VOLUNTEER - any activity that involves spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or someone (individuals or groups). Central to this definition is the fact that volunteering must be a choice freely made by each individual.
I thought I’d start with the wonderful definition of a common word, why you may ask?, well it’s a word associated with every individual in our club who supports our cause. Committee, coaches, treasurers, social committee to name but a few. All of the people who volunteer within HTJFC do a fantastic job and although I tell them all of the time what really is fulfilling is that they shrug off the praise and say “we do it because we love it and the club”. What a fantastic bunch of people, eh, there’s not many organisations that have almost 100 volunteers who each week give up on average 5hrs each per week, so doing the math in total that’s 500 hrs per week, 2000 hrs a months and a whopping 24,000 hours per year on average VOLUNTEERING FOR HTJFC...WHAT A CLUB... J
Other stuff that’s been going on in my world this week, firstly pulling a calf muscle isn’t the best thing to do, quite painful actually!!,l we’ve booked this year’s “Respect the game week”, sold out our mOObs event tickets, so a MASSIVE 250 guests will enjoy a great night by the local band fronted by David Mole, our sportsman dinner event in April with Paul Merson has sold 200 tickets, this is our first dinner hosting event but to sell that amount of tickets is great (still 50 or so tickets left if anyone wants one). The two funding forms I mentioned in my last blog were complete and sent, crikey me, did i underestimate what you need to do to complete one of these!!! Definitely on the delegation list the next time, anyway they are submitted and i hope the hard work pays off. A constant over the past week or should i actually say the past month is the weather, we’ve had biblical rain which has pretty much wiped out the football calendar on our grass pitches, the back-log of fixtures mounting up and mid-week games in April/May a certainty, it raises the hot topic about 3G pitches, should they be used and more of them installed, well my view is YES, the access we have to Clegwell 3G is superb and for me it’s the future, I just wish we could take it over full time to offer our teams more in terms of training and matches, I continue to live in hope on this dream, we are still a relatively young club but definitely going in the right direction, who knows this time next year we could be MILLIONAIRE’s (all you oldies reading this will know what classic British sitcom that line’s from).
So I sign off from this week’s blog with another great phrase from the same sitcom, after writing this blog for the first time but then a) forgetting to have the lap-top battery charger plugged in, thus the battery life dying until dead DOH! and b) not saving my first blog attempt, thus losing everything I originally typed, this version is therefore my second attempt!!!!!!! So feels appropriate to say “STEPHEN YOU PLONKER”
