Looking ahead to next season

As mentioned to some of you in recent weeks, given how stretched our squad has been this season, I think it's sensible that we assess whether and how we can have a squad to enter our 11-a-side league next season.

Of course it would be excellent to compete in our league again, but in order to achieve that I believe it makes sense to give some thought to how we can aim to have a squad that is at least a shade more competitive than this season.

We knew this season would be a test with going up a division, but our availability picture has brought about further challenges. Of course there are other elements to competitiveness beyond availability, but from the years that I've been involved with GHFC I do think that availability is key and that the biggest single thing that we can do to enable us to compete better is to increase the number of players available to us on a weekly basis.

Here are some of the challenges that we've faced this season:
- We've had the worst luck with long-term injuries that I've experienced in the last fifteen years
- For various reasons some of us haven't been able to play as much as we anticipated at the start of the season
- As a result we've used more players than during any other season in the last 15 years
- In our code of conduct it talks about having a core squad who are available for 80% plus of games to give us some continuity ... when you look at our squad over the whole season, mathematically this threshold has been hit by 5 people; whereas when we've had more successful seasons our core has typically been double this size or a little more
- In most seasons it has not been the norm for us to be scrambling around looking for players to get us up to 11 late in the week, but alas this season this has happened on several occasions
- Recruitment has become a little more difficult in the past few seasons: we don't have many keen footballers who are part of our partner church at present - and as some of our long-term players have got older it's naturally a little more tricky for them to find peers to sign on, so we need to consider new recruitment approaches

In case this topic seems a bit negative, this really isn't about blame and who has and hasn't been around. I know that plenty of us contribute a good deal of time and money to be part of our team, alongside meeting our various family, work and personal commitments: thank you! I'm particularly grateful for the people who have joined us mid-season and helped us to replace players who were injured or no longer available. Sometimes circumstances change (not least during the last two years!) and people feel the time is right to focus elsewhere. Rather the reason for us raising and discussing these points is to aim to develop a plan to get us a larger core of players for next season, so that we can commit to the league and aim to have a team that is a little more coherent and competitive.

So, I think the two key questions to ask of each of us are:

1. Do you think you will be able to be a part of our core squad next season? (I appreciate September might seem miles away to you, so provisional answers will have to do!)
2. Do you have any ideas as to how we can recruit and build the squad for next season?

The league would like confirmation from all teams by the end of April that they intend to be part of the league next season, so please let me know any thoughts or comments on this in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!