Hi folks,
I have posted a message on a "New Topic" site cos I'm not very clever with the email and didn't realise I could just use the message board!
Anyway, I'm really just visiting your site in nostalgic mode. Forty-odd years ago, as Linda Barrett, I was a Suffolk Junior/Senior County player, back in the days when we travelled miles in wintry weather to play just one match. No motorways or weekedn groups then!
My Dad Denis was County Coach, then Chairman, and Mum, Edna, ran one of the junior teams for several years. Dad and I played in the Ipswich League, first in the British Legion building, later in the Britannia Club, then somewhere near the Heath Road hospital.
Good to see Dave Halliday still holding his own, and Nigel Hodder too. Dave was top junior boy in my day. Nigel came after my time and was a friend of both my parents.
Good also to see the names Vicki Gray, Clair Emmerson and Aimee Sparkes, whom I used to meet at British Junior League alongside my daughter Tamara and her friends, who were playing for a Scottish side about ten years ago.
I'm still battling on, fifty years after Dad put a bat in my hand, enjoying the local league and the Scottish national circuit. I do our local press too, following my Dad's footsteps - he wrote, as Topspin, in the Ipswich Evening Star.
I wish Suffolk well and maybe I'll bring my bat when next I visit! Earlier this year I met an even older past player whilst walking round Ipswich, a lady called VI ?, whose name was familiar to me from conversations I had heard in my youth though I had never previously met her. Perhaps somebody will be able to supply the missing surname which has completely vanished from my memory.
All good wishes.