It’s hard to believe that it’s only been four months since launching Southsea Badminton Club. With all the voluntary work that we put in every week behind the scenes, we hope you’re enjoying the weekly club nights, league matches and socials.

This past week, your club committee met and discussed a wide range of items relating to your experience of SBC. This includes some recent suggestions raised by our members.

Friday club night

After an interim review, we agreed to continue our trial of running an additional club night on a Friday for a total of 10 weeks, until mid March.

While these sessions are broadly financially sustainable for the club, with very good turnout at many, the time commitment from our small team of committee volunteers to organise this session is challenging. We will review the longer term sustainability of Friday club nights after 10 sessions.

Club night assistant volunteers

To help these club nights continue, we’ll be seeking volunteers to help administrate our club nights – namely recording attendees the club night register and collecting fees on behalf of the club.

We agreed that in recognition of this contribution, that anyone who volunteers as an assistant organiser for a club night would get the remainder of the evening’s club session for free once their responsibilities are complete.

These volunteers will not be expected to help at every session, and will only be invited to assist a more experienced organiser should a second committee member not be able to make the session first.

If you are interested in helping out with your badminton club nights, then please speak to one of the committee members.

Monday club night

Monday club nights continue to prove very popular, in part thanks to our flexible pay and play model. As a result, we’re exploring ways to relieve capacity in court and get people on for games as quickly as possible.

We agreed that at exceptionally busy times, games would run to either 15 or 11 points (rather than the usual 21) based on the judgement of the lead organiser.

We are also exploring other options, including rearranging home league matches to Friday nights to free up court space on Monday nights.

League teams and training

Team captains and players will soon be given guidance setting out what’s expected from them, both in their roles as part of our league teams and at the club more broadly. These will address issues like the expectations of team captains and players, how match fees should be collected, guidelines around communication, and any other relevant information.

The issue of team training has also been raised with us. The committee agreed that where possible and without detriment to the broader running of club nights, organisers can try and pair groups of people playing together in upcoming matches.

However this will not always be possible, and club nights are not primarily team development sessions. Teams and their captains will be encouraged to consider arranging alternative dedicated sessions where they can train.

We’d like to thank the member who raised some of these issues for our attention and discussion.

And finally

Finally, the Development Officer and Captain of the Mixed team Matt Main has decided to step down. In the interim and as per the constitution, the Chair and Deputy Chair will assume the Development Officer’s responsibilities while the committee will look to reappoint a new Captain of the Mixed team, which will be announced shortly.

Thank you very much for all of your support while we continue to find our feet as a non-profit community club. We’re still doing our best to iron out the kinks but we think we’re continuing to move forward in a positive direction.

Our focus soon will be to look at development opportunities for our members, but more on that soon.