ES Council Meeting Birmingham – 28th May 2016

I attended the England Squash Council Meeting in Birmingham recently, a first for Northumbria to have a representative there, as far as I know.

The main purpose of this meeting was for England Squash to outline the changes taking place at ES due to Sport England reducing the funding given to squash because of dwindling participation numbers. This being a key ingredient for SE funding. Most of the changes that ES is implementing are to try to increase the weekly participation figures and these appear to be on the up. ES has also devolved downward control of funds and procedures to a County Associations Network and Regional Forums.

Keir Worth CEO gave his update to the gathered members.

ES also has been going through rigorous interviews to appoint the requisite number of board members as stipulated by SE. Of the eligible counties that could vote on the board members, 31 voted for the motion, 1 voted against and 6 did not vote at all. Some may remember one elected director – Phil Collins from Tynemouth.

There was lots of useful information coming from ES, there needs to be more justification for funding, a need to replace an aging stock (courts etc), encourage Local Authorities to include squash courts in any new leisure centres (as in Washington), a need for ES to generate revenue as a business and funds are available for increasing the number of Squash101 events.

The 1st phase of revamp for the ES website is due for release w/c 13th June with the old website taken down beforehand so be prepared for that. The new website changes to a more streamlined a better user experience with the existing data cleaned up before being loaded onto the new database.

And finally Racketball is due to be relaunched this summer with possibly a new name? Anyone want to guess?? BigBALL is my guess.