The league thought it worthwhile giving it a go and Geoff Adams from New North Road Baptist Church is administering the pool. Anyone wanting to join, Geoff’s contact details are: MobileNo: 07885 988527 Email: geoffreymadams@aol.com

An example of how it could work:
A team might get promoted, but a player may not be keen to play in that higher division. Or, the club might have a large squad meaning they would not play very often.  Rather than drop out of the sport, this is where the pool of players comes in; The player could join the pool, and is now able to sub for another club’s team when they’re short of a player, maybe because someone is poorly, injured or on holiday.  The individual gets to play, the fixtures get fulfilled, and hopefully we keep a bigger number of people playing table tennis.

We appreciate there could be arguments about bringing in markedly better players, or only having weaker players available in the pool, and to counteract this we would suggest looking at the players past handicaps in order to judge their suitability.  It would also be courteous to advise the opponents that a team is planning to use a sub if time permits.  The hope is that for many, our motivation for playing is to play a range of people, having more people playing, and enjoying a decent evening than focussing on the end result.  To avoid distorting results, the pool should not operate for Division 1 teams.  Those teams should be able to cover player shortages from lower division players in their own clubs in most cases.

We hope as a committee clubs will respond to the idea and use the pool of players instead of maybe cancelling matches when short of a player.