Afternoon current / former / future Ballers, we hope you’re all still well and plodding along. When we went into lockdown scarves and wooly hats were still part of the Ballers nightly uniform! Here’s a quick update on what our restart plans currently are…

It remains unlikely we’ll be given the go ahead to start up full contact football for a while, but as soon as government guidelines allow we will be going ahead with our previously proposed Longies League which allows for us to manage social distancing (https://skballers.com/2020/05/06/ballers-longies-league/ for details).

We’ll keep a close eye on what Boris has to say in the coming weeks, and will look to get something started within 7 days of any change that allows us to. This effectively means that if the lockdown is eased this Sunday, 31st May, we could be getting started on Sunday 7th June, which is just over a week away! We will start initially with Sunday, and will be happy to run leagues at pretty much any time of the day. We hope everyone understands that half the number of players at any one time means we will only be making half the money, so we won’t be able to justify coming entirely off furlough full time just yet, but we obviously want to give people the opportunity to start kicking a ball around again in a semi-competitive manner. So in an ideal world as many teams as possible will find a suitable time on a Sunday to play. We will look to roll out alternative nights once we’ve got Sunday started, based on demand.

What we need you to do now is have a chat with your lads (or in the case of any potential new teams, round up some lads!) and let me know your thoughts. I could do with answers off all potential teams on the 4 following questions:

1. Are your lads up for it, or would they rather wait until we are back up and running fully?
2. How many lads are up for it, and therefore how many teams you will be wanting me to find space for (if there’s 6 or 7 of you, that will presumably be two teams!)?
3. Can your lads do Sunday, and if so what would be your preferred time of day? We would entertain running leagues in the early afternoon (2pm-4pm), early evening (4pm-6pm) and later evening (6pm-8pm), so please let us know of any times you definitely couldn’t do. These times are just examples…
4. If Sunday is a no go, what other nights between Monday and Wednesday could you do?
   

Please understand that this is effectively going to be like starting up a brand new business, and we don’t know how long we will have to do this for. There will also undoubtedly be teething problems, so a bit of patience would be appreciated.

Please help to make things as simple as possible for us!