Sorry this has ended up as a rather long note - thanks in advance for reading. You have received or will receive in the next few days the request for payment of subscriptions. We would really appreciate it if you could take care of this as soon as possible and minimise the amount of time needed to chase these up. As previously these can be paid in one go or monthly.

Player Subscriptions
We try to keep the subscriptions as low as we can, recognising our position as a grass roots village club. We think at £170 for most members it is very good value including weekly training. FA and league registrations and match pitches, plus coaches training. Most of the subscriptions go on artificial surfaces to ensure training can go on through the winter, and as you know we supplement our subscriptions through the fundraisers of the quiz night and the tournament.

Pitch Updates
We continue to work to improve our pitch availability through the winter months. With thanks to Dave Cauvin, we now have two 7 a side pitches at St James’ cricket club, which are much better draining. In addition with the arrival of the Arc at Burgess Hill, there is a little more artificial pitch availability than there has been. Nathalie, our fixture secretary, has secured the 9 am slot on Saturday there and we are finalising plans around a Sunday pitch that can be utilised by the Horses. Hopefully this should allow all teams to get some slots on the 3G, thereby ensuring some home football matches even in wet winters.

Fundraising
For this year, the plan is to fund this extra pitch time through a “go fund me“ initiative which we are launching on our website now. We are hoping to raise at least £4500 in total, which may sound a lot but an hour at the Arc is over £100 and we need at least 1.5 hours for our matches. If you are able to contribute when your team utilises it, that would be amazing and help to demonstrate if there is support for the additional spend. Alternatively, if half our parents contributed £30 per child for the year now, we would get there immediately. Any excess will be used for more pitches or improving the equipment of the teams for training and matches. During the winter we will try and solicit more opinions and refine the process for next year.

Join the committee
Finally, we are looking for additional committee members. We are planning to split the fixtures and registration secretary roles so that they each cover half the club ( younger ages or horses and older ages). This should make both roles much more manageable as there will be fewer coaches and parents to liaise with So if you feel you might be able to help please speak to me or any of the other committee members; the commitment in this new form will not be too large but they are critical functions to allow the club to exist and we’d welcome your views at the broader committee meetings around the direction of the club.

Many thanks

Phil