Following an exceptional amount of work behind the scenes by
our volunteers and coaching staff, additional advice offered by the government
and Swim England, and a further meeting this afternoon, the Committee has taken
the decision to suspend all of our current training (pool and land based) from
tomorrow, Saturday 21st March 2020.
All sessions scheduled for Friday evening (20th
March) will run as normal.
We have been able to negotiate a holiday from payment with
most of our facility providers to ensure that we are able to restart training
as soon as it becomes appropriate to do so. This leaves us with our main
expenditure being the payments which we make to retain the services of our
coaching team. Some of our coaches have agreed to waive their payments to help
the club and we are extremely grateful for their assistance. However for some
of our coaches, the money they receive from the club is their main source of
income and we would like to try and maintain this for them. Additionally we
would hope that once the situation returns to normal, we are able to hit the
ground running in terms of both our coaching team and our training programme.
We are therefore looking to implement a basic, flat fee
structure of £25 per swimmer per month to try and ensure that the club stays
afloat until we are able to operate fully again. This will be effective from
April’s payments and will require you all to amend your standing order payments
accordingly.
We realise that for some more than others these are
uncertain times and if anyone feels that they are not able to maintain their
payments at this time and wishes to leave the club, we would like to assure
them that this will be no barrier to them returning should they wish to do so
in the future.
For those that do wish to stay with the club, our coaching team are looking at running online group sessions and are now working hard on scheduling and content. It is hoped that these will be a mixture of age-appropriate daytime and evening sessions. It is the intention to roll these out early next week starting with a series of online squad meetings. Details will be emailed out once they are arranged, so if you have not been receiving our recent emails please contact members.lesc@hotmail.co.uk to ensure that we hold the correct details.
Under the current guidance we expect this situation to
continue until at least the end of May, but any variation to this will be communicated
to you all. However, should you wish to contact the Committee during the coming
weeks contact details can be found on our website
Finally the Committee would like to thank you for bearing
with us while we have worked through the situation and look forward to seeing
you all at a pool somewhere in the future.
Helen Akers
on behalf of Long Eaton SC Committee
