Plans for 2025 and beyond

Plans for 2025 and beyond

Thanks for your participation and support for our weekly Thursday evening session, our sessions have been subscribed to capacity most weeks especially when there are home matches. We want to thank you all for your patience and flexibility during busy periods when you have a wait to get onto a table, and for being accommodating to junior players and new joiners. We want to improve the experience for all if we can, so we are looking into possible ways to do that. These are not definite plans but we want to share the ideas with you and welcome feedback and suggestions.

Additional or extended practice sessions

Currently, there are a couple of available, regular slots at the Jubilee Centre which we could use for additional or extended sessions:

• Tuesday afternoon/evening
• Thursday before our current 7:30pm slot

Being a potential earlier time slot, it might be more convenient for junior players. The other possibility is for a greater emphasis for new players where there is more coaching advice.

One challenge with this will be availability of people to help with running these sessions. For sessions involving junior players, we would either need parent/guardian attendance or a suitably accredited adult to run the session, e.g. a licensed table tennis coach. Any suggestions on how we can organise such sessions are very welcome.

Our current plan is to see if capacity remains an issue after the season finishes. There are 3 home league matches left to be played and no more than one per week, which could help with capacity. There might be cup finals and the Koslowski which we normally host, but there are no dates for these yet. After that, we could try a couple of trial sessions to test feasibility and demand.

Booking Practice Sessions and Match Tables

While our simple, online spreadsheet has served us well for a few years, with more demand and potentially more sessions to organise, it could be too constraining to meet longer term requirements. We are looking to move to an event management and ticketing platform. This would have the benefit of being more secure and robust as well as additional facilities such as automatic wait lists, booking multiple slots with one transaction (e.g. parent and child). To minimise the cost to the club it is likely that we will keep the invoicing and payment of fees separate and as it is now.

We want to move to a new system within the next few weeks. There will be some changes in the booking process but hopefully any change will have long term benefits for all. Again, any comments or questions welcome.

Table Tennis Equipment

Apart from hall hire, the fees that you pay are only used to fund maintenance of the table tennis equipment. Our aim is to provide a high quality environment for playing table tennis for club users, the local table tennis scene and Table Tennis England events. We have just bought 2 new tables, which means we now have 6 Butterfly National League 25 tables. The Sponeta table (which everyone dreads moving) is an NDTTA table which we store and can use as a reserve match quality table. The other (3) older tables are going to new homes where they can help the local table tennis community. With the equipment we now have, we think that we have all that is required to support club and other table tennis activities. If you think that we need any additional equipment, please do let us know.

With Toby getting up to speed as Equipment Officer, we hope to be able to maintain the quality of facilities we enjoy. Please do help and support Toby by looking after all the equipment and making him aware of any issues. The equipment can be expensive to obtain (the price of the tables we just bought are double what we paid for tables a few years ago) and it is all funded by your fees, so it is in all our interests to look after everything.

Thank you….please do let us know your suggestions.