Chatsworth Tennis Club Covid19 Resilience

Our Club

We are Chatsworth Tennis Club in Carlisle and we were established in 1898

 Our mission statement is "Tennis for everyone". 

What We Do

We have two indoor and four outdoor courts, and each week we provide over 40 organised coaching sessions, catering to people of all ages and abilities from complete beginners to national standard players. We offer tots tennis, mini tennis, junior coaching, adult coaching and wheelchair tennis, in addition to nifty fifties, county training, health & wellbeing and inclusion sessions, as well as school curriculum coaching on site and in schools.

You can join as a member or you can just pay and play. Our coach led sessions start from as little as £2.00

We have indoor court hire or outdoor court hire: You can play with your friends, play with your family, play in a group or a team or let one of our coaches put you through your paces.

We have over 230 members, but you don’t have to be a member to play here.

We’re a tournament venue, hosting county cups, winter county tour events for juniors and adults. We also run fun match plays, county champs and we hold over 50 competitive events each year. 

We have 4 men's and ladies' teams in the local leagues and several junior teams playing team tennis.

We are the host venue to School Games for Tennis Level 2 and host the final county-wide event. 

In school holidays we run fun holiday camps.

We also regularly run Free Open Days for anyone to come and try out our facilities.

In normal circumstances over 400 people use our club each week, including over 250 children and 40 people regularly in our inclusion sessions. 

We pride ourselves on being open and inclusive and aim to be a real community facility.

 The Challenges We Face

The club has been gutted by flooding twice in the last 15 years, in 2005 and 2015. 

Thankfully we’ve managed to bounce back both times. 

As the risk of flooding is always a consideration we were raising money to build a new club room upstairs, and move the expensive items like the plant room, kitchen and offices to the first floor to make the club more flood resilient. We only have £25k of insurance cover against flooding and the plant room alone cost £90k to repair after the flooding in 2015.

Then in March this year the coronavirus pandemic hit.

The club was completely shut down for eight weeks. This and the on going coronavirus situation has had a real knock-on effect on our usual income and put on hold all of the flood resilience fund raising we had planned.

We are lucky as tennis is one of the safest sports to return to. Although initially we were only able to play on our outdoor courts we made them open for anyone (members and non-members) to book online. It’s been fantastic to see so many people coming down and enjoying our outdoor courts.

Being allowed back to tennis after lockdown has made us all really appreciate just how much we love being able to come to the club and what tennis and being here means to our physical and mental health and wellbeing.

With the Coronavirus Pandemic still prevalent and the uncertainty of another lockdown, we took the decision to invest our flood resilience money in floodlights. This way, we will have as much court time available as possible all year round and help future proof our coaching programme against another indoor lockdown.

What We Need 

We now need to raise money to pay for the repair work and repainting of our outdoor courts so they stay fit to use and in the best-possible condition. Our outdoor courts haven’t been resurfaced for over 15 years and have been flooded twice, so they were certainly in need of some TLC.

Repairing, resealing and repainting the courts has made sure they are safe and playable even in the unique Cumbrian climate. Now, we can make the most of our new floodlights and ensure we continue to offer all our members and the local community more opportunities to play outdoor tennis all year round and especially in the event of another lockdown.

How You Can Help

If we can raise £5,000 then Sport England will match fund up to our target of £10,000.

It’s a large sum of money and if every member gave to the cause it would be £22 each. If every weekly user of the club contributed that’s £12 each.

If you can help by donating, even a small amount, it would be greatly appreciated. 

What Successfully Raising Funds Would Mean To Us 

If we hit our funding objective we will:

• Be more flexible should the indoor courts get locked down again due to Covid-19
• Be able to offer safe enjoyable outdoor tennis - for everyone
• Keep the club financially viable as we will be able to run an outdoor programme should our indoor facilities get closed again
• Ensure our outdoor tennis courts stay in a better condition for much longer
• Have more court availability all year round, giving more children and adults the chance to play the sport they love. This will help support our local community with their physical and mental health and well being.
• Keep our coaching team and staff busy and thriving.

Thank you for your time and please help in any way you can, it would mean a lot to everybody involved with Chatsworth Tennis Club.