We all know that sports and leisure activities can help physical and mental wellbeing through increasing fitness and engaging with others. However, many of us are less physically active than we would like. In my own case, most of my limited exercise comes from walking, cycling around town, a bit of gardening, and occasionally running around hitting people with fake swords (!) as part of one of my hobbies (live action role playing). I’ve fallen out of the habit of taking part in organised sporting activities. My background includes being a civil servant for over thirty years, mainly based in Cheltenham, but recently I’ve made nowhere near enough use of CACSSA’s facilities. As Chair of CACSSA, I would like our members (including me) to make much more use of the wide range of sports and recreation that we and our affiliated clubs provide. I am passionate about us being a fully inclusive and accessible volunteer-led association where everyone is welcome, whether you actively participate in team sports or are involved in other ways.

CACSSA is an area association of the Civil Service Sports Council (CSSC), a not-for-profit, membership organisation of over 140,000 colleagues across the civil service and wider public sector. CSSC provides sports, health and wellbeing benefits, together with savings (such as family membership of English Heritage and Cadw), discounts (at supermarkets, DIY stores, cinemas, etc) and a wide range of leisure opportunities (such as theatre trips and discounted days out). Members of CSSC who are based in the Cotswold area become part of CACSSA automatically at no extra cost.

CACSSA began 70 years ago when GCHQ first moved to Cheltenham. Shortly afterwards we gained a lease on our sports grounds at Tewkesbury Road. In April next year we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of our Club House which is an excellent venue for social events and activities. We now have two football pitches, a rugby pitch, a lacrosse pitch, a floodlit all-weather sports pitch, cricket squares, four tennis courts, two squash courts and two skittle alleys. There are currently 11 sports clubs affiliated to CACSSA: archery, cricket, football, lacrosse, rugby, skittles, squash and tennis which all use the Tewkesbury Road facilities, and golf, hockey and sailing which meet offsite.

CACSSA has an impressive history but unfortunately our future is not secure. Participatory sport is declining across the country, especially since Covid, despite increased awareness of the importance of physical and mental health. Meanwhile, there are some inter-related challenges and opportunities coming up for CACSSA:

• We need to renew CSSC’s lease with Cheltenham Council on the Tewkesbury Road sports grounds. A new lease will cost more but could open up new opportunities for grants to improve our facilities.
• We want to modernise our changing rooms to provide individual shower cubicles which will make them more suitable and inclusive for a range of sports.
• We are considering other options to improve existing facilities and develop new ones to support our affiliated sports clubs and other leisure activities at Tewkesbury Road or elsewhere. Ideas include providing a café, board games evenings, film nights, e-sports events, reinvigorating the skittles club, restarting a table tennis club, and starting new clubs for walking, running, netball, games, etc.

In tackling all this, the CACSSA Committee and I want to listen to our members so that we better understand what you want from your club, and how we can together develop it for the future. Over the next few months, we want to engage with you so that we can reaffirm our purpose and develop a future vision and strategy together.

We are holding the annual CACSSA Family Fun Day at Tewkesbury Road on Saturday 17 August. Everyone is welcome from 2pm for an afternoon of leisure activities and games followed by live music with the OFFtheGRID covers band from 8pm until 10.30pm. This will also be a chance for you to meet members of the CACSSA Committee, our full-time staff and representatives of our affiliated clubs, and for you to contribute views about what you want from your club. Please contact me (chair.cotswolds@csscvolunteer.co.uk) or Neville Thomas, CACSSA’s General Manager (manager@cacssa.co.uk), if you would like to be part of the volunteer team supporting the Family Fun day.

I am really keen to encourage more people to become involved as volunteers at CACSSA, our affiliated clubs and with CSSC. In particular, we are looking for more people to join CACSSA’s committee to lead on Social Media, Publicity and Communications, and also for our newly-created committee role to champion women’s sport. Anyone can apply for these positions (which can be shared), though I would particularly welcome interest from women as currently we have more men than women on the Committee, and only a third of our 3000+ members are women, despite our sports clubs having thriving women’s and mixed teams. Please get in touch with me if you would like to discuss these roles further. Please also free to share any thoughts you may have about the future of CACSSA by emailing me or Neville. We would love to hear your ideas, whether they’re about volunteering, our facilities, sports and leisure activities, social events, or anything else about your club.

I’d like to finish by thanking my predecessor, Alan Brown, for his inspirational leadership as Chair of CACSSA for the last 10 years, and Gareth Edwards and Josie Gibbons for their invaluable contribution as previous Treasurer (also for 10 years) and Social Media & Publicity Secretary respectively.

I look forward to meeting many of you at the Family Fun Day or other events in the future. Best wishes, Dave Wetherall Chair of the Cotswold Area Civil Service Sports Association.