Duffield Squash & Tennis Club
23 Town Street • Duffield, Derby • DE56 4EH
Tel: 01332 841702
Dear [[firstname]],
Espresso version
Double espresso version with a croissant
Unification of the two clubs
Over the last few months the Squash and Tennis committees have independently agreed that it is in the best interests of the two clubs if they merge into one unified Club. The new club will need a new Constitution, and this requires a vote of acceptance by the membership at an EGM. This EGM happened last Thursday where the rationale behind the merger was shared by the steering group. There were several questions raised which prompted some healthy debate, before the assembled 71 members across Squash and Tennis were asked to vote to accept the proposed new Constitution. The vote was a near unanimous Yes, and the meeting was then advised that the results of the Proxy vote for those who couldn’t attend was also a totally unanimous Yes.
Accordingly, as from 1st April 2024, the Clubs will join to form a single Club to be known as Duffield Squash and Tennis Club.
The EGM was then shown a proposal for how the new Club will be managed, and how this is slightly different to the current Committee Structures. In the future there will still be Leads for Squash, Tennis, Gym & Fitness, and Bar & Social; however their focus will be purely on the delivery of their sport or social activity. This leaves the management of the non sports delivery aspects of our Club “business” to be done by other members of the Management Council (eg Finance, Facilities, External Communications, Governance etc). We hope that this separation of responsibilities will allow for greater focus and less distraction for all Council members. We firmly believe that this new focus can ignite new energy to create a more vibrant and healthy single club fit for the next 20 years.
In the next couple of days there will be another email communication to share role descriptions for the Management Council structure. We really hope this will attract interest from within our 900 members so that we have the best people possible to lead our Club forward. If you want to have a chat about these roles or anything else about the new organisation then in the first instance contact Gren or Vic. There will be another EGM on Tuesday 26th March when we will look to vote in the new Management Council.
Last week we finally got acceptance from HMRC that the current Squash Club has got CASC status (Community Amateur Sports Club). This is really important for any members' sports club like ours as it gives several mainly taxation benefits.
Squash
Courts 3, 4 & 5 are now all fully plastered with just some lines to be painted.
Court 3 has never had any heating so we are installing electric under floor heating under the new floor.
The 3 new timber floors will be going down starting on 23rd Feb with the aim of all being playable from 4th March.
Tennis
Courts 3,4 & 5 are now back to beautiful carpets and first impressions are that they are playing really well.
As part of the flood resilience works the edging to court 7 has been raised so that any future flood water would shoot over the edge of the stuck down carpet and it should stay flat like courts 3,4 & 5 did during Storm Babet.
Fosse will be doing some similar but slightly different flood resilience edging to courts 1 & 2 over the next couple of weeks.
Then courts 1,2 & 7 will have carpets laid, hopefully in mid March.
Court 6 will be having a new tarmac surface but will not be having a carpet. It will be fully painted and set up for tennis and also pickleball.
Gym
The insurance tender process has been complicated and lengthy but is now almost complete, so last week we have asked the appointed Principal Contractor (Carter Construction (Derby) Ltd) to reinstate the existing gym room as quickly as they can.
Once that is done we will be in a position to return the cleaned gym equipment back out of storage. There were several pieces of equipment that were deemed BER (Beyond Economic Repair) so the insurance will pay for some new replacement machines which is great news.
We will let you know timescales as soon as we have them.
The future / 23 Town Street
Shortly after the flood there was much discussion about using the opportunity to make the club fit for the future. All the members were asked to submit ideas for activities that were synergous with Squash and Tennis and also likely to attract new and younger members. The top ideas were Padel, a better gym, a flexible space for fitness / wellbeing classes, and a social area that had wider appeal.
The heart of the club is Squash and Tennis, so in parallel the two sections were asked to develop their strategies to understand the longer-term direction for each sport. This work has not been completed yet, but several challenges are clear and will need to be addressed to secure a healthy future for the club. Most notably these include the membership demographic and the relatively low utilisation of our courts and clubhouse.
The next steps are to complete the Squash and Tennis Strategies and decide if they alone will provide sufficient revenue in the longer term. If not then other options will need to be considered, some of which might be architectural. The estimation is that shortly after Easter this work will be completed to a sufficient degree to provide a balanced view to all of us members. To be clear, no decisions have been taken yet and our focus is getting Squash and Tennis playing as soon as possible whilst creating time to make sure the bigger decisions are taken sensibly.
Best regards,
Your Recovery Team
18/02/2024
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