Rothbury Tennis Club – Chairman’s Report 2018

Ian Anderson

It is with great sadness that again, I am starting my report by reporting the death of one of our clubs members.

 

Many of you will already know this, but Ian Anderson died on 2nd October 2017. Ian was a previous Chairman of the club and also Secretary of the Recreation Club. Ian was responsible for overseeing the building of our present courts, the clubhouse and the 5-a-side football pitch. He raised £378,000 from various sources to do this and has since raised more money to support Thropton Indoor Bowls and a children’s playground in Thropton.

 

Alnwick District Sports Council presented Ian with a cup in February 2017 to honour his “Services to Sport” in the county. This was the second time that Ian had been presented with this cup.

 

5 Club Members attended Ian’s funeral in Cheshire and I know that Dorothy was very appreciative of our support. I am sure that Dorothy will remain in our thoughts.

 

Membership

 

I am delighted to report that the club continues to do well. Our membership has remained relatively stable. We currently have 102 members, 66 adults, 34 juniors and 2 students. This compares with 104 members last year.

 

Members continually join and leave the club and it is encouraging to note that we had 27 new members joining this year, 15 adults and 12 juniors. I hope that we will all do our best to make our new members feel welcome.

 

Website

https://clubspark.lta.org.uk/RothburyTennisClub

 

I hope that you have all had a chance to use our new website. Our thanks go to Dennis Greenslade, Peter Duguid and Caroline Benn for all the work that they have put in to getting this set up and working.

 

I hope that you agree that it is better than our previous one. It also gives us the opportunity to use it to simplify several areas of administration in running the club.

 

The Lawn Tennis Association provides this website free to clubs.

 

If anyone has any suggestions about how we could improve the website, please send them to Caroline or me.

 

Tennis

 

We continue to have club sessions on Sunday morning from 10-12noon and on Wednesday afternoons from 1.30 – 3.30pm. Everyone is welcome to these sessions, just turn up and you will get a game.

 

We held another successful Open Day on 13th May, which was well attended. We enjoyed Pimms and Strawberries as usual!

 

We have had two “American Tournaments” this year. These are designed so that everyone mixes in and you change partners after every short match. They have been well attended and Joan Wilkinson emerged as winner of both tournaments. Congratulations to Joan.

 

The courts are available for members to play at any time. There is no booking system but if you want to check that the courts are free and that there are no matches scheduled, there is a link on the website under “What’s On” which allows you to view any courts that are booked out for matches or club sessions.

https://clubspark.lta.org.uk/RothburyTennisClub/WhatsOn

Non members are also welcome to play, after buying a day member pass from Soulsby’s.

 

Competitive Tennis

 

 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank John Foggon, who has organised the team tennis for several years now, as well as captaining the Men’s First Team. It is a very time-consuming job, but is much appreciated by all of us who play for the various teams.

 

Rothbury feilded 6 teams playing in the Northumberland and Durham League this year. This is a lot of teams for a relatively small club, and may not be sustainable. I would like to thank the respective team captains for all their work and also the players for turning out so regularly.

 

John Foggon has provided the report below.

 

Another good year for Rothbury Lawn Tennis club within the Northumberland & Durham Tennis League. We again fielded 6 teams in 2017, which is credit to the club given its size.

 

All the teams competed well within their respective leagues, playing in some close matches against teams of similar standards, which helps to improve everybody’s game. Thanks to all the captains, Flora Cann (Ladies), Steve Cann ( Men’s Vets I), Colin McMillan ( Men’s Vets II), Pat Beswick (Ladies Vets) and Bernard Johnston (Mixed Vets), for all their hard work in arranging matches and organising teams including attending fixture evenings in Newcastle. It is a difficult job not helped by the British weather and the subsequent need to rearrange matches.  

 

Once again many thanks to everybody who played in the various teams, there is a big time commitment often not returning home until late in the night after a mid week match. A special thank you to those players who stepped in at short notice to fill any gaps within teams.

 

Good luck to teams for the 2018 season. If anyone is interested in playing for a team please let Caroline know and she will pass on details to the relevant captain.

 

If anyone is interested in the team results, they are available, via a link to the Northumberland and Durham League, on our new website.

It is in the Team Fixtures section.

https://clubspark.lta.org.uk/RothburyTennisClub/TeamFixtures

 

Coaching

 

We continue to provide coaching on Saturday mornings and Monday evenings. Phil Barron, our head coach organises the coaching. He was being helped by Beth Williamson, but she has gone to college and we are delighted that Joe Race has agreed to come back to assist with coaching on Saturday mornings.

 

The number of people coming to coaching has fallen off slightly and the club currently has to subsidise the coaching sessions to a small amount. We believe that this cost is worthwhile for the future development of the club, but are considering if we can make any changes to the coaching to increase the number of people attending.

 

Information about coaching can be found on the website

https://clubspark.lta.org.uk/RothburyTennisClub/Coaching

 

Rusty Rackets

We were lucky to be awarded money by the LTA to support our Rusty Rackets coaching session on Saturday mornings. These sessions are for adults who are new to tennis or returning to tennis. This allowed us to provide free coaching sessions over the summer and subsidised sessions over the autumn.

