There's a lot going on at the Club right now - and coming up in the next month or two! Our June newsletter is now live...

Following the Government’s decision to postpone the final lifting of restrictions until 19th July, in terms of day-to-day operations not much will be changing around the club until then.

Nevertheless, lots has been happening at the club recently and there is plenty more planned, and we have a couple of requests for your attention - read on!

Club Open Day

Thank you to everyone who joined-in with our first Open Day for some while - for obvious reasons.

The sun shone, the tennis and squash courts were full, the men’s tennis 1st team produced some fabulous (winning!) play in a National Club League match, much food and drink was consumed, and over 40 new members joined our fabulous sporting community.  Welcome to the club to those people!

Fanzone

The new portable big-screen TV and outdoor seating area for the Euro’s has been well received.

The dreadful weather forecast for the next 10 days is going to be testing for us, given the continuing restrictions on indoor hospitality.  We will still be the best venue in town (in our opinion!), but bear with us while we manage all bar and lounge arrangements to the prevailing protocols.

We have had our fair share of unannounced no-shows at these events.  Please, if you have made a booking and your plans have since changed, let us know so that we can invite others and/or adjust the catering preparation.

There is much more sport to come this Summer, with Wimbledon, the British Lions and the Olympics.  Watch it all happen, with us.

Club Box Leagues

Tennis box leagues have been back for a while for both singles and doubles.

We planned to restart the squash and squash57 boxes on 21st June.

We brought this forward by a couple of weeks for squash as it was clear that many of our squash members needed the boxes as a prompt to get themselves organised and activated to resume playing after the doldrums of lockdown.

Squash Skills and Drills returned this week (contact Adam or Mike if you’re interested).  Squash57 box leagues join the party next week!

Membership and Indoor Court Fees

With all full play formats now back in place, it’s time - sorry! - to remove the open offer for squash members to play tennis free of charge, and also to re-introduce the peak booking fee of £5 for squash courts on weekday evenings.

A fair number of squash players have so enjoyed their tennis excursions that they have taken out a combined membership.  We hope that others will also do so.  From 1st July, as usual, subscriptions reduce by 20% to reflect the pro rata remaining period of the membership year, so now’s the time to commit to all the racket sports we provide! Contact the Club Managers for more information at manager@bltsrc.co.uk.

World Class Squash at the club

We referred earlier to the brilliant tennis on show at our Open Day.

On the squash side of things, pro tour events have resumed in England for UK players.  Congratulations to one of our coaches, Grace Gear, who (seeded 4) produced some great performances this week at the Crawley Open, winning through to the final without dropping a game, but then coming up against a very in-form opponent.

Grace has a number of domestic tournaments coming up over the next couple of months - good luck Grace!

And one of those tournaments will be our own!

We are excited to announce that, from Thursday 29th July to Sunday 1st August we will be hosting the Berkhamsted Linksap Open for both men and women.  A huge thanks to those members whose sponsorship has made this possible.

With most pro squash players devoid of any opportunity for earnings or ranking points in the past 12 months, there will be a very strong draw in both events, with many of the world top 100 competing.

Tickets will be going on sale shortly.

We will also be organising a number of associated opportunities for members to play and get involved (the tournament will only require 2 courts - there will still be plenty of room for everyone!) so that we make it a fun-packed jamboree of squash for 4 days!

Tennis Club Champs

Tyrell is about to issue details of our annual tennis tournament with finals day on September 11th. The timing is different this year for obvious reasons but we missed out completely last year. Entry details will be published within the next week or so.  

Requests for your attention

We said this bit was coming.

1. Volunteers

We would love to have more people become involved in helping our club.

Aside from our business partners, such as Isalie (bar and catering), BTF (tennis coaching) and BEST Academy (squash coaching), we have just 3 (brilliant!) part-time members of staff:  our groundsman and our office managers.  The rest of the running of the club is down to our volunteer workforce.

