As we come to the end of the year, a general update on what is happening at the club seems appropriate.

COVID

The first item is that, to date, England Squash have not advised of any need to change our operating. The committee will continue to closely monitor any developments, and the club will obviously abide by any changes in the law on Indoor Sport. However, for the moment, the club remains OPEN and all normal Squash activities are possible.

Christmas Opening

As we haven’t been informed to close, the club can remain open daily from 07:00-23:00. However over the holiday period out-of-hours access will often be required as there will be many times when the Sports Centre is shut. The Sports Centre’s planned opening schedule over the festive period is:

Christmas Eve – 07:00-13:00

Christmas Day - Tuesday 28th – CLOSED

Wednesday 29th - Friday 31st – 07:00-13:00

New Year's Day – CLOSED

January 2nd – 08:00-13:00

January 3rd – CLOSED

January 4th onwards – return to normal hours

Please be aware of these times, particularly on days when the Centre is only open to 13:00. If the Centre shuts whilst you are playing, your car is at high risk of getting locked into the site! We cannot do anything about this – so take note, and if there is any risk on timings park in front of the school and walk through.

For details on how to access the site when the Leisure Centre is shut, please contact the club by email melbournsquashclub@gmail.com

Melbourn Squash Club tops

The committee would like to offer the opportunity for all members to buy sports-style shirts with the Melbourn Squash Club logo. You may have seen some players wearing these around the club. If you haven't spotted them there, they would be similar to the shirts superbly modelled by Junior players Alistair and Louis at a recent event.

Despite the kids wearing green in the above link, the shirts would only be offered in two colours – blue with a white logo, or white with a blue logo.

Cost per shirt is to be confirmed but is expected to be around the £~10 range.

There will be a minimum order number we would need to reach. The first stage is therefore to see if there would be enough takers to make it viable. If you would like to be involved in such an order, please reply saying so and how many shirts you would probably buy.

N.B. a reply at this stage this is just an expression of interest and NOT a commitment to buy.

Junior coaching and Ladies Casual Squash

These have now finished for 2021.

Junior coaching is open to all and free to attend. It is currently taking place from 4:00-5:00pm on Wednesday evenings. The session re-commence for 2022 on Wednesday 5th January.

The Women and Girls Casual session has been a great success with a peak attendance of 13 people over on evening at the start of December and a mailing list of now close to 20 people. Given how well it has been going, we have decided to run weekly in 2022. These sessions will take place on Tuesday evenings from 7:00-9:00pm, using both courts. Each session costs £2 per evening per participant. We have also secured funding from Melbourn Parish Council to pay for a (female) coach to attend once every couple of months for Hints, Tips and Pointers sessions.

Both the Juniors and Female Casual sessions have their own mailing/contact lists. These are always open to new interest – if you know someone who would be interested in joining in in 2022 please contact Mark Oppen (markoppen@yahoo.co.uk) for Juniors or Nicole Rincon (njr2020@gmail.com) for female casual Squash.

Club Night and Internal Leagues

Club Night, which runs from 6:40-8:40pm on Sundays, won’t happen on Sunday 26th Dec, but will return for the New Year on Sunday 2nd Jan.

If you are interested in taking part in Club Night, please respond to this email with your phone number so you can be added to the WhatsApp group.

Regarding the Internal Box Leagues, League Secretary Colm has these two messages;

• Great to see the numbers in the leagues back to pre-covid levels and continuing to grow.
• Thanks for the feedback on how the league is operating and we will continue to refine it to encourage more games to be played.

Men’s Handicap Tournament proposal

The committee has made especial recent efforts to improve our offerings for Juniors and Female players. So now it is the Men’s turn – we want to try and offer something additional to increase the participation levels and club engagement of our male players.

Our first idea is a single day timed handicap tournament. The concept would be for matches of 15 minutes of continuous play (timed by a stopwatch), and simply to accumulate points. No games, just a running total. The player with the higher score at the end wins and advances.

To re-emphasise the event would be handicapped. That means the weaker player begins with a head start. 7-0 up, 10-0 up, that sort of thing. The bigger the expected disparity in levels, the larger that head start would be (30-0 to being with..??). If the handicapping is right then anybody, whatever their level of Squash, should be in contention to win the event.

If we got 16 players signed up we would run Cup and Plate competitions; that would mean at least 30 minutes of Squash for everyone across the day, rising to 1 hour for players reaching finals.

This was vaguely planned for January but given the developing situation we are going to kick the can down the road by a few months. So the suggested date is now Good Friday, 15th April. Hopefully things will have improved again by then and gathering a group of people together seems reasonable again.

As well as connecting with new opponents, another potential incentive to be involved stems from Cambs Squash having a fund for encouraging adult male participation in the sport; the committee have discussed this idea with them to see if we can get a chunk of that to support our proposed tournament. If this is available to us (please note that is TBC, the Cambs county committee are currently considering our suggestion) there may be prizes on offer…

Feel free to offer feedback on this proposal. We are all ears when it comes to ideas for additional playing opportunities for our male members as well as our female and junior ones.

Melbourn Squash Club Committee