Vol. 1, Issue 9 - Getting Things Ready

The season begins for many of our teams in just a couple of weeks. Here's a quick rundown of what is happening at Barham FC. This issue of our newsletter comes to you from Katrina & Tom.

We hope that you have all had an amazing summer and are all well. The club has seen a huge amount of interest from new players over the summer, and this is absolutely fantastic news.

UPDATE ON THE COMING SEASON

We’re so grateful to you all for working on getting registered onto the Whole Game System & Match Day App. It is a huge effort and steep learning curve, but hopefully, we are nearly through the worst of it, with over 70 players now registered with the club. If you haven’t yet managed to complete all the tasks, please take heart and keep going! For every member of the club, we need your membership forms, photos and payment for the season as soon as possible, as we must have this all sorted to allow you to come to training and play matches. By doing this, we will be able to communicate any change to training session times directly and quickly and keep an official register of who is at training. If you would like to talk about staging payments, please contact Diane, our Treasurer, at events@barhamfc.com.

Don't hesitate to get in touch with JP or Katrina if you are grappling with the technology. We can do quite a bit for you from this end if we know you are having problems:- jp@barhamfc.com or katrina@barhamfc.com.

LEAGUE ENTRIES

We are so delighted to say that we are entering at least five teams in various leagues this year at the time of writing! This is a really significant expansion on the previous season. In addition, we are aiming to run squads and training in other age groups to ensure that as many groups as possible have access to play.

YOUTH TRAINING UPDATE

Under 10s: Sundays at 9.30-10.30

To improve the coaching offering, we have had an offer from Aaron to be added to the coaching set-up for the Under 10 and potentially one other coach to work specifically with the younger sections. We are working through the FA requirements to get these kind people fully on board. Most of you know Aaron already, with his son Archie playing in the Under 8 team. In the short term, Aaron will be working with the supervision of other Barham FC coaches as he finds his feet.

League wise, for the Under 9s and Under 10s, there is the opportunity to enter the Faversham League from January. There is no pressure on this side, but over the next couple of months, as everyone gets to know Aaron and gets into the swing of things, it would be great to have feedback on whether this is something that you would all want. Kevin, Chico and I will have a trial run in the Faversham league over the next few months with our teams to assess the suitability for our club etc.

In the meantime, we have developed several local contacts of teams who would be delighted to play friendly matches if there is demand. All this requires is a little parental help and enthusiasm to get it going.

We have also got a fully qualified coach in Kevin, who will be taking on the reins for our Under 7s. They will have so much fun this coming season with him!

Under 14s

Mike, Dan and Katrina continue to coach the team and are looking forward to this year’s season with a healthy sized mixed squad.

Under 16/17s

We have scheduled the first combined training session for these groups for Wednesday 1st September at 6 pm. Please do come along and play. The sessions will evolve according to player suggestions and be supervised by the Men’s manager, Phil Young. This will provide a great pathway to adult football.

SATURDAY PICNIC - PITCH READINESS AFTERNOON

The Bear Trap will be open from 1-4 pm this Saturday to all members and their families for a kick about and also for those who can lend some time to tidying the long grass and getting pitches ready. Please do come over and lend a hand! Enough people have already committed to bringing tools, and we need willing volunteers to stack the trailer, learn to measure out the pitch and use the line marking machine.

SUMMER FUN DAY

The last of our popular Summer Fun Days is next Tuesday the 31st of August. John and the team will be on hand to make sure that this last day will be a full-on football extravaganza. Spaces are limited, so reserve your place ASAP.

If there are any football-related questions, as always please get in contact with Tom, Michael or Katrina and we can answer any questions. Otherwise, we can’t wait to welcome everyone back and have a great time playing football.