Welcome to the February edition of this brief supplementary monthly newsletter, exclusively for our women squash and racketball players.

More new joiners

A warm welcome to Sarah, Cata, Gemma, Caroline and Su, who have joined as squash and racketball members in recent weeks - either as new club members or as tennis members expanding to our lovely community😍.  We hope you love playing here - let John know (john.gs@btinternet.com) if you need any help in linking up with people to play.

More of you in the club box leagues

We’re into double figures! 10 of you are now in the current round of box leagues, which is great to see.

The next round for squash starts next Monday; for racketball, it starts on Monday 7th.  We try and stagger them by a couple of weeks, to help those who play in both.

To join the squash box leagues, email Rob squashleague@bltsrc.co.uk; to join the racketball leagues, email Andrew racketballleague@bltsrc.co.uk.

Club champs are Go

We’re underway and it’s great to also see 10 entered in the women’s squash open!

It promises to be probably the most tightly contested women’s event at the club for many years.  We definitely need the final to be on the show-court with a packed audience!

Andrew Bryson’s organising the women’s racketball open as a round-robin on finals day (Saturday 30th April).  It should be great fun - if you’re not already entered and fancy playing (to ensure you get a game on finals day, if you don’t fancy your chances of making one of the other finals), email Andrew at andrew@enablingit.co.uk

Friendly tournament coming soon

Before we get to club finals day, Corina is organising a friendly tournament on Friday 11th March from 6 or 6:30ish, with a drink afterwards.

If anyone fancies joining in - and all standards are welcome - email Corina at corinasampson@hotmail.com

Wednesday women’s squash evening

It’s lovely to see the regular 7pm - 8pm Wednesday evening slot, coach-led by Grace, proving so popular and that many of you are prioritising this as a regular ‘me-time’ slot in your busy weeks.  If it’s Wednesday, it’s Women’s squash evening!

It now regularly gets 10 participants and Grace is adding a 3rd court to the evening when she knows that many are coming along.

squash evening!

Grace is flying

Talking about Grace, last month Grace reached her highest world ranking so far of 67!

Tournaments have been a bit thin on the ground so far in 2022, for Covid-related reasons but, with things now looking much more positive and international travel and spectator events becoming much more normal, Grace kicks-off her 2022 season on 2nd March at the Calgary Open in Canada.  Good luck Grace!

The team is nearly flying

Yes, it’s all about joining in and enjoying just playing.  But it can get a bit dispiriting if you don’t get a bit of a result every now and again.

So it’s great to see that the team are starting to pick up a game here and there, and even a couple of individual wins!

It’s the 1st season in 10 years that we’ve fielded a team in the Herts Ladies League.  Well done to everyone who has turned out - Berko Ladies team is back in business!

Anyway, even if we lose, we’re going to look the biz - the team shirts arrived this week!

Also great to see is both Grace and Natalie regularly turning out for the “men’s” teams, Grace starring in the 1st team, and Natalie, even though still a teenager, blitzing things in the 4th team and more recently in the 3rd team.

New member of the squash & racketball committee

A huge thank-you to Lily for stepping up and volunteering to re-launch our women’s team.

And Lily has also now volunteered to join the s&r committee, after we mentioned in the last newsletter that we’d love it if we could make the committee a little less male dominated.

Something that’s on the radar for 2023

We all need a shower after we’ve played a hard game of squash.

And if we our serious about growing the women’s game at our club - and we are - and if we want to be a great venue for visiting teams as well as our own members, then we need better shower facilities, with a more up-to-date design layout for women.

This year, the club’s investment programme is fully stretched with the substantial work being done to 4 tennis courts.  And we will need to hold the purse strings quite tightly for a while after that, to replenish reserves.

But we will be championing a refurb of the women’s showers with the Club Council once we start to look at our scope for undertaking 1 or 2 ‘continuous improvement’ smaller projects in 2023.  We’d also like to include converting courts 3 and 4 to glassbacks as an investment bid candidate; but secondary in prioritisation to the showers.

At the appropriate time, it would be really helpful (vital) if a couple of you would join a design working group to help us with the shower project.  

For now, though, I think that’s about it.  Lest’s keep the momentum going! 

Squash & Squash57 Committee

(John Shaw, Mark Shattock, Adam Fuller, Lily Main, Gill Trimmer and Rob Harbron)