Update from Executive Chair Andrew Stalbow

In the Malvern Town programme, Andrew Stalbow gave an update on what he has been focussing on since the sale completed. For anyone who hasn’t read the programme, here are the highlights

Thank you for the incredibly warm welcome at the games versus Chippenham Town and at Taunton Town last week. It was great to see us traveling to Taunton in such strong numbers. If we’re to have a successful season, it will be because of the togetherness of all of us at the club. It’s early days in the season, and it’s good to hear the belief and positivity in every conversation.

We’ve spoken about how we want to be a launchpad for young players and it was a committed performance from the U18s to progress in the FA Youth Cup vs Portishead Town 10 days ago. I was pleased to see so many members of the senior team and the coaching staff at the game.

I’m a little over two weeks in to the role, and we’ve been focused on the football, the infrastructure and the future training facility, all with the aim of supporting the teams to deliver their best performances.

Firstly, we’ve moved Scott Bartlett from a part-time role to a full-time role. It’s important he has more time on scouting, opposition analysis, training, the building up of our football infrastructure as well as time to invest into the community. We want our manager to be 100% focused on the job and we’re thrilled he’s signed up.

We’ve been working on enhancing the player experience. To that end, we’re improving the home dressing room, adding a screen for coaching, installing a new floor, fixing the showers as well as some other smaller tidy ups. We are also working to add nutritional options for players pre-and post-game, as well as after training.

And we’ve started work on finding ourselves a piece of land that could become a training facility for us to invest into for the men’s team and the women’s teams, and also to be made available for the U18s, the youth teams and the wider community too. We have identified potential sites and we have kicked off conversations with local stakeholders. It’s a key project for us.

We are also working through our investment into the Twerton Park pitch for the rest of the season, more details to follow once we move forward on that. Unfortunately we won’t be able to fix the drainage in a meaningful way until the end of the season.

In addition, we’re building a small but talented team off the pitch to complement our incredible volunteers. I look forward to sharing more details with you on these very soon.

And then lastly, before the game today I’m hosting a reception inside Randall’s to say thank you to our wonderful volunteers, and the previous board, without whom this club wouldn’t be here. We’re lucky to work together with an extraordinary group of volunteers and together we’ll continue to work hard to try and unlock Bath City’s potential.