2014 Proposal to Increase Court Time

 Some of our members say they would like to train more often.

Our club court-time is constrained by several factors:

• Lime Kiln has space for only one volleyball court.

• The volleyball court is not regularly available on other days, so we are confined to Sunday evenings.

• Most matches are Sundays, which reduces the number of weeks available for training.

• We share our 3 hours training time between 2 mens teams, 2 womens teams and juniors.

• Our first teams (men and women) prefer to have some training time without the second teams, to achieve higher training intensity and standards (so each team usually has one hour alone plus one hour shared training with another team).

One way to increase training time would be to increase our Sunday evening court-time to 4 hours, 6-10pm (if Lime Kiln can accommodate us).  This would mean:

• On WVL match days we could have a 1-hour junior session before Aces and Bees play matches (3 hrs)

• On training days we could vary the schedule as now, for example:

  • 1 hr juniors then 3 hours mixed adults (occasionally – especially before/after the league season).

  • 2 hours women then 2 hours men (usually – especially during the league season).

If we assume a similar match schedule to this season, and first and second teams are willing to training together always, we could increase training time something like this:

 So the juniors and men would gain around 7 sessions over the season (nearly one per month) and the women would gain 3 sessions (the women are constrained by having more away matches on Sundays than the men).  This gain would be reduced if the first and second teams prefer to have separate training time.

Can we afford to increase our court-time?

The additional hour each week would cost the club around £700 for the season (at today’s prices: £21 per hour x 33 weeks).  This increase is a little over 20% of current annual costs (total £3,000 in 2012/13)

Assuming we have the same number of paying members, and we don’t change our annual membership subscription (currently £30 adult, £15 junior), our monthly training fees (includes training and matches) would therefore need to increase by 20%:

• Adult training fee would rise from £17 to £20 per month

• Junior training fee would rise from £8 to £10 per month.

• Would our members be willing to pay an increased training fee for extra training time?

• Would our members be willing to train earlier, from 6pm?