer of £15 for your first lesson in May (usual price £20 per hour). Sally’s currently taking her Level 3 coaching qualification so has lots of up-to-date coaching tips and practices to share with you!  She enjoys working with juniors from mini red up as well as beginner and intermediate adults, so if you’d like to brush up your skills ahead of the summer just drop Sally a line!

We Need You!!!

We are delighted to be able to invite you to an Extraordinary General Meeting of club members to discuss and hopefully approve a very important part of our development.

We are proposing to convert the club into a charitable organisation which we feel better suits what we do and will increase our access to funding. This involves us updating both our Memorandum and Articles of Association and the Club Rules.

The proposed changes to the Articles are mainly minor updates given the age of the original document (c.1965!!) and subsequent changes in legislation which include the introduction of clauses covering benefits and payments to and conflicts of interest of Directors, and Proxy Voting.

The proposed changes to the Rules reflect current practice at the Club with additional detail required by the Charity Commission in our application for charitable status.

The agenda for the meeting is therefore to:

• “Receive, Review and formally adopt the revised Memorandum and Articles of Association and Club Rules”.
• This is an important part of our development and it will be very helpful if you are able to attend to share your thoughts and opinions.

Proxy Votes

Free to all mini tennis players on the coaching program(red, orange & green), non members cost £5.

Download the form to take part here!

1.Web site

Adam Spicer has very kindly reviewed and revised our current website and it is now ready for you to look at. Work is still being done on the shopping feature as well as some other areas. We are aware that some of the images are low resolution and these will be updated when we have better ones available.

The url for the website is: http://www.southbournetennis.club/

We would be very grateful if you would take the opportunity to have a look at it. Please let us know if there are any obvious mistakes,alterations, omissions etc and any other comments that you have.

Thank you in advance for your help and feedback -we look forward to hearing from you. Please send your comments directly to Adam Spicer adamspicer72@gmail.com by Friday 8th March.

2.Membership Working Group

We are delighted that so many of you responded to our request to work alongside the Committtee to explore the issues around membership. We are looking forward to working with more of you as we continue to undertake the actions arising from this during the production of the Club Business Development Plan.

3.Marketing

This is the next area that we need to focus our attention on. So far we have been unable to identify the best way of taking this forward as currently we do not have any expertise to benefit from.

So this is a heartfelt plea – talk to the people that you usually play with, see if they have any ideas or know anyone who might be interested in this important element of our club. In the first instance we would look to establish a short term working group but in the longer term the Committee feel that we may need to recruit an additional member whose remit would be to lead on this vital function of the club.

Please give this some serious thought and get back to us as soon as you are able to.

Thank you for your support.

Susie Grainger

As you are aware, we have organised a group trip to this event the last two years. Unfortunately, due to the amount of time, phone calls and emails it took to actually be allowed to buy the number of tickets last year, we are unable to run this event again this year. However, tickets are now on general sale through the 02 for anyone wishing to attend themselves. The area we sat in last year was Block 113 if you wanted to find seats in that area again.

Celia is running a ladies doubles tournament this Saturday (followed by cheese and wine) and needs 2 more players to fill all the spaces so if you would like to join in please sign up at the club. The weather is looking fine and dry so it will be a fun event.

Please note that the lights are being sorted this week. We have a cherry picker at the club and ,without wanting to state the obvious, please don’t allow children (or anyone!) to climb on this.

Please note that the deadline for playing Box League matches has been extended to Sunday, 14 April.

This is partly due to the tempest that has been raging outside for a while and looks set to continue for most of this week. If you see a chink in the clouds, book a court and get your matches in 🙂

Social and medal ceremony to follow end of April, date tbc (but probably Friday, 26th)

We are still looking for someone to take on this role. We have had several members come forward to offer to run an event or two during the year so it would be more a role of managing the programme of events and allowing members to run with their own ideas and host them. If anyone is interested in taking on managing a team of volunteers, or would like to add their name to the list of people who’d enjoy the challenge of running a fun social event or being on a kitchen rota, do drop us a line.

Peter Richardson is holding a maintenance morning this Sunday, 10-12 noon. Do come along for 30 mins/ an hour if you’re free. If the weather is wet, there are jobs indoors that can be attended to. Bacon sandwiches at noon for helpers!

Celia is running a fun ladies doubles tournament: 2-5pm, Saturday 23 March followed by cheese and wine. Do sign up on the back door if you’d like to take part.

Another fun trip this year to the 02 ATP World Tour Finals.
Fabulous day of tennis with friends and family!

Thanks to all organisers, volunteers and of course all players – guests and members – for another successful Open

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR MEMBERS WHO WON MEDALS:

• Sophie M- BRONZE 8U Mixed
• Zach H & Don N – SILVER 9U doubles
• Thomas H – SILVER 12U Boys
• James J – GOLD Men’s doubles
• Charlie W – GOLD Men’s doubles, BRONZE Men’s singles
• GOLD 18U Boys’ singles

Celia Barron

celiabarron@yahoo.com

A member of the club for over 20 years, Celia has enjoyed helping out. She is a retired teacher, working both here and abroad.