The summer sessions were quite well attended with four participants, but the numbers have fallen off since.

 

Tots Tennis

We also had a grant from the Coop Community Fund and would like to thank all Rothbury residents who supported our club in this. This allowed us to provide a new coaching session for 3 ½ - 5yr olds on Monday evening from 3.30 to 4pm. We have called this Tots Tennis. Five tots attended the sessions and seemed to enjoy them. Let us hope that they continue to enjoy tennis and progress through the levels of coaching that we provide.

 

 

 

Girls only coaching

We had noticed that the number of girls attending the teen coaching session was very low. We tried to address this by providing a girls-only coaching session, but unfortunately no one enrolled for this session, so it has been withdrawn. If anyone has any other suggestions on how to keep girls engaged in tennis, we would be delighted to hear them.

 

School tennis

The club continues to contribute to running some tennis coaching sessions for schools in the valley. We currently split the coaching costs with the schools equally. The sessions are well supported by the pupils and culminate in a tournament, which is held on our courts.

 

 

Court Maintenance

 

I would like to reiterate the advice I gave in last year’s newsletter.

 

The courts continue to be in good condition, helped by annual maintenance by Technical Surfaces. Ian Fowler is in charge of liaising with them, for which I thank him.

 

In order to keep the courts in good condition, we all need to play our part. Members are good at brushing the courts after use, and this is very important, but we have been advised to ask if we can take care to brush the back of the courts, right to the outside netting, as some moss is building up in this area.

 

For similar reasons, we would like to encourage people to play on the court nearest the car park. This court gets played on less often than the other 2 courts, and because of this it also gets brushed less frequently. This has caused a small amount of moss to start growing on the court.

 

We are trying to address these issues. We are in the process of removing a large Sycamore tree, which overhangs the court, shading the courts and dropping keys onto the playing surface.

 

We have used a leaf blower this autumn to try to keep the courts clear of leaves and organic debris, which would otherwise rot down and exacerbate the tendency of the back of the courts to become waterlogged.

 

We have also increased the frequency of moss killing to try to prevent the courts getting slippery, especially in the autumn and winter months.

 

Finance

We have a business plan which Joan Rickaby helps us to maintain. This projects forward to 2030 when it is projected that the courts will need to be completely refitted. The cost of this will be considerable, but I think that we are managing to plot a course that should allow us to be in a position to manage these costs when they arise.

 

I would like to thank Jan Deckers for continuing as our club treasurer and for his careful management of the clubs finances.

Jan will provide more information in his report.

 

We have managed to keep membership fees unchanged for several years, but are currently considering ways to encourage people to pay promptly, as our secretary spends a lot of time chasing people up for unpaid fees.

 

Safeguarding

 

The club has recently rewritten our Safeguarding Policy and I encourage everyone to read it. It is available on the website, see below. Thank you to Ruth Hamilton for all her work on this.

 

It is important that we are all aware of the importance of safeguarding. If anyone has any safeguarding concerns, please contact Ruth Hamilton  (01669 621601) or any of the committee members as soon as possible.

The club safeguarding policy, which includes contact details, is on the new website under “About us” and then “Policies”

https://clubspark.lta.org.uk/RothburyTennisClub/AboutUs/Polices

 

 

Social

 

We held our annual Christmas Dinner at the Anglers Arms on 8th December.

23 people came and we had a very enjoyable evening. I would like to thank Ian Fowler and Caroline Benn for organising it.

 

 

Committee

 

I am indebted to all our hard working committee members. In particular the officers of the club, Peter Duguid, our Vice Chairman, Caroline Benn, our Secretary and Jan Deckers, our Treasurer. I am delighted that they have all agreed to stand for election for another year.

 

We are actively looking for someone to take over as membership secretary. Currently Caroline is doing this on top of the arduous job of secretary and this is not sustainable in the long term. If anyone would be prepared to help with being membership secretary please get in touch.

 

I would also like to thank Dennis Greenslade for his help with setting up the Club Spark Website and more recently for organising a questionnaire to assess member’s views on several important areas.  I would also like to thank Ruth Hamilton for her work on the new Safeguarding Policy and for taking on the role of Club Welfare Officer, Joan Rickaby for continuing to update our club Business Plan and finally Mike Jevons, for continuing to help out around the club in all sorts of ways.

 

 

We remain keen to receive any ideas about how the club could change, in ways that would help our members. If you have any thoughts, please get in contact with any of the officers or committee members. We would also be delighted for new people to come and join the committee. We are particularly keen to recruit a parent, to represent the interests of our junior members. If you would be interested please let Caroline know.

 

If you want to contact any of the committee, our contact details are on the website, under contacts.

https://clubspark.lta.org.uk/RothburyTennisClub/Contact

 

Gordon Cameron

Chair- Rothbury Tennis Club

 

 

Gordon Cameron.       Tel. 01669 621179      Mob. 07713019967 or

                                    Email:  gordon@westhillshouse.co.uk