Welcome to our final newsletter of 2025.  It is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

Our opening hours for the holiday season are about to be issued - Christmas Day is the only day of the year when the clubhouse is closed. Elvis will be appearing on Friday for a very blue Christmas. And the Waitrose car park will soon be gridlocked at most times of the day.

Time for a brief reflection on the past 12 months, and a look into the snow globe to see what is coming in 2026.

Looking back on 2025

We have kept up the continuous improvement activity all around the club; some small items, some material:

1. Refurbed and modernised the womens toilets, which was long overdue.
2. Repainted the lounge, now that we have finally sorted the roof leaks that kept afflicting a couple of the ceiling areas.
3. Largely resolved the water ingress issues with the ITC doorways.
4. Installed new fencing and gates at the rear of tennis courts 10-12.
5. Upgraded the floodlighting on tennis courts 1-3 to LED.
6. Modernised squash courts 3 and 4 with glass back-walls, giving us a continuous run of 6 glass-back courts.
7. Included within that scope: modernised the balcony above and the walkway behind by completing the boxing-in of utility pipes in the balustrade plinth, completing the panelling of the corridor ceiling, sanding and varnishing the balcony floor, and painting the corridor.
8. Added a Wattbike to the fitness suite.
9. Opened a coffee and cake cafe in the clubhouse on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
10. Installed scoring posts on tennis courts 7-9.

That is a decent list. We will keep nudging things forward on all fronts.

Looking forwards to 2026

The main project next year will involve our club management platform.

In Q1, to be in place in readiness for membership renewals, we will be releasing a new club website and switching to a new service provider for membership management and email communications.

This will involve considerable change for us more than you, but we will keep the transition as smooth as we can and iron out the inevitable gremlins as quickly as possible.

The replacement systems will have much better integration with payment processes for subscriptions and with distribution and publishing applications for email, enabling us to provide an improved online member experience.

We will have a more joined-up and enterprise-wide software platform, enabling us to access the future roadmap potential associated with an increasingly mobile-first and AI-influenced world. That is a sentence laden with jargon but, even for a community sports club, it is where we need to get to; Q1 will be the start, not the finish.

For the time being, mindful that we will never fully press pause, we feel we have done most of the heavy lifting for our courts and clubhouse. We are also conscious that the systems work will take a lot of our management time, at least in H1.

Nevertheless, we intend to:

1. Upgrade to LED floodlighting on tennis court 6a, completing LED installation on all our tennis and squash courts other than 6b which has no electrical ducting.
2. Introduce pickleball to one of the ITC courts - last week we approved a contractor to lay the marking lines.
3. Install false ceilings to the most dilapidated areas of the original squash courts and balcony.
4. Replace and modernise the smorgasbord of rusty old signage currently at various parts of the club driveway entrance.
5. Replace the gravel border to the pathway alongside tennis courts 10-12 with a resin-bound surface and drainage channel.
6. Add a cable machine as a rack accessory to the fitness suite.

To hear more about the club, please come along to the 2026 AGM on the evening of Monday 2nd February in the lounge. Everyone is welcome - a date for your new calendar.

Club kit

Something else coming your way in 2026 and worth a specific mention.

Over the years, we have done club tees for players from time to time. But it has always been an administrative burden for someone to manage the sourcing, printing, sizing, payment and fulfilment.

We have now linked up with Court10, an online racket sports clothing company run by one of our tennis members, Nick Georghiades. Court10 provide the kit for our National League tennis team and it looks great! It is also now available at Berko Sports in the High Street. We are finalising the process with them and we will announce things soon. Initially it will be mens apparel, but they will be releasing a womens clothing line later next year.

If you need kit now and cannot wait until we launch, contact our tennis coaches Josh Sapwell or Josh Rose who are brand ambassadors of Court10 and are able to place your orders with their own promo codes. They get a slight kick-back, but it does not affect the pricing to you.

Seasons greetings

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas, and best wishes for the New Year to all our members and everyone connected to the club.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for supporting the club in 2025. With special thanks to my fellow Council and Committee members for their enormous voluntary work on our behalf; the fantastic volunteers who run the box leagues, teams, tournaments, club nights and organised sessions; our excellent office managers and groundsman; our brilliant coaching team, and our fabulous bar and catering team. Without you, we would not be the club we are.

John Shaw

Chair, BLTSRC