Volunteers needed the help at Club bar for 2026 season
- cricketchippenham
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
With the new season fast approaching we have the exciting news that we now have a full premises licence for the Clubhouse at the ground meaning that we can run a fully licensed bar.
Ideally, we wish to do this on all match-days and when training will be taking place. This a great opportunity for the club to add to the social experience of playing and watching cricket at Chippenham, increase interest in the club from the local community and raise important funds so we can continue to offer the excellent playing and training facilities at the ground.
Given the seasonal, weather dependent and random nature of when cricket is played, the number of people at the ground varies significantly. Therefore the only sensible way for us to run the bar is the short term at least, is through volunteers. I appreciate some of you have already expressed a willingness to volunteer to help with this but as we are now are at a point where we have a clear picture of ideally when we would open the bar and how many volunteers we need, I wanted to share more information with all members to see how many people feel they can help. Here is a summary of what is involved:
1. Below is a shift pattern for the hours we would ideally want to cover between Monday 13th-April and the end of July. To be clear, we only intend to open when matches, club training or a special event is taking place. Therefore towards the end of July the midweek match activity drops away quite a bit and although training will still be taking place the perception is the later shifts won’t be needed on most days into August on weekdays. In addition, only Sunday matches will run in September and all midweek and Saturday matches plus training nights will stop.
If games or training are cancelled due to bad weather, we won’t open the bar. Having said all that, you can see during that key mid April-July period we need significant volunteer support to cover all the shifts. So in a nutshell, we will only be able to open the bar when we have a volunteer to cover that shift.
2. As I am sure you appreciate having a Premises Licence comes with certain responsibilities and therefore all volunteers need to be trained and we need to keep records of this training. We have put together a training programme which is made up of the following:
a) A 15 minute online training session that includes a video covering the key legal and safeguarding points that those volunteering to work behind the bar need to know.
b) An onsite face to face session, which takes you through everything you need to know about serving and managing the bar when you are volunteering. Likely to last 30 minutes.
c) A refresher session on the above with all volunteers needs to be carried out every 6 months.
In the first instance we are looking for feedback on two things. Firstly, If you feel you can help by volunteering for shifts to run during the bar please let us know be using the link below to express your interest (please still do this even if you have already expressed an interest in the past). This won’t commit you to anything at this stage and we will contact you over the next few days to talk in more detail about what is involved and how much time you can commit to volunteering.
Secondly, if anyone feels they can take on the task of managing the Bar volunteer team, then please contact Darren or one of the other committee members directly, so we can discuss further what this involves. As a short summary, it means coordinating the volunteers to ensure we have as many shifts covered as possible, recruiting new volunteers when others can no longer do it and ensuring volunteers have had the training mentioned above.
I hope the above all makes sense but don’t hesitate to contact one of the committee members if you have any questions. Otherwise if you feel you can help with this please use the link above to express your interest.
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