With schools having broken up and the annual holiday season upon us, things are a bit quieter around the club than usual, but there’s still quite a lot going on behind the scenes to tell you about.

Tennis

Our men’s National League team are through to the National Finals in Bournemouth for the second year in a row on the weekend of 6th-8th September, which is a fantastic achievement!

However, it was a shame that their semi-final playoff opponents, Stirling University, had to scratch and give us a walkover, depriving us of a great afternoon at out club.  Travelling from just north of Edinburgh for a tennis fixture in Hertfordshire is a huge ask of the LTA’s premier club competition, but the last minute cancellation was not helpful for our catering and hospitality preparations.

The work to remedy the ‘deadspots' on court 10 has been successful and we will get the contractors back to apply the same fix to 11 and 12.

We will also ask them to remove the sandbags from the car park.  The plan had been to use these for the recent quarterly court maintenance. But much of the sand was too wet to go through their mechanical spreader.  We have attempted to move them by hand ourselves, but they’re too heavy.

Squash & Racketball

Our annual PSA Challenger Tour event earlier this month, the Berkhamsted Linksap Open, was a great spectacle.  A huge thank-you to Linksap and our other sponsors who enable us to put on the tournament, now in its fourth year.

Bear with us on Wednesday and Thursday next week.  Courts will be hard to come by during the day as we have the England senior squad training at our place.  Former world no. 1’s Nick Matthew and Mohamed Elshorbagy will be in the house!

Our survey of s&r members, to gauge their preferences and priorities for court improvements, has now closed.  There is a 73% majority in favour of converting courts 3 and 4 to glassbacks, creating a run of 6 modern courts and completing the replacement of old-fashioned concrete backwalls.

We will report in more detail to our s&r members.  We really appreciate the engagement of nearly 50% of you in responding to the survey, and we will do our best to incorporate all the feedback comments as we start to formulate our plans.

We continue to put in place smaller, continuous improvement changes from time to time.  Foam rollers for warm-ups are now available in the squash corridor, and we have a couple of other things up our sleeve which we hope to deliver soon.

Social

We had some brilliant evenings at the club for England’s matches at the Euros.  Unfortunately, nothing’s coming home and Southgate’s not the one.

We realised, though, that whilst we now have a fantastic AV set-up, when we are packed out with noisy people, the sound system could do with having more volume.  We’ll see what we can do.

Entrance Lobby & Players’ Bar

We’ve started to make some changes, although you may not have noticed them yet (remember the suggestion box, telephone table, huge ceiling lights and wire mesh window?  do you like the first of the new bar stools?)

Next month, the refurb will really kick on.  Starting with new bifold doors to replace the patio door entrance from the terrace.  It will be an evolution rather than a revolution, changes to decor rather than changes to structure.  Nonetheless, we believe it will make it a much more welcoming and impactful entrance into the clubhouse; we hope you like it.

Among the features will be a painting of the club by local artist Mary Casserley.  Those of you on the Berkhamsted Life facebook group may have spotted that prints are already available from Berkhamsted Imaging in the High Street.

Website

For some while we’ve been saying that we must do something about our rather dated website.

We’ve finally taken the plunge.  This week we have kicked-off a redesign project working with Indigo Tree in Tring.

Spotlight on…

…our court maintenance arrangements.

We have a rolling medium term capital expenditure programme for our club facilities.

But, just as important as these material projects, is the regular planned maintenance of the site; the courts in particular.

It is vital that we deliver a continuous schedule of ongoing upkeep.  It is also cheaper in the long run to have everything regularly serviced and in good working order.  To use the old saying, standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards.

Therefore, we make the following annual provisions for court maintenance:

1. £40 per senior tennis members subscription (broadly £40 x 500 = £20k) goes into a sinking fund to cover the maintenance of the 11 outdoor tennis courts.  We have a quarterly contract for regular maintenence including a the top-up of the sand and clay on these courts when required.
2. £10 per senior squash member subscription (broadly £10 x 250 = £2.5k) goes into a sinking fund to cover the maintenance of the 6 squash courts.  We repair and clean/sand all courts over a 3 year cycle.
3. a £15k P&L charge goes into a sinking fund to cover the maintenance of the indoor tennis centre.  Once the ITC was fully depreciated and debt fully repaid a couple of years ago, it was appropriate to swap out at least part of that allocation with a provision for the inevitable lumpy repair costs that will start to land as the facility ages.

We hope this is a useful insight into a key aspect of how we aim to cover both the present and the future as prudently as possible.

That's all for now, until next time.

Club Council

(John Shaw, Phil Trimmer, Michael Beavis, Tracey Mackey, Mark Shattock, Matt Markwort)