Here’s our penultimate monthly Newsletter of this very strange year. Hope you’re all bearing up and not going too stir crazy in this 2nd lockdown.

Club re-opening

We anticipate that the club will be opening again on Thursday 3rd December, although the Government’s comms machine is currently busy managing expectations about what we’ll be able to do ahead of Christmas week.

Best guess at the moment is that the squash courts (and the tennis courts) will be allowed to open, but we’ll be more restricted than before lockdown about who we can play - we’re hopeful but uncertain that the ‘rule of 6’ for squash/squash57 bubbles will be reinstated for Tier 1.

If there are any positives that can be taken from the country’s two lockdown periods, one of them is that they have made us all really appreciate things that we took for granted as part of our normal lives and which were removed by the restrictions.

Probably at the top of this list for many of us is the simple activity of talking (f2f, not on a Zoom call!) to friends. I’m sure that when we returned to the club after the 1st lockdown, many of us realised how much we’d missed both the physical enjoyment of playing squash and squash57, and the friendliness of being back at the club.

As we have done throughout this pandemic, we will be watching Government announcements closely and observing the subsequent guidance from the LTA and England Squash. Accordingly, we will open as soon as we are allowed, with the required protocols.

Looking forward a bit further, things are becoming more positive, with rollouts of mass testing and vaccinations coming imminently.

World Squash Day

In last month’s Newsletter, we advertised World Squash Day on 10/10/20, which launched England Squash’s Team Laura vs Team Nick squash challenge. 

A huge ‘thank you’ to everyone who took part - we finished 6th in the country and earned a prize of 120 Dunlop double-yellow squash balls and some Dunlop junior kit bags. John will distribute them when he next sees you.

Squash on your screens this week

Also in the October Newsletter we talked about our hopes to put on a challenge match tournament for our pro squad players. We still aim to do that, but we have had to press pause for the moment, until we see what the rules are for us all when we exit this 2nd lockdown.

However, England Squash are putting on a similar event this week, starting tomorrow, at the National Centre in Manchester. It’s more viable for them than us, to raise sufficient funding without spectator income. 

4 of the 16 players are from our BEST Academy pro squad: Richie Fallows, Ben Coleman, Josh Masters and Alice Green. All the matches are being broadcast; the glassback court matches are on SquashTV (subscription required) and the side court matches are on YouTube (free - PSA SquashTV channel).

That’s all for now. See you on Thursday 3rd December - hopefully!

In case anyone wants to keep bang up to date with our squash and squash57 section and stay abreast of what’s happening across both sports around the world, we post everyday to the @BerkoSquashRbll Twitter account. We’ve been doing it for just over 12 months and we’ve grown to 300 followers.

Squash & Squash57 Committee

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