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    What to do about the leagues- update

    Hello again.

    Wendy, Michael and I 'met' last week to take a look at how we might manage the leagues depending on what we can actually do when the time comes and our discussion started by separating what we do with the partially completed Spring league from what kind of league will we be running in the Autumn. 

    We've had a range of suggestions from players and captains about how to make use of the Spring league results from scrapping the league and starting again through to extrapolating a likely outcome and starting from that. We've had a few suggestions on extrapolation too including using maths, levels, expectations, taking account of promised resurgences or just plain wishful thinking...

    Our view was that we wanted to make use of the results so far if we could, apply some judgement and see if what came out made sense. We'd rather not scrap the league unless it's really too uncertain. In many cases teams were only a few matches away from completing the league though some, in particular the university teams still had a long way to go. Michael had studied the state of the league before our call and is pretty sure we can come up with a reasonable proposal. This is significantly helped because division 1 only has 5 teams in allowing us some flexibility and reducing the number of relagations per division to one.

    Michael is currently documenting our proposal and we will share that with you in due course.

    We also discussed the ladies league but that is in something of a state of change at the moment so the Spring results so far won't make too much difference.

    We then turned our attention to what we might be able to do for the Autumn. Squash is not a sport that lends itself to social distancing - it couldnt be much worse - so we really don't see us back to normal by the Autumn. Given the guidelines beginning to appear and hoping for the best, we still expect there to be restrictions by the time Autumn is upon us but we may be able to do *something*. We may need smaller teams, we may need to arrive and leave in pairs (which will prevent car-sharing) and we may have to play locally. Or whatever - we don't know. It's also likely that some people will not want to play if they are protecting family etc., and we may not see university students back for a while...

    So our feeling is that we won't be back playing anything like 'normal' until Spring 2021 and our fingers are firmly crossed for that. So, for the Autumn, once we find out what we're allowed to do, our plan is to propose something of a placeholder 'league' that's aimed at keeping us entertained and challenged, see who wants to take part and go from there. We'll be looking for your ideas as we approach that time. Watch this space!

    Cheers,

        Richard, Michael, Wendy.

     

    Hi.

    I think the last message we sent out on this was that, due to COVID-19, we were stopping the Spring leagues and it was very unlikely that we would be able to finish them. That's still true.  And as it turns out there will be no play-offs, summer league or doubles either... Tough times.

    As we look ahead to the Autumn and the possiblity we might be able to run that league (we can but hope - and we should certainly plan) we need to make some decisions about how we manage the promotion/relegation between the seasons.

    Wendy, Michael and I will be meeting (virtually) Monday evening for an initial discussion and then we'll have a follow up call to put a proposal together. We would like to hear from you what you think we should do.

    Note we are including both mixed and ladies leagues in our discussion so opinions welcome from all players. We have already heard from a few of you but we need to hear from everyone with a view including the uni teams who no doubt have an extra level of uncertainty to deal with.

    Please do get in touch.

    Thanks,

        Richard.