Club sessions, fun tournament, teams and more

Hello everyone,

Club sessions
We had 14 people at club night last Wednesday and 13 on Saturday afternoon, so a pretty good start to the year. Let's keep it up!

Handicap tournament
Shingo organised a fun handicap tournament on Saturday 5 January. 24 people of different playing standards who attend a variety of sessions at Blackbrook took part, and it was a big success. The scoring system seems to have worked a treat. Thanks again to Shingo for organising and Kerry for making the indoor courts available at no cost. 

We'd like to organise more of these tournaments in an effort to bring together people from different sessions. There will be another one on Sunday 17 March, so please put that in your diary and look out for more information. I've added some of the people who played in the tournament to the club email list. The emails are designed to keep you updated on what's going on in the club and at Blackbrook as far as tennis is concerned. If you don't want to be on the list, please let me know and I'll take you off again. 

Committee meeting
We had a meeting on Saturday. Here are the main points:

Funds
We are building up some small funds from tournaments we organise and our other activities (competitive indoor doubles etc.) so that we can finance further activities. We now have our own domain name for the website (www.tauntontennisclub.co.uk) at a cost of £60 a year, for example. That's helped us to feature reliably in the first few Google hits. We'd like to reimburse people for having club tournament trophies engraved this year as well. If that's you, please get in touch. 

Committee members
Laurence agreed to become treasurer and join the committee, so we have a pretty good team in place now: David Walter (chairman), Mike Lynch (communications), Oli Knowles (men's captain), Hayley Collins (ladies' captain), Laurence Paul (treasurer), Shingo Yamada (new players) and Karin Sladden plus Kerry Quirk, the tennis centre manager. Nigel Hatfield has told us he will be coming off the committee but continuing to captain the men's team in the North Somerset League.

Winter team
The team is playing in Division 1 of the North Somerset League, where the standard is very high. Laurence, Oli, Shingo, Hayley, Alice and Nicolette have played most of the matches. They've been competitive and had some good matches, but with four matches left they have their work cut out to stay in the division.

Summer teams
It looks like we will enter one more mixed team in the West Somerset League, which will start at the end of April or beginning of May. Bill Scott has expressed an interest in this team. We hope it will be made up of players from the Evergreen sessions and others who are unlikely to get many games in our other teams. We had a number of teams that were promoted last year, so things are likely to be tough! We'll have the following teams in local leagues:

• Mixed A team in Division 1 of the West Somerset League
• Mixed B team in Division 2 of the West Somerset League
• Mixed C team in Division 5 of the West Somerset League
• Men's team in Division 1 of the Yeovil and District League
• Men's team in Division 2 of the North Somerset League
• Women's team in Division 1 of the North Somerset League

We'll also have a men's team at the county level of what used to be the Aegon league (involving a handful of Sunday matches where you get to play singles as well as doubles) and two women's teams (one at the national level and one at the regional level).

Winter indoor doubles league
31 players from five different clubs have played in the Monday and Friday evening sessions in the bubble since September, playing a total of 254 sets in 76 different pairings and occupying two courts 75% to 80% of the time. The idea is to run competitive sessions, and we are keeping a table of results and standings for both the different pairings and individuals. Of those players who have played five or more sets, John Rens of Martock and Oli Knowles have been most successful up to now, winning 83.33% of their sets. John just has his nose in front in terms of percentage of games won. This will be running until April.

The Thursday lunchtime and Sunday evening sessions are also still going ahead, although a few players have been lost since the spring. They are generally filling one court per session.

Clubhouse, open day
The clubhouse has undergone a deep clean. We agreed to bring our own tea towels for matches and club sessions.

There will be an open day on the Great British Tennis Weekend on Saturday 20th July. There will be more on that nearer the time.

Have a good year's tennis!

Mike