24/01/2025 Commitee Meeting Summary

Back with another summary of some of the key points in our commitee meeting last Friday, which usually occurs, every 4-6 weeks.

A big thank you to those of you who added your suggestions, ideas and pain points to the form I send out usually a week before the meeting. There were lots of submissions this time which is really great to see. On top of that, several of you had overlapping suggestions meaning that it’s much easier to identify the problems and solutions to these issues.

As usual, this is not a complete list of everything discussed; some things aren’t really relevant or finalised yet but and you’ll hear about this through other announcements

Tuesday Sessions

We’ve had some feedback on having more variety in the big games. We’ve actually got a decent amount of games in our arsenal but we’re definitely not cycling through them enough so we’ll include those that we see less often more frequently.

Otherwise, if anyone has any suggestions for big games, please just reach out to the club and we can trial it.

Thursday Sessions

Session Structure

We’ve had some feedback that some of the Thursday session’s have had less focus on playing with too much time spent warming up, discussion and drills, as well as some other aspects which we’d like to address.

We tend to be in agreement and whilst there’s definitely value in the aformentioned aspects, we’re going to try to keep the sessions running more smoothly to allow for more game time.

Individual or group warm ups will be started as soon as possible (no individual warm ups going straight in to a group warm up).
Warm-up length decreased (we’ve sometimes gone from warm-up to another style of warm-up into a drill which feels bad).
Have a variety of national team and balanced team practice. Eg. 1sts vs 3rds for 12 sets on a night isn’t the most useful for the 1sts so switch the teams up.

Reviewing Development Training Access Policy

We wanted to discuss our current thoughts on our Thursday development training policy which was added to prioritise access to our competitive players until 24 hours before the session.

It has provided a great place for our competitive teams to train together and we’ve seen some excellent progress.
We’ve not always been prompt on sending out the public link on Wednesday for any remaining slots.
This problem exists simply because the Thursday venue only supports a single court, and allowing for more than 18 in the past has lead to a crowded, more disorganised session.

To address the problems, we’re doing a couple of things:

Every Wednesday at 7pm, the link to the session will be shared in the messenger chat. Multiple commitee members now have ownership of this going forward to ensure that we deliver on that time.
Acquiring a new hall that would support a larger capacity.

Acquiring a new hall has proven to be very difficult. We’ve been hoping to start a junior club for some time now but we’ve not been able to find a venue with any availability.

With regards to a new hall, we’ve recently had an extremely promising opportunity for a hall with 2 courts. Should that prospect succeed, you’ll hear more about this shortly.

Foam Training

A few dodgballers have shown some interest in a foam dodgeball training session.

We’re going to be trialling a foam dodgeball session on Tuesday 25th March; we have a lot of upcoming competitive meets and we’re trying to maximise the amount of training we can do before that, hence the date. We’ve already started to run a competitive training court on Tuesday’s and we don’t want to have a 2nd alternative court at this point in time but we’ll gather your feedback after the trial session.

Advertising

A big thanks to Lewis who recorded an excellent video for the club.

You can view it here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEk9do0I6sZ/

The club used the video to feature in some local advertising to attempt to bring in some players which was actually very successful, so we’ll be continuing to do this going forward.