Message from Tom Armstrong, chairman of Cumbria Squash about the retirement of David Henderson as the organisation’s junior organiser:
David recently advised us that for personal reasons he would be retiring from the organisation on Sunday 25 September 2016 at the end of the Junior County Closed championships. This was a great surprise and disappointment to everyone but we all fully understood his reasons and respected and supported his decision.
David has been one of the longest serving volunteers in our organisation ever – there are only a handful of other people who have given a similar “sporting lifetime” of dedicated service to it.
He joined the organisation on the Executive Committee in 1998/1999 so this is his 19th season of continuous service to it. Over all of those years as well as working on day to day Executive Committee business he has had specific development responsibilities – the first nine years were as Development Officer focussing on the whole scope of our organisation and the last ten years as Junior Organiser leading our junior development initiatives.
David has been very effective in every job he has had – he is a great leader, professional in all he does, an effective administrator and an energetic `hands-on` worker when required. And, equally important to me, he has done his work in the quiet and friendly way that is the measure of the man – he is a real gentleman
Because of his length of service most of you reading this may not be aware of his Development Officer work but I am sure you know about his work with our juniors.
He was appointed as Junior Organiser in 2007/2008 season with the remit to continue the good work of his predecessors Liz Jackson and Ray McCreadie, who themselves did excellent work, and to further develop our junior set up.
He has certainly done that – he has been leader of, and one of the major contributors to, the work of the excellent junior committees we have had over the years. As well as effectively organising and managing our junior competitions and tournaments they have designed, implemented and developed our extremely effective junior coaching & development processes that have resulted in progressive year by year increases in the performances of our junior teams and individuals to higher and higher levels. The fantastic individual and team achievements at national level in the last 3 years show just how effective those processes have been. Our achievements have not gone unnoticed and in recent years I have been contacted many times by England Squash to congratulate us on our performances and the excellent conduct of our players and support teams – what a great boost to the image of CSR within ES network.
I think that says it all doesn`t it? David will be a hard act to follow
We have a Long Service Award that you may not know about because very few people qualify for it – I presented David with his at the Junior Championships.
I am sure you will all join me when I say to David: we are very sorry to see you go – it has been a pleasure working with you – thank you for all of the work you have done for our organisation – best wishes for the future to you and Ann.