Duffield Squash & Tennis Club Update - 12/11/23

Dear [[firstname]],

Short version

We are playing tennis again in half the time it took Noah to build the ark.

Longer version

Membership fees compensation

We need to clear up some confusion about how our insurance will compensate members for the time their sporting and social use of the club is disrupted. Copied below is the explanation previously written in the note on Wed 1st Nov:

Clearly everyone is devastated. Progress towards getting the club up and running is impressive but the scale of damage inevitably means that you have to play elsewhere and incur costs, in addition to paying your subscription. We have considered various options to reimburse you and rest assured that you will be recompensed for the weeks that the club is not fully operational. We have insurance for loss of revenue and in discussion with our loss adjusters, we have a plan, obviously subject to the approval of our insurers.

SO, whilst we haven't needed to call on you to get your wellies on and shovels out, we are asking you to support the club by continuing to pay your subs so that we maintain cash flow during the recovery process. THEN when we are fully operational, should you wish, we will freeze your payments for an equivalent number of weeks. Those who paid an annual fee can have their membership extended. We appreciate your understanding and please bear with us.

Or putting it another way, if your use of the club is significantly disrupted for say X months until we are properly up and running again, then at that point, and should you wish, we will freeze your membership subs down to £ zero for the following X months. As with all compensation schemes it perhaps won’t be perfect but we hope you can appreciate our efforts to come up with a felt fair and appropriate mechanism to compensate the membership and the club. Do bear with us.

Insurance update

Late last week Nigel & Andy had a really positive meeting with the loss adjuster. We are becoming increasingly confident that our insurance company will very soon be accepting liability and paying out the claim. You might feel that it’s completely obvious we flooded and so they should pay out, but when faced with paying for ~ £1,000,000 of building works and fees any insurance company will spend a lot of time and effort scrutinising the detail of the policy trying to wriggle out of paying up! However, we are nearly over the line and hopefully we will have some more definitive news very soon.

Nigel has another meeting on Monday with the company who will be doing the initial strip out of the damage, and they will then be taking over the drying out process.

Tennis

We now have courts 1,2,7 & most of court 6 available, and the first trial sessions of tennis took place on Saturday. Delighted to say that all went well!

[image] [image]

So we have 3 tennis courts, and 7 pickleball courts spread between tennis courts 6 & 7. All of these are lovely clean tarmac with newly painted lines. Once the insurance claim is sorted we will start getting new carpets ordered.

Sal and James have already separately emailed about the technicalities of booking and using these courts, and the safety considerations of accessing the toilet only through the main door of the club where you will see large red barriers in the hallway. Do not go through or move the barriers as they are for your safety.

Also as Sal has explained, if you are a squash or gym member you can now join tennis for free as a “flood member” and play tennis or pickleball. Fabulous!

Squash

All 5 floors have been lifted and disposed in 7 skips. Very sad.

[image]

The drying out process will now be far more effective because lots of residual damp was trapped underneath the wooden floors.

Good to see team Racketball is continuing, thanks to Dean Gregory for re-aranging the Duffield v Burton Racketball competition as an away fixture, and congratulations to the team for beating them 18-4 yesterday.

[image] [image]

Come and have a look next Sat 18th Nov

We are very aware that on safety grounds we have stopped members from entering our club, and so not many people have seen first hand the damage. However, in a controlled way we can now make it safe for members to walk a defined route around the inside and outside of the club. So during the morning of next Sat 18th Nov we will allow members in for a few hours to have a look around. We will explain further details about how this will work in the next note on Weds.

And the even longer version for those who really can’t sleep …………..

Every day is a school day.

We continue to have many long conversations with lots of members about what has happened and what we are doing about it. It has become very clear how this flood damage is far more than simply an inconvenience having to drive somewhere different to play your sport. What has happened has disrupted people’s social lives and their ability to enjoy the friendships that existed as a consequence of the sport they play. That really focusses the minds of the Recovery Team to get the club back up and running as soon as humanly possible.

There are many facilities within our club that we need to get back up and running as soon as we can - playing tennis, playing squash & racketball, using the gym, doing strength & conditioning classes, having a daytime coffee in the lounge after playing tennis, having a drink in the bar in the evening etc etc. These are the sporting & social activities that are the reasons why we are in a members club, and rest assured we are working really hard to resurrect them asap. Obviously some of them are easier and quicker to achieve than others, for example we have got tennis courts and now pickleball available from tomorrow morning. Rest assured we are working very hard to get the other facilities available as quickly as we can.

As part of this process we will be reopening the upstairs lounge area really soon and this will mean members can still come in for a coffee after tennis.

We will also be opening the bar very soon. Initially we are sure that won’t be every night as it was before, but we will talk to members and think about what specific days of the week will work best for people to come in and meet up with friends and have a drink.

Obviously as the rebuilding work starts we will have to continually assess what is possible and safe but we will do our best to keep as much of it open as often as we can.

Thanks for the ideas emails that are still coming in to 23townstreetduffield@gmail.com. Your input is extremely important as we work out what facilities to keep, and what to change and develop, to create our bigger and better future for 23 Town Street. We can’t reply to all of you but it is hugely appreciated and important that you take the time to offer your views. Please do keep sending them in.

Thanks and best regards,

Your Recovery Team

12/11/2023

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