It can be very rewarding to be a steward of a community sports club, particularly if, in our case, you are an avid tennis or squash/squash57 player who would like to lend a hand with the sport they love.

And we like to think we have a great team that makes everyone welcome and helps each other out.

First, thank you and welcome to Bobby Mercandino, who has recently joined the Club Council as our new Social Chairman, succeeding Matt Markwort who became our Tennis Chairman earlier this year.  Bobby is already doing a fabulous job.

Second, we are seeking a Special Projects manager for tennis and a Chair for squash/squash57:

Tennis Special Projects

Running our tennis section is time consuming.  Matt and his committee members are doing great work and our tennis set-up is thriving.

But there is more we want to do.  Courts 7, 8 and 9 need work.  There is subsidence at the rear, the playing surface is heavily worn and the floodlights are from a bygone age.  Court 6b is plain tarmac and we could make much better use of it if it had a modern surface.

Indoors, it’s time we brought the women’s showers up to date.  For too long we’ve kidded ourselves that they’re ok because they don’t get much use.  But it’s no wonder really.  If we want to grow the women’s game at our club in both tennis and squash, we need to have respectable, modern showering and changing facilities.

These things will be done over a period of time, with prudent financial management.  The contractors that we select for each individual project will manage things end-to-end.  Nonetheless, each activity needs oversight, budgeting, site meetings, and reporting out to Club Council and to club members.

They are not things that can be easily taken onboard by existing Council/Committee members who already have very full unpaid responsibilities that they undertake for the club in their spare time.

If any of you have an interest in any of these projects and would be willing to get more involved, please speak to one of us.  We’d love to hear from you.  Don’t worry; no commitment at this stage!

 Squash/Squash57

John Shaw is currently ‘double-hatting’ as Club Chair and Squash Chair.  To ease the workload a bit and to avoid any potential conflict of interest, we are looking for someone to join the Squash/Squash57 Committee with a view to succeeding John as Chair of the section at the next AGM in February.

2. Care of the Club

  Having the club vibrant once again is brilliant.

  But we are disappointed by a couple of occurrences: 

• after a particularly busy Friday evening at the club a couple of weeks ago, it was disappointing to arrive on Saturday morning to find pizza boxes and litter all around the terrace and quite a bit of mud from outdoor shoes on squash court 1;
• the bag rack next to the bar has once again become a store for dozens of water bottles, discarded rackets and general paraphernalia; and
• this week we narrowly avoided a hefty 4-figure bill for re-sanding squash court 2 after someone had been running around the court on Sunday in black-soled trainers and covered it in black scuff marks.  Squash courts are not waxed, varnished or lacquered.  To retain their grip, they are untreated.  As a result, they pick up marks easily and cannot just be wiped clean - although we did manage to scrub the worst of it away on this occasion.

Please clear away your rubbish before leaving the club.  We have plenty of bins and we empty them every day.

The bag rack is for bags while members are in the lounge.  In future, anything else will be put in a lost property basket in the Centenary Room for a few days and then discarded in the weekly rubbish collection.

All squash and squash57 players must wear non-marking shoes.  We are happy for children to run around the courts when no one is playing.  But, from now on, parents please ensure that they remove their shoes/trainers before doing so; there is now a ’no shoes’ policy.

We believe that we have a brilliant club, we work hard to maintain it for you to enjoy, and we are always looking to continuously improve the facilities.

Please help us in taking pride in the upkeep of our club.  Let’s all have an ‘owner’s mindset’ for the place.

Apologies, this has been rather a long newsletter, covering a lot of ground, and we’ve just taken the tone down a bit with our last subject.

Let’s finish it on a happier note and with a thank-you to you guys, our members.  Our club has bounced back strongly, we are well set for the future, and that’s thanks to your tremendous support in sticking with us and then returning in force to ensure our resurgence.  Working together we will keep making sure our club is a great place to be.

Club Council

(John Shaw, Matt Markwort, Phil Trimmer, Tracey Mackey, Mark Shattock, Bobby Mercandino)