Some more excellent news received today. We have been successful in our application for funding through West Sussex County Council Members’ Big Society Fund for support with our club house of £25,000.

Thankyou to all involved, especially Sophia Wilks and to Councillor Debbie Kennard for her support in the application.

With the many applications we have submitted for our club house campaign, one of the key things we have highlighted is the growth of the club over the past few years. What we hadn’t done is tracked the full growth as we knew we were adding at least one new squad every year.

Mark has provided the registration figures since he took on the role and it shows we have over a 79% growth in the youth section alone over 3 seasons. Adding the senior figures in, the club growth as a whole is at over 60%.

Chatting with other clubs, the growth we are seeing is unprecedented but, we expect to continue growing year on year with the hope that in a few years our youth teams will naturally feed into the senior squad. It’s only 4 years until that could be a reality.

With our club now consisting of over 200 playing members, sharing the small facilities and 2 changing rooms we have access to this really does show the urgency for the club house.

Next season we will have at least 2 senior teams and 3 youth teams playing competitive rugby and hopefully not competing for changing rooms but using our new facilities.

As you hopefully saw in the last club house update, things have picked up a lot of momentum as we approach year end and we have a couple of new developments to share with you.

Firstly, the bad news. We have talked a lot about the £50,000 RFU funding we had secured for the club house development. Unfortunately, we met with the RFU last week and were advised that that funding had been reallocated as they did not think we would be ready to spend in time. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case but we are discussing alternative options to ensure that it does not impact our overall position.

And now the good news:-

• We have been successful with our National Lottery funding request and have secured £50,000.
• We have been successful with our application to the council to help fund the club house, improving the facilities at Buckingham Park with a new Cafe, Public Toilets and obviously the Community Club House. This contribution is £150,000!

Currently the Club have raised approximately £30,000 and with these new awards our fund raising has reached a total of £230,000 and we expect the build to be in the region of £350,000 so we have a little way to go. We do have the option of an interest free loan from the RFU of up to £100,000 and we have started the process. Any loan needs to be agreed at an EGM so when we are in a position to proceed with this we will issue notice to convene one.

With the outstanding fund raising balance of only around £20,000 (obviously the more we raise, the less we borrow) we are in a very strong position to start building early in the new year. We will be starting many of the final fund raising initiatives shortly (buy a brick is a popular option), but if anyone has access to a company or organisation that would be willing to sponsor Shoreham RFC or if you can help Sophia with the fund raising then please let me, Mark or Katie know.

We will be forming a club house committee shortly to manage this project, so any member that has building experience or has some time to assist please let us know.

The club house project has been a little busier this month and we’ve now got the  architectural drawings back which should give you a clearer idea on the scale of change we are proposing and we will be tendering for this work shortly.

Work with the Council has been extremely positive, and with funding from the Lottery of £50,000 confirmed we hope to have confirmation from both the RFU and the Council their levels of investment which will help us identify what we have left to raise or borrow. We have also completed our incorporation, and officially now known as Shoreham Rugby Football Club Ltd which enables us to move forward with this project with less risk and in line with RFU recommendations.

You can see from the drawings at a high level we aim to have a two story build comprising 4 x Changing Rooms, 2 x Officials Changing Rooms, toilets, a Kitchen & bar and a treatment room. Attached to the building will be a new Cafe and public toilets. These will not be operated by Shoreham Rugby Club.

The attachments below should be viewable in Acrobat Reader.

1111-PA-001 BLOCK PLAN 1111-PA-002 ELEVATIONS 1111-PA-010 PROPOSED GROUND FLOOR PLAN 1111-PA-010 PROPOSED LOCATION PLAN 1111-PA-011 PROPOSED FIRST FLOOR PLAN 1111-PA-012 PROPOSED ELEVATIONS 1111-PA-013 PROPOSED ELEVATIONS 1111-PA-014 SITE SECTIONS 1111-PA-015 SITE SECTIONS 1111-PA-016 PROPOSED SECTIONS