My personal, sporting and professional life mean that the restrictions on life due to Covid19 since mid-March have brought me a range of perspectives. As a parent it has meant about 15 weeks so far of home school for our 7 and 9 year old children, alongside full time work. Whilst the volleyball community will know me as a player, coach and trustee at Newcastle Staffs – my career is in sport and I am the Chief Operating Officer at the Youth Sport Trust, a national children’s charity that uses the power of sport to improve young people’s lives.

1.       As it starts to look like the government are thinking about opening leisure facilities can I ask what your club is doing to prepare to go back to playing?

We moved relatively promptly to close down our activities in March, and whilst we were able to create a ball-loan system for members and it was a fun novelty to run our annual awards online through a Facebook broadcast (which reached almost 600 viewers!), we also had to postpone our 40th Anniversary Dinner and other celebrations which was heart-breaking after all the work our volunteers had put into it. We have a brilliant set of Trustees that form our board, and we immediately moved to a footing regarding Covid-19 that our first commitment should be to protect the health of our members, and our second should be to protect the club. We benefit from legal and insurance expertise amongst our Trustees, meaning that our response to Volleyball England consultations and queries from our members have been oriented to these priorities.

2.       What do you think the main challenges will be and how are you going to overcome them?

As facilities open up in the next few weeks (which seems inevitable) our first priority will be to risk assess the venues and delivery of volleyball in them. If we don’t do this well, and someone gets ill with Covid-19, or passes it to others, and our members become seriously ill then we will have failed in our duty and this is not something to brush off lightly. Venues will need to provide their own risk assessments, confirmation of signage, cleaning regimes, restrictions on toilets etc, limitations on numbers, use of waiting areas etc.

We use four venues to train in – will they all have the same risk assessments and restrictions? Will some levy an additional cost due to the extra cleaning they need to provide? Will they open straight away if staff are on furlough? All are based on education sites (school, College and Uni) – will these be open at all to third party bookings in the autumn term? We just don’t know the answers but are trying to be thorough with the questions!

We don’t know what the regulations on play will be yet but we will have to take time to understand the Volleyball England advice too – as the deliverers of the activity it will ‘on us’ to combine the venue and the volleyball assessments to form our own, then brief coaches and players, and then follow through.

Things like the following all need considering:

• keeping contact registers for 21 days after sessions will be the norm for a while

• for some of our groups which see over 20 people training in the hall at the same time – if numbers are limited we might have to have a booking system for training sessions

• if we do this do we ‘lock out’ some members from the club, or face paying for more court time and asking for more time from volunteers (we typically have courts for over 20 hours per week already during the indoor season)

• We may have coaches that don’t want to risk exposing themselves

• We may have members who have vulnerable family members (although shielding will end 1st August, people will still feel vulnerable)

… its hard to consider everything and simple, step by step practical advice and guidance for clubs in this period will be very helpful especially in the context of insurance and protection. Most of all, we want to play. But we don’t want to risk anyone’s health and that has to be our paramount concern.

3.       What do you think the ‘New Normal’ will look like?

Tough question! For Volleyball there is no doubt that the 20/21 season will be ‘different’ and ‘memorable’! I would like to think we will see increase co-operation between clubs on things like fixture planning in the NVL. It excites me in some ways that we might have test ourselves to play matches every single weekend – like we would if we were a rugby, netball, hockey, basketball or football club… whilst daunting from a people and infrastructure point of view it may increase our credibility with parents and young players vs other sports. I wonder if a side-effect along with environmental concerns might be that we increase regionalisation of competitions as a sport. As a Trustee – holding meetings on zoom has worked really well (as long as everyone has turned the TV off! 😊) with full attendance throughout, so whilst we all live locally why not do this sometimes as it will reduce costs and hassles in booking rooms.

The club finances will be relatively stable as we manage them closely and our costs will come down along with income if we take time to get playing again.

We went into this break on the verge of confirming some very ambitious plans for the future of the club based on facility developments and my priority as chair of Trustees is going to be reigniting these developments and getting our 2030 Golden Anniversary Vision off the ground, setting a game-changing plan for our club.

Thanks Will.