Lichfield Squash Club News - February 2023

I hope you have all been enjoying and playing lots of squash since the New Year resumption. It has certainly been a very busy time as far as the club is concerned, with lots of exciting news and developments to bring you …

I prewarn you, this is quite a long read, due to the amount of news and its detail, so I do hope that you are able to make it through to the end. Future editions of the Newsletter will be shorter as we will post just headlines and click-through links to our new website news page, where the detail will reside (see story below).

Open Night and Beginners/Improvers Club Night

We held a very successful Club Open Night on Wednesday 11th January, with a wide range of participants, from complete novices, returners after 20 years, new members and some seasoned players.

This has led to the establishment of a regular Beginners/Improvers Club Night, which takes place every Tuesday from 7.00 – 9.00pm. This offers a mixture of group ¾ court play and mix in singles games, so everyone gets to play a wide variety of people, and is proving very popular

Coaching is sometimes available too, with a backhand clinic on offer at the next one on Tuesday 31st January. It is hoped that we can offer a full programme of beginner/improver coaching in the very near future (see below story).

If you are interested in joining this Club Night, we have set up a WhatsApp group for it, so please ask to be added by messaging me on 07816 620504.

Funding bid / coaching programmes

As a Commonwealth Games sport, we were encouraged by Together Active, the County sports development organisation, to apply for the Games legacy B2022 Fund.

Our bid, if successful, would fund the coaching qualifications for 2 members to achieve the England Squash Level 1 award, as well as for 1 member to progress from Level 1 to Level 2.

This would build our capacity to deliver some coaching and participation programmes, which forms the second part of our bid, including for juniors, after-school, beginners/improvers and established club players.

Our bid will be assessed imminently by Sport England, so we should know soon if we have been successful. We will keep you posted.

Rally Together / International Women’s Day

England Squash is running a campaign to encourage greater female participation in squash called ‘Rally Together’. As part of this, they are encouraging clubs to run special events to celebrate International Women's Day, which is on 8th March.

We have decided to run an event and 2 of our newer members, Julie Pickford and Tess Crabb, have volunteered to help organise it - we are very grateful to them for this. Details are currently being finalised and we will be in touch soon with full details.

Staffordshire Team

Our team competing in the Staffordshire Teams League has enjoyed a great start to the second half of the season, winning both our opening fixtures, away at Oak Park and home versus Tamworth last week. The latter match saw a particularly fine performance against a Tamworth team which is riding high in the league, with all 5 of our players notching a victory.

Our next match this Wednesday is a tough away trip to Wolverhampton and we will hope to continue our winning momentum to mount a serious challenge to win the League Title.

Team matches are always on a Wednesday and spectators at our home matches are always welcome. You can check the booking system to see when home matches take place as the courts are booked out to the team from 7pm – 9pm.

Club Internal Leagues

We hope that those players who are in the leagues are enjoying the current campaign, which runs to the end of February. Pease try to arrange and play your remaining games by 28th February.

Please note that over the past couple of days, we have been encountering problems logging on to In-Zone, the system through which our leagues currently operate. It had been our intention to migrate the leagues to MyCourts from 1st March but if these technical issues persist, we may set up the leagues in MyCourts a month earlier.

If we do this, we will inform you via email, with instructions for accessing the leagues. In the meantime, please bear with us and retain any results to enter online as soon as this is possible.

New website and logo

Our current website has been around now for several years and is suffering from a number of technical issues. In addition, the server where it is hosted is about to be switched off.

We have therefore purchased a new hosting package and are currently in the process of designing a new and improved website. Please note this is different to the MyCourts site, which is a standalone facility which we will of course still link through to via our new website.

We expect to launch the new site around the end of February and will let you know as soon as it is live. Many thanks to Dominic Roberts who is providing the necessary site building skills.

As part of this, we have tweaked our club logo to simplify it and make it stand out better, on screen, in print as well as on garments. See above and we hope that you notice the enhancements.

And finally … Club future plans

As mentioned at the start of this year, 2023 is pivotal for the Club and we are hopeful of achieving our aims to boost participation in squash across Lichfield. We have made a great start, with a good few new members and the establishment of the Beginner/Improver Club Night. If we are successful with this B2022 Fund bid, this will provide a further massive boost.

We are not resting on our laurels though and are looking for more ideas to help develop squash and the Club. If you have any good suggestions, please do get in touch.

In addition, as the club expands, we are going to need more people to come forward with relevant skills sets to help out. If you have experience in any of the following, we would be particularly pleased to hear from you:

Finance and Accounting
Events and programme management
Marketing, especially digital marketing
Governance (e.g. safeguarding, equality and diversity, risk management etc)

The main qualification required though is enthusiasm and determination, so if you have those qualities, then please get in touch whatever your experience!

Cheers

James Roberts

Lichfield Squash Club

31/01/2023