| Club Newsletter - October 2025 | |
| October 28th, 2025 | |
 | Welcome to our October newsletter! |
2025 Members’ Opinion Survey
The results are in!
232 of you participated, roughly a third of our adult membership, which is an engaged response rate and sufficient coverage for us to assume the responses are a reasonable representation of your collective views.
Thank-you for taking part. Every opinion matters and the responses provide us with a valuable vault of feedback to help us keep our finger on the pulse of the club and to manage BLTSRC for you.
Over 90% of respondents gave either 4/5 or 5/5 for the club overall and nearly two-thirds gave at least 4/5 for all areas. 79% of you would be very likely to recommend the club to a family member or friend.
Which is lovely but, nonetheless, in the accompanying comments we received many constructive suggestions where the club can improve. We are working through all your feedback so we can provide an informed report back out to you, giving our views on all those recommendations.
Our next Club Council meeting is mid-November. This will be a main agenda item and we will be in touch with you after that. By the way, we have just published the minutes to our most recent Club Council meeting if you want to read about the sort of things we discuss when we get together. Click here for the minutes from 30th September (you will need to be logged in to the members area to be able to see them).
Projects around the club
The refurb of the women’s toilets has been completed. Everyone’s patience with the portaloos was starting to wear thin. Thank-you for bearing with us!
Coming up in November are the upgrade to LED floodlighting on tennis courts 1-3 (timely now the clocks have changed), and the installation of a new gate and improved fencing at the rear of court 12. We will keep you informed when courts are out-of-action; we will try to keep this to a minimum.
Upcoming social events and cafe news
On Wednesday we have another edition of Quiz Night! Teams have been registered and there is a £50 bar tab available for the winners!
Next month, on Friday 28th November, Rock ’n Roll Bingo is back, with a Christmas theme.
Then, with his unique blend of singing and comedy, Elvis is alive and well and back in the house for a blue Christmas on Friday 19th December.
For tickets and booking, speak to Claire or Graham, or email claire@isalie.co.uk
Those of you who play tennis and squash in the mornings will have noticed that Claire and Graham are trialling coffee mornings at the club, opening from 9-12 on various days to see which prove the most popular.
Look out for the ‘cafe open’ sign by the front door.
With this in mind, we will be upgrading to a bean-to-coffee machine.
Tennis
Sunday 16th November is Finals Day for the Club Handicap Tournament.
It will be a brilliant occasion, why not come along and support your friends as they battle away!
On the indoor courts, our National League team have their opening Winter League fixture against Dukes Wood from Gerrards Cross.
The bar and kitchen will be open. Come on down!
As Adam mentioned in his email last week, we welcome two new members to Tennis Committee, Joanne Lloyd-Evans and Phil Casserley. Plus a restructuring of the committee to assign areas of specific responsibility, so that all representatives are empowered to play a key role and to provide a ‘voice’ for every cohort in our membership base; and so you have more clarity on whom to approach with any concerns or suggestions:
As a members’ club with just 3 part-time direct employees, we are hugely reliant on - and incredibly grateful for - the contribution from our volunteers. We all strive to do these roles to the best of our ability in our available spare time.
Welcome to Joanne and Phil, and thank-you to all our volunteers, social playing organisers, team captains, and everyone else who leans in to support our club!
Squash & Racketball
We’re making changes to our box leagues.
Our current box leagues work fine on the surface but, behind the scenes, they have a number of drawbacks which are hampering our ability to swiftly and easily launch each new round.
Also, the automatic upload to the SquashLevels ranking system is increasingly flaky, and SL are getting fed up with making bespoke fixes for us.
The root cause is that the system (also used for our tennis singles boxes) is sourced from a sole trader who is ’sunsetting’ the platform (which also contains our current website, membership database and email comms. Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a major systems migration programme, which we are trying to de-risk by tackling on a modular basis - the website and box leagues coming first). It is built on old technology that would otherwise require a complete overhaul.
We are therefore intending to switch to box leagues provided by SL themselves.
SL have recently launched Squash57Levels and we are going to start with our racketball boxes, with effect from the next round in mid-November. With just half a dozen or so racketball boxes, it allows us to launch a ring-fenced pilot.
If all goes well, the intention is to pick up any lessons learned and roll out to our squash box leagues.
(Tennis have already switched to an LTA service for their doubles leagues and they are similarly reviewing their singles leagues.)
Until next month, that’s all for now!
Club Council (John Shaw, Phil Trimmer, Adam Suggett, Pete Walker, Matt Markwort, Tracey Mackey, Mark Shattock) | |