Shortening the Year:
We have had repeated problems because the club's Membership Year does not coincide with the Competitions Year. Only paid-up club members are eligible for the competitions and they can only count scores achieved when playing with other club members. Problems have arisen when members have partnered players whose membership has lapsed before the end of the Competitions Year. With most of our systems now being maintained electronically we have manually over-ridden the program defaults to deal with specific cases but we are all agreed it would be far simpler if everything was synchronized. To achieve this we need to move the end of the Competitions Year back by two months from 31^st August to 30^th June and we have decided to do this in two stages:

• The 2011-2012 Competitions Year will be shortened to 11 months. This means that the “year” which began on 1^st September 2011 will now end on 31^st July 2012.

• The 2012-2013 Competitions Year will similarly be shortened by one month. This means that the “year” which begins on 1^st August 2012 will now end on 30^th June 2013.

 

Tallon Handicap Trophy:
This is an individual competition. We include the duplicate events staged on both the first and third Wednesdays of each month, which means there are potentially 24 qualifying dates and we then take the best 10 scores to determine the winner of the trophy. Because of the number of different dates involved, players will almost inevitably have played with several different partners so it was not envisaged that there would be a tie between two members who had played together throughout. In consequence there was never any formal stipulation requiring qualifying scores with more than one partner. Because the Trophy has produced just such a tie twice in recent years we have decided it would now be appropriate to amend the qualifying requirements so that with effect from the 2011-2012 Competition Year players must include scores with more than one player in their best 10 (i.e. no more than 9 scores with any one partner can be counted).

 

Substitute Events:
In the past we have arranged a substitute to replace any of the regular dates when an event counting towards a competition has been lost, such cancellations usually having been the result of Christmas holidays and or bad weather etc. To provide the replacement dates we have used the fifth Wednesday or fifth Friday dates that were available but this has meant that players have been unable to arrange regular partnerships for those “fifths” and/or have the opportunity to play with new partners. We have decided that,for the next two years we will not replace any date that is lost.

Where appropriate the qualifications for the relevant competition will be adjusted so that they will not exceed 50% of the available events, with fractions rounded up. This means that if the events actually held fall to 10 or less we will reduce the number of qualifying scores from 6 to 5.