Issue 77 of the Shaymen Down South fanzine will be on sale for the first match of the season, at home to Bamber Bridge this Saturday 16th August 2008. Members and subscribers who have renewed should receive their copy shortly. See the SDS Archive for a sneak preview of the contents. Many thanks for your continued support!
The Shaymen Down South Goal-O-Meter and Sponsor Owt schemes will be running once more for the coming season. Please help us to help the Shaymen by sponsoring every Town goal for 2008-09, or anything else that you fancy! Click through to the SDS Fundraising page for further details, all our forms can be found at the bottom of the Fundraising page or navigate to the relevant section to see the sponsorships for the coming season (to be updated shortly). As ever, many thanks for your continued support!
As we will shortly be relaunching the SDS Goal-O-Meter we thought it appropriate to confirm how we plan to manage the funds that we raise. The Goal-O-Meter is an SDS initiative and, as such, all funds raised go initially into the SDS account along with funds raised from other SDS activities.
One of the things we believe people like about the SDS is that it moves along with little bureaucracy - when something needs to happen, it happens. No fuss, we just get on with it. In the last edition of the fanzine we asked members to comment if they had any particular preference with regards to how SDS funds were managed. We had a few replies in favour of building up a fighting fund but generally there were very few strong opinions either way.
With a significant amount of money now in the SDS account (the exact amount will be published in SDS77) we have decided to introduce the opportunity for members to have an involvement in deciding how we spend our hard earned funds.
General administration up to £300 - As you may be aware, the SDS fanzine, and most of the SDS merchandise, is produced in-house. The main fanzine consumables are paper, envelopes, stamps and toner. We have in stock enough toner for the next six issues and enough coloured cover paper for at least another ten. White reams of paper and postage stamps are purchased as required. The 'unknowns' are the reliability of the printer and the folding machine which are both running fine at the moment, but from a business point of view are life expired. The replacement cost of the printer (HP8150DN) would be around £180 and the folding machine (Takofold) would be a minimum of £300. We don't propose to consult the membership on general consumables expenditure but will detail any required capital expenditure as and when it is required.
Requests from Halifax Town for up to £1,500 - We have established a working group who will consider requests from the club for funds up to £1,500. The current members of this group are Simon Denton, Laurence Ball, Paul Clark, Matthew Wright and Richard Wilson. If anyone else would like to be part of this group then please let us know - it is open to any paid up SDS member. We would like to be able to make decisions quickly and it would be a benefit if any new members of the working group had an active e-mail address. To date we have had a request from Physio Alan Russell-Cox for £600 to purchase a new hydraulic treatment couch. This request has been approved.
Requests from Halifax Town for over £1,500 - All members will be informed in the next available edition of the fanzine, or separate mailing if urgent, and will be given the opportunity to have thier say on whether or not to accept the request.
Going forward, we see SDS funds being primarily for specific items / projects outside of the normal day to day running of the club that will help make an extra difference. As the months and years go by this may be revised and the membership will be consulted if and when any changes arise.
SIMON DENTON
The final few copies of issue 76 of the Shaymen Down South fanzine were sold out at Tamworth yesterday, so for those who didn't manage to get one this time, the issue is now available online in the SDS Archive. The first issue of the new season (#77) will hopefully be available at the first match, Bamber Bridge's visit to the Shay. Thanks for your continued support at this important juncture for the new club, and watch this space for new developments - we have some interesting ideas for keeping the fundraising momentum going, further details will be published in the next fanzine and on the website.
Haven't already become a member of Shaymen Down South, subscribed to the fanzine, or renewed? Then click here (or right click and select "Save As..."), fill out and print the Membership form for the 2008-09 season, and send it to the usual address. As usual, memberships run from 1st July to 30th June and include 6 copies of the fanzine, including postage. If you haven't already joined, please consider doing as we help to drive the Shaymen back up the leagues!
Our Fanzine Designer has also provided an .ICS file, for all those technically minded, containing the full fixture list for FC Halifax Town for 2008-09. For those who don't know what an .ICS file is (as I didn't until earlier this week...) it's a calendar file, compatible with Apple iCal on iPhones, Mozilla Sunbird and Google Calendar, which you can import to those applications. Right click on the link below and select 'Save Link As...' to download it.
The first FC Halifax Town match is down south! (almost...)
We look forward to meeting as many members as possible on Saturday at Tamworth for what will be a rather unique occasion. Not only is it the first game for the phoenix Halifax club but it is also likely to be the only game for quite a while that many of us can get to within two hours! We have an SDS pub nominated for the day, we return to The Albert Hotel on Albert Road which is just by the train station. The full address is 32 Albert Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 7JS.
We have 10 issues of the close season fanzine left (SDS76) and we also have our first badge of the season available 'Jim'll Fix FCHT'! We are hoping to produce our first fanzine of the season in time to go on sale against Bamber Bridge but this will depend on the number of contributions we get as much as anything else. It would be particularly appreciated if we had some volunteers to write first hand reports on the rest of the upcoming friendlies.
Members who have renewed should receive their membership card / fixture list in the next week or so. To date, around half of the members have already renewed which is slightly ahead of previous seasons at this stage. We thank you all for your continued support.
Our Fanzine Designer has also provided an .ICS file, for all those technically minded, containing the full fixture list for FC Halifax Town for 2008-09. For those who don't know what an .ICS file is (as I didn't until earlier this week...) it's a calendar file, compatible with Apple iCal on iPhones, Mozilla Sunbird and Google Calendar, which you can import to those applications. Right click on this link and select 'Save Link As...' to download it, or see the SDS News page.
Anyone interested in the site updates over the previous few months can see them in the 2007-08 archive section on the SDS News page, which we will begin updating for the new season shortly.