Queensferry Tennis Club warns of being priced out of playing at sports hub as fees double in three years

The tennis club’s members each pay an annual fee to use the courts at Queensferry Sports and Community Sports Hub at Ashburnham Road whenever they need to, for practice and league matches in the East of Scotland tennis league.

An adult membership was £120 in 2022/23, £135 in 2023/24, which increased to £185 in 2024/25, and is proposed to increase to £240 for this coming season. A family membership will now cost £540, up by 46 per cent from £370 last year.

Queensferry Tennis Club treasurer Scott Boath fears that the increased fees could lead to the end of the 10-year-old tennis club. However the Hub has hit back, and highlighted a drop in member numbers at the tennis club in recent years.

Scott said: “The situation is a little complex, as the tennis club does not own the land or the courts, and are only allowed to access the tennis courts in consultation with the trustees of the hub, for league matches and social tennis events.

“Every year, we have been able to pay an annual subscription rate, whether an adult, family, senior, or junior – and this allowed the members to play whenever they wished, as is the model with all other tennis clubs. However, this year, the annual subscription has increased substantially.

“Our serious concern is that there will not be a tennis club for much longer, especially if the membership fees remain as proposed.

Pictured are members of Queensferry Tennis Club, with its treasurer warning that increased fees at its home base of Queensferry Sports Community Hub could see the end of the 10-year-old sports club. | Submitted

“The alternative proposal from the hub is to ‘pay as you play’, which means that we would have to pay for each court booked, on an hourly basis. This makes the situation rather impractical, due to the lack of flexibility for members, as this would require the club to block book sessions, and so only offer limited times for our social tennis sessions.

“We have two ladies and three gents teams in the East of Scotland league, as well as two junior teams. Our club had a successful 2024/25 season, as well as celebrating our 10th anniversary. We are a proper community club, bringing everyone together. But this could finish that and we would lose that community spirit.

“There is a growing number of people in South Queensferry with new housing developments popping up all the time, so there are more people that will want to play tennis here. However, with the fees going up and up we might not have a tennis club for them to join for much longer.”

Get Edinburgh’s biggest stories as they’re happening - sign up for the new breaking newsletter

Click here to sign up 👇

https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/newsletter

Scott is worried that some of the club’s current 100 members will stop playing the game, having already lost members when the hub’s fees increased last year.

He said: “The hub’s proposed increased membership fee structure is likely to result in several families and other active members not re-joining for the new season.

“It’s a great little community we have got here. But unfortunately we think a lot of our members are going to be priced out of playing. It feels like we are being forced into the pay as you play model.

“We used to take the annual fees from members to pass onto the hub, so we could take a small cut to pay for equipment and entering competitions, but now we will have to fundraise.

“Most families in our club are saying they wont joint us for the coming season if we have to move to pay as you play as it’s a very inflexible model. In the past they just turned up whenever they wanted to pretty much, and they didn’t have to pay as they had already paid their annual fee.

“We are proposing as a club that we go with pay as you play for six months for our season from April to October. It’s not as bad as it sounds as people tend to obviously play more in the summer than the winter.

“But the concern is we are going to lose members, potentially up to a third of our members, and then eventually have to close the club if these fee increases keep coming every year. Who knows what it will cost next year.

“Everyone is feeling the pinch with prices increasing for everything, including council tax and energy bills. Everything is rising and rising in price.”

Queensferry Tennis Club members practising at Queensferry Sports Community Hub, where adults fees have nearly doubled in the past two years. | Submitted

Responding to these concerns, the trustees of Queensferry Sports and Community Hub, which is a not for profit SCIO charitable organisation, said: “Queensferry Tennis Club had an ambitious plan to grow the club, and one of the first things that was done is that we invested in getting the tennis courts re-laid and getting new fencing and floodlights, this work was completed in early 2016.

“By 2022 the courts needed to be re-laid again as they were starting to break up. We again invested over £70,000 in this work which was completed in early 2023.

“By this time we realized that the tennis memberships were declining year on year and concluded that revenues generated by tennis membership was not even covering the sink fund required to keep up with maintenance and refurbishment as it was required, never mind contributing to the overheads of our organisation.

“Come to 2023/24 we were further concerned that the club membership had fallen again and was now lower than it was when the club started in 2014. This is despite every other area of our facilities growing fast.

“At that time we suggested that we may benefit from going to a pay as you go (PAYG) model as we felt a very small number of tennis members were utilizing the courts constantly at peak times and the general public could not get prime time slots. We believed this model would be more inclusive to the whole community.

“The tennis club fought against this and asked us to consider their proposal which was basically staying on a membership model and increasing the adult membership price to £185 per annum, their suggested figure, not the Hub’s. They also asked us to agree that a family of two adults and up to four kids would only pay the cost of two adults.

“We reluctantly agreed to their proposal but gave them a target to increase the adult membership by 20 per cent in that year. Unfortunately their adult membership fell by 15 per cent which meant that the overall revenues from the tennis club were pretty much the same as the year before and the rest of our operation was still subsidising the tennis club in covering its costs.”

Speaking about rising costs to run the Hub, the trustees added: “We have had a huge increase in running costs over the last couple of years and are finding it harder and harder to fall the right side of the line each month. This was mainly due to energy, wages and maintenance costs increasing substantially.

“As a result of this we have asked all our users to absorb an increase in costs of around 25 per cent, this includes gym users, function room lets, lettable space etc. as well as tennis membership.

“It is not a financial attack on the tennis club as it is being portrayed. We also gave them the option to go on to the PAYG model as we felt a good percentage of the members would be financially better off under this model.

“We feel that Scott is trying to blame the Hub for their failure to grow and retain their membership which is very unfair. We believe in tennis moving forward which is why we continue to invest in it and why we have recently refurbished the courts at huge expense. And why we have recently obtained planning permission to build a padel court on our facilities.”