Sadly after many years of illness Traicy Tait, a long time member, lost her fight, and died in early January.

2009/2010 Season:
The new season has now been completed.

Scott returned from his serious injury, to help both teams finish 4th and stay in Div.2 for another season.

The Basingstoke team won all their matches before christmas, but only 2 after. However the half season scores (28/ 27) don't reflect the win/lose status. Considering that only 4 of the 12 matches were played with a full team, we did well to still be in the race for promotion as long as we did. But it's still disappointing to be as far off the pace as we ended up.

Points wise the Newbury team's results matched that of the Basingstoke, winning 6 points in each half of the season. Overall the team did well to finish fourth. The team managed to lose 5-4 against 2 pairs and also to win 5-4 with only 2 pairs.

As reported by Newbury, our home form is way better than our away form, with both teams only losing 1 home game each all season.

from 2007/08 Season:
Both leagues have proposed a change in the scoring, with Newbury already confirmed has switching to the new international system. Let's hope that Basingstoke change over as well, as playing two different systems could become confusing.

from:
9 sets of 'best of 3 games' to 15 points (i.e. 3 pairs v 3 pairs)
(with setting to 15 or 17 points at 14 all)
Scoring, only when your serving
Both players serve (except at start of game)

to:
9 sets of 'best of 3 games' to 21 points (i.e. 3 pairs v 3 pairs)
(after 20 all, the team to get a 2 point lead or the first to 30 points wins)
Scoring, whenever a point is won
Winning serve, whenever a point is won

for more info refer to the Match Play or Download sections

The new scoring system will take some getting used to, especially if not tried out before the matches start. Where as the old system seemed to be biased towards the better, fitter & more consistent players, the new system biases to those with a more consistent serve & not necessarily the better players or so it seems in these early days.

The benefit of the new system will be that all games will come to an automatic conclusion at 29 All, with the next point winning the game for either pair, in theory saving time. The old system could in theory go on infinitely, with all four players continuosly losing serve.

The disadvantage seems that it is more difficult to get a good lead and even harder to claw your way back in to it!!

So far the scoring in most games is working out quite close, generally without the need for the tie break, regardless of the evenness of the pairs.