Hello everyone(new and senior), Firstly, we would like to thank all of you who made it to our first session, we hope you had fun and enjoyed it as much as we did! We are looking forward to seeing the hall full again next Saturday! There are a few things we'd like to point out and ask your help with (we realize this may not reach everyone who was there yesterday but at least some of you will be on the list): 1. We would like to gauge your interest, in particular the complete beginners, in a basic skills session (so ball handling, passing, shooting, agility drills - less cardio and more technical work); this is because based on numbers we had this Saturday (which we hope will be the norm) it would be useful to have a session when we can take things slower and also we can speed up the beginners training. Soon enough we will then be able to train all together since in less than a couple of months we will all be playing in the same teams (men and women respectively). We have been offered by the sports centre a session on Thursdays from 5 to 6pm, if you can make that please fill in the doodle (link following the next point). 2. The next point is about competing: our first weekend of competition will be the 21 - 22nd of November in the regional qualifiers of the University championship. This will be held in Birmingham and typically will be short games of around 20 minutes the number of which will be determined when we know our group. We will be driving to Birmingham and spend the night of Saturday there (last year we were at a yha hostel and the facilities were great, it was very cheap too so we will probably go for that again). The deadline for entering the teams into the competition is very soon(the 23rd of October) so we would like you to fill in the doodle with your interest and availability for then, this will help us determine if we enter 1 or 2 teams of each gender. Just to make this clear: We realize it is early to ask all of you to commit now, but we would like you to indicate with YES if you are fairly certain that you are interested and available, with MAYBE if you have not made up your mind yet about handball but you are potentially interested and available and NO if neither interested nor available applies. Also, if you can make one day but not both please indicate that, perhaps we can work something out and get you there and back somehow. Here is the link: http://doodle.com/poll/xc6dphtx5w4rfru9 3. This brings me to my next point which is more of an admin one: we would like to encourage all of you who were there on Saturday and are reading this to drop a line to Eleni(ep428@cam.ac.uk) and let her know that you were there; this is for two reasons - first it is very useful for our records and also like we've said before, we will at some point have to pay in order to be full members(unfortunately, we are neither rowing nor rugby so we have to be very thoughtful with our finances). Just to remind you that the fees would be 20 per term/35 per 2 terms and 50 per year. If you have not made your mind up as it was pointed out to us that some of you were not yet sure about committing for more than one other session - we are happy for you to come along for one, 2, 3 or more sessions and pay 5 pounds for each session and if you eventually decide to commit for the term we will deduct what you had paid previously from the term/yearly fee whichever. 4. Misc.: we are happy to take any comments or suggestions on board and work out solutions to things which may be working well/ not so well in training and not only. So for example it was pointed out that we could try having sessions in the weekday mornings hence the last question in the doodle poll. In general, if you have any questions or anything at all to say to us we are happy to hear it. We will do our outmost to make sure that although restricted, we make the most of our resources. Handball is a great sport and we will surely have fun and bring glory playing for our University. Really sorry for the very long text, hopefully you have managed to read through, we think things need saying sooner rather than later so that we have a smooth start to a great year of handball! Our emails are agv25@cam.ac.uk (Alex) and fs417@cam.ac.uk (Florian). We are very excited to see all of you coming back to training next Saturday! Best wishes from your captains, Alex and Florian.