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Friday Feb 03, 2012

Facilities Wanted

Recently I have found booking a venue for pre-season training very frustrating. It appears that this time of year every team wants to use the same facilities and at the same time.

At Hull Scorpions we train at a school which also has an all-weather pitch which we have used for around 6-8 weeks every pre-season for the past 6 years. Unfortunately, this year the facility has been fully booked by various teams from mens football to junior rugby league. This left me trying to find another venue at relatively short notice. During my search I discovered that there are very few facilities with all-weather facilities in the part of Hull where we normally train and those that have do not open on Sundays which is when we train. After expanding my search to include other parts of Hull and various indoor facilities it became clear that in order to get somewhere suitable indoor or outdoor was going to cost us £30 per hour which is £60 a week for a two hour session and would total up at between £360 and £480 for our usual 6-8 week pre-season. For a team which has just acquired new uniforms and equipment this is a lot of money and in order to raise it we would need to charge our players between £4-£6 each week which would inevitably put at least some of them off training.

Originally I thought that it was just us who had this problem then I discovered that the Northern Baseball Academy had to change its venue at the last minute due to their usual facility in Bolton been booked up. Like me they could not find a suitable replacement within the same area and had to move to Manchester.

As far as the Scorpions go it appears to me that as a team we would be better off braving our diamond and hoping that it doesn’t rain much over the next few weeks. However the whole experience has left me wondering why there appears to be so few all-weather facilities and even fewer that are affordable for an amateur team?

Posted by Simon ( 10:07 PM )
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