Dear BPA fans,
Tonight I look forward to meeting many of you at our fans forum. I will be introducing Mark Leadbeater as our full-time Stadium Operations Manager, and Colin Wilson our Director of Development, who some if you might have noticed hanging around the club recently but he has actually been doing a great job of helping us secure a stadium worthy of playing great football. As I mentioned over the new year we are planning improvements to the stadium including a new surface and hospitality. We have been working with the West Bowling rugby league teams to have them base out of Horsfall as a major partner which will help everyone to support the cost of running the stadium and they are also applying for eligible grant funding to underwrite some of the improvements.
We shall know by 26 March whether the project will be definitely going ahead, and indications are good so far. If the project goes ahead we expect it to start work in early May and be finished by August. At this point we are very confident that it will and assuming that it will, then our priorities next year will be to increase our match day revenues and Increase the size of our Academy.
With a 3G pitch available during the day our Academy students are going to enjoy studying and playing at Horsfall. We hope to increase the size of the Academy over the next few years which will provide not only a great experience for them but will provide a source of young players that will knock on the door of the first team. Perhaps we will gain some new supporters alongside them.
I plan to attend the match tomorrow and usually the team loses when I do that!! But I think our luck is going to change and perhaps I can start to be a lucky charm when I do visit the Horsfall.
Up the Avenue.
Gareth Roberts.