The results are in! Thanks to everyone who filled out our player survey looking back over our club nights during 2021. 

Here are some of the points you raised, and our responses:

Southsea Badminton Club’s welcoming atmosphere

We were over the moon to see that about half of respondents felt that friendliness at our sessions was the best thing about the club.

We all know that joining a club for the first time can be daunting. There’s nothing worse than plucking up the courage to go to a new club night, only to feel unwelcome or be met with cliques. 

We’d like to think that both we on the committee and our brilliant players have created a club culture that welcomes new joiners who want to get on court and improve their game.

Lighting in the sports hall

We’re aware that the lighting in the hall isn’t as good as it could be, and have asked the school to look at improving it. 

The caretakers are currently planning to replace light bulbs in the hall with LEDs to make the space brighter for our club nights.

More club nights and court time

We’re flattered that some of you have asked if we can run more club nights during the week! 

Our priority since restarting after pandemic lockdowns has been to focus on running one, good quality, and sustainable club night a week. 

However we continue to be oversubscribed for every session, so there’s obviously a lot of demand for flexible badminton in the city – so it’s something we’re happy to look into over the coming months. 

It’s worth mentioning that our club nights are run by a committee of volunteers giving up our time for free. Adding a second night a week would mean doubling the hours we put in – both to run the actual session but also the ‘hidden hours’ of admin and organisation around each club night. 

Also as a not-for-profit club we need to think carefully about making sure that the club nights we do run are viable, and that there’s enough players at each session to cover increasing hall and shuttle costs.

More generally it would be great to have more court time for all of us. In an ordinary year many of us would also have the chance to play for the club in competitive league matches during the week. We hope to see the league return soon to offer this extra court time for our players.

More social gatherings

We normally do a few socials during the year, the last one being our pre-Christmas social.

With the ongoing Covid uncertainty, it’s difficult to organise and book many activities in advance. Also some people are understandably cautious about mixing with others – and we don’t want to exclude or make folks feel uncomfortable. 

However we will look to organise a couple more socials in the coming months – Covid dependent!

Our Eventbrite booking system

It was useful to get feedback on our booking system, introduced in Sep 2021. Most of you felt it worked well. 

Numbers and booking

We also feel it’s worked in helping us manage the numbers of players at club nights. We review capacity on an ongoing basis and have been making adjustments to keep games at club nights flowing but diverse. 

We do sell out every week, so we strongly encourage you to book more than a few days ahead of time. Club nights are now available up to 8 weeks in advance. 

Also if we’re fully booked we recommend you join the waitlist. Most weeks one or more people on the waitlist get offered places that have freed up.

Other features and benefits

The booking system has meant we can go paperless and cashless, which is simpler and more Covid-safe than taking payment and registering players on the night.

Following your feedback, we’re looking into other features that Eventbrite offers to see if it’s technically possible to offer things like booking multiple nights at once. We’ll let you know if any of these are possible and if we are able to make them available in due course.

A big thank you

Thanks again to those of you who took the time to give us your feedback, it means a lot to us to hear what our players think so we can make the club the best it can be.

We drew a name at random from those who completed the survey, and Daniel W has won the free club night – we’ll be in touch!

SBC Committee