This coming season you will see an unfamiliar name appear in the fixtures and the Handbook. If you see ‘Seven Sisters’ you are not imagining it. We will have a team called Seven Sisters competing in the Ladies league. This is not a new club – you will know the players very well as they have played for Goostrey and Canute for many years.

Both clubs were fearful of having too few ladies to ensure turning out a team every week in the ladies league. Canute had already withdrawn and Goostrey were considering doing so. This was a real shame, especially as we are struggling for numbers in Ladies badminton. They came up with the idea of combining forces which is perfectly legitimate in our rules as players can represent more than one club in different disciplines. We already have several people who do this. In this particular case the amalgamation of the Ladies is fairly evenly split between Goostrey members and Canute members. We could just have called the team Goostrey in which case the Canute identity is lost, The reverse would also have been true. The Ladies wanted to be able to compete without losing that identity. Practicalities meant that the only way to introduce a completely independent  entity would have needed a new club. That wasn’t really what was wanted. Instead our web master has amended the database so that a team with no specific club identity can compete. This team will be Seven Sisters.

Again for practical reasons Seven Sisters needs to be administered through an existing club, for registration, fees, contacts, web handling etc. Goostrey will be the administrative home of the team, so you will find details of Seven Sisters under the Goostrey entry on the web and in the handbook. Seven Sisters will appear in the fixtures so if you are playing against them in Ladies Divison 2 this time – look at Goostrey for details.

In case you were wondering, Seven Sisters is not the number of competing ladies. There are not seven of them nor are they sisters. They looked at a few road names somewhere between Goostrey and Knutsford and came up with Seven Sisters Road between Toft and Ollerton. Simple as that!

The clever technique Carl Swain has used to manage the web site is to use a new field in the database called ‘Nickname’. All fixtures and web entries will use Nickname as the first point of reference, so if there is a Nickname that will be used. In the absence of a Nickname then normal club name will be used as now. This opens up the possibility for you to give your teams more meaningful names if that suits you. At the moment you are stuck with Welsh Row A, Canute B, Northwich C etc etc. These teams can now be called anything you want. How does Welsh Row Wanderers, Canute Crusaders, Northwich Nomads sound? You don’t even need to mention the club at all, so Astronomers, Blade Runners, Brexiteers (sorry about that one) could be used. The potential is endless. OK well you don’t have to if you don’t want – but be aware of the possibility of giving the team more than just A, B, C. This is something you can start doing now, but of course the handbook being printed in August means you might confuse people. Club Administrators will be able to put team names into the system so anything generated from the database will be up to date.

Any questions - please don’t hesitate

Hon Sec