South Devon Tennis Centre
Erme Playing Fields, Ermington Road • IVYBRIDGE • PL21 9ES
Tel: 01752 893700
Dear Members
Here is my reprot for the AGM on Wednesday:
Manager's Report 2024 AGM
I have been in post for almost 2 years and in that time, I have spent a considerable amount of time understanding the business. Before I became Manager I did not fully realise how delicately balanced the operating of this centre is, and why tennis cannot be the only income stream. The LTA have admitted that they would not build a pure tennis centre again because tennis requires a lot of space, cannot be scaled up like a gym and is resource hungry.
So my first focus was to make the best of what we have. Increase usage and increase income, how do we maximise the potential of the centre and ensure we can keep it open for tennis from 9am to 9pm, 7 days a week.
We visited many different centres and conducted lots of research with the support the LTA.
Following this, we focused on attracting more people to tennis including more #tennisopenedup in line with the LTA’s national strategy. Tennis for specific groups of people including tennis fitness for young mums at one end of the spectrum and walking tennis for older players at the other end.
We have also put a lot of energy into developing our junior and family programme, including tennis for free, holiday camps, tennis for children who are home schooled, those with autism and our junior coaching. We recognised that these people are the members of the future and the need to encourage younger working age people to engage with the club.
In the first 12 months I pushed tennis hard in Ivybridge, with offers, banners and free promotions. But despite a lot of effort I could not fill the outdoor courts. I also had to concede that our current membership packages did not really offer many of the groups mentioned what they would want from a tennis membership. We talked a lot to the LTA about how people access sport and activities.
17 months ago we introduced Pickleball and made the decision to pull back on introducing any other new sporting activities. We were approached by walking football and cricket as well as others. But we said no.
We concluded that Pickleball, although not tennis is a racket sport and belongs to the same family as tennis, so if we have to have other sports it is a preferential sport to support. It was also attracting the younger demographic that the club needs and introducing the centre as a whole to new families.
Netball operates in our deadtime and the income from this helps us to keep the staff employed all year round. So we concluded to continue to support Netball.
Therefore our focus now is Tennis, Pickleball and Netball .
It is undeniable that the work we have done has significantly contributed to the uplift in our income, from £317,269 in 2022 to £391,527 in 2023. However, it is not enough to offset the significant rise in costs over the last two years. Furthermore, we heard just a few weeks ago that there will be a further increase to the National Living Wage and National Insurance – which will impact us directly and also likely to push up suppliers costs which will be passed on to us.
THE PLAN
I have a two-pronged approach to addressing this situation:
In terms of increasing our potential and making the most of what we have, I believe that there is still room for improvement. This is why changing our membership structure is so very important. With only have 158 members. Club activities, like TNTs and Club sessions are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
We need to provide membership options for people who want different things from their tennis, coaching for example. Some of the people who regularly attend the improvers sessions, pay the club nearly £900 a year for their tennis. And one of our most popular evenings for tennis is the Hit and Hopers night, which is actually operating now at an improvers standard.
Could a coaching membership package encourage more of these people to become members and subsequently engage in other activities here as well?
Secondly, we need to increase the court space. If we could cover two of the outdoor courts, we would give ourselves 50% more covered space. Some of the activities that are currently in conflict with member court time, could then move outside and members would also have more covered space to use when the weather is not favourable.
The District Council has provisionally awarded us £100,000 towards this and we have engaged with an architect to work through the options.
So please bear with us whilst we fully investigate these options.
We would continue to welcome help and support from members both in terms of club maintenance, gardening and also social media content creation of distribution.
Members you are incredibly important to the survival of the club. We need you and we need more of you. We recognise that opening the centre to lots of different groups of people creates challenges in terms of court space and we appreciate your support whilst we go though these changes.
A description of the proposed new membership will follow later today.
Lesley Crocker
General Manager
08/11/2024
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