We are going to have a wonderful home-base when we get our new building in about a years time, everything will be better than it is now: bigger / better meeting spaces, bigger / better canteen-bar- kitchen set-up, brand new toilet-shower facilities, better located storage areas for our training gear, bigger gym, appropriate facilities for people with disabilities i.e. new wider staircase / new lift.
But here’s the problem guys. As of in a couple of weeks time, we are going to be a massive club that doesn’t have a home! Our pavilion will become a building site, replaced for the next twelve months by a few little ‘portable’ buildings (some toilet / shower areas, some changing space, a canteen), but that’s it! No great social space in which we can continue to enjoy the benefits of membership of FHC. The timeline is: Choosing the builder / establishing contracts / getting them on site: Oct – Nov: Demolition of all internal structures – throughout December, builder’s holidays the month of January, and in February the massive new renovation gets underway! It’s been estimated as a nine month building period from Feb forwards.
This next year will see a testing of our ‘social capital’, the spirit and commitment that underpins FHC. We’ll have to find other ways to socialize as a team / as a Club, other ways to conduct meetings, other ways to prepare for and then analyze elite level games. But our Club is not our building, it’s you and I and the other 600+ terrific people that call FHC ‘home’. Regardless of what confronts us next year, let’s all continue to enjoy the friendships and social connections that sport provides us with, let’s commit to be there to cheer on our club-mates, and let’s commit to get to social functions which will require us to go off-site. ‘Survive’ for a while, so that we can ‘thrive’ thereafter!
Brendan Sheehan, Pavilion re-build sub-committee
