Develop your Club with West Squash!
Junior League
West Squash and Racketball (WSR) are looking for your ideas to help West clubs develop with the aim of growing the size of the squash playing community in the West. This could be starting a junior club, or getting more adults playing by advertising “open doors” days at the club for non-members to come in and try squash.
Take the Craighelen Project for example. During the summer, we met up with the Kurt Hart and Chris Bowman from the squash section the club. to see how we could develop a new junior section for the club. WSR agreed to meet the travel and coaching costs for Stuart George over a six week start-up period.
We started with a couple of taster sessions run by Stuart at the Club summer camp in July. The response to the summer taster sessions was really promising. The club then followed up the taster sessions with Monday coaching classes run by Stuart:
- 4:00 PM (ages 5-10 yrs)
- 5:00 PM (11-16 yrs)
The kids paid £20 for the first seven week coaching block. The end result? The club now have a junior section of about 16 kids playing on a weekly basis. They’re even looking at putting a team into the new West Squash junior league.
The next target for the club is to use the local Active Schools coordinator to attract more juniors to the club. This is exactly the kind of project that DAVID FALLON, the new SSRL West Development Manager can help with.
The success of this project has been due to hard work and 100% buy-in from guys at Craighelen. A junior club has real benefits, not only for Craighelen, but for every club. These include:
- In the long term, the club will benefit from juniors feeding into the league teams;
- To raise the local profile of squash
- To increase the membership of the club.
- Parents and friends may join the club.
A full article on the project can be found here: Helensburgh Advertiser Article
Develop YOUR Club!
WSR are very keen to help ALL West clubs develop and increase their numbers of members. We are open to any and all ideas. If you or your club would like to do something to promote the sport, we want the chance to support your idea!
