Florida State Softball visits Finsbury Park, August 2025 (BaseballSoftballUK photo)

Starting in August 2026, BaseballSoftballUK will be highlighting the most successful clubs and leagues across Great Britain, sharing their knowledge and wisdom in the hopes that it can help others! For more information, or to have your organisation considered, please contact David here.

The Inaugural Club of the Month for August 2026 is the eight-time reigning NBL Champions, the London Mets! Club and Coach Officer David Turner spoke with Chairman Joe O’Connell and Committee member George Neyhus.

What’s one piece of advice you want to share with other clubs?

O’Connell: Make it as easy as possible for members to get involved in the club, and to give back to their community. Our Baseball for Beginners programme has had the biggest impact on the club over the last 10 years, and it reinforces itself, as graduates from the year prior form the bulk of the coaching staff. It perpetuates a positive club culture and creates a lot of a lot of positive energy for the club. We have more than 120 people on the wait list to join. We have always found that beginners programme is always the most enthusiastic cohort, so we try to feed that back into the club.

Neyhus: Enforcing or creating a community within teams within the club is probably one of the most important things. Most players at our club play in the lower league levels; they’re not here for elite competition but for community. All our staff are volunteers, but they do the work because they love it. They love doing it for each other. Allowing the communities to grow and enforcing that growth within your club and as a club as a whole, is probably priority number one. I know the people [training tonight] because we've played together, been down together, fixed things together, rebuild the mound together, built the cages together, and now we're friends. We go to the pub, we have a chat, and when they come have a game, I'll watch. Community is priority number one, for me.

What is the biggest limitation you currently have?

O’Connell: The biggest limitation we now have is our ability to train – both in terms of field space and in terms of time. If we had floodlights, that extends the training night by an hour – you can go to 9:15, 9:30 at night. That would let us have two sessions on a Friday night. We could also do a Saturday night session until 10 o'clock. Currently, because of the varying sunset times across the year, we're a little bit limited there - our beginners programme only starts in the middle of May and then runs until the end of August. Lighting would be a big improvement and we’re advocating for that facility upgrade.