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Help Your Club – Show Your Pride

This article was created as a resource for club promoters who are trying to enlist the assistance of their members in the task of attracting new members. All of the articles in this series offer suggestions to club members regarding how they can help to attract new members. Club promoters are encouraged to link to it if they wish to provide suggestions to their members.

Help Your Club – Show Your Pride

You just moved to town. You don’t know a soul. You want to play tennis, squash or badminton, but you don’t know where to start. So you turn to Google for guidance.

You find three clubs that are conveniently close to either home or work and all three appear to be roughly equivalent. So, like most people, you start checking out their reviews. You check Facebook and Google+.

Two of the clubs have a few five star reviews supported by a single sentence or less. One of the clubs has over 50 reviews on Google and more than a hundred on Facebook.

The reviews are not all great. In fact, a small number of them are downright nasty. But taken all together, you end up reading a couple of hundred sentences that give you a clear fairly sense of what is happening inside of that club. You can see that there are lots of enthusiastic members who think the place is wonderful and a few negative Nellies.

Which club will you consider first? The one that offers you a clear view inside their walls or the two who who appear to have tepid support at best?

It is not unusual for the members of non-profit clubs to ask their members to post online reviews. In fact, there are a few who require members to update their reviews annually as a condition of membership.

While it would be unfair to try to dictate the content of those reviews, it is completely reasonable for clubs to ask members to talk about their experiences online so that prospective members can get a glimpse inside.

Facebook Reviews

For members who are already subscribed to Facebook, posting a review to their club’s Facebook page is super simple. It only takes a few minutes but it provides years of value to the club and is essential to attracting new members.

The most useful reviews indicate the approximate level of the player and mention some of the things that they enjoy doing at the club. For added credibility, it is helpful for reviewers to mention something that could be improved along with an acknowledgment from management that the concern is being addressed.

Google+ Reviews

Facebook reviews are nice and they are generally easier to get than Google+ reviews, but Google+ reviews are essential when a club is trying to grow. The club’s star rating is one of the very first things that Googlers see when they start searching for clubs. Google reviews are so essential that some clubs quietly offer free court time coupons to members who have posted or updated their Google reviews in the past 12 months.

Anybody with a Gmail account can submit a Google review almost instantly, because they already have a Google account. Members without Google accounts will need to set one up. This takes time, which is why clubs will sometimes offer an hour of court time as an incentive to get this done.

Once again, player reviews on Google are most useful when the player indicates their level along with some examples of what they do or what they enjoy most. And as always, it is helpful for reviewers to mention something that they are not entirely happy with provided there is an appropriate response from management.

Paying for Reviews

Of course, clubs must be careful here. Both Facebook and Google prohibit clubs from paying for reviews. So it is not a good idea to make such an offer in writing. But there are no rules to prevent club managers from showing their appreciation for positive online reviews. And word about such shows of appreciation tends to circulate rather quickly amongst the members.

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Why Pickleball is Kicking Your Ass

This article was created as a resource for club promoters who are trying to enlist the assistance of their members in the task of attracting new members. All of the articles in this series offer suggestions to club members regarding how they can help to attract new members. Club promoters are encouraged to link to it if they wish to provide suggestions to their members.

Why Pickleball is Kicking Your Ass

This is a brief note to tennis club promoters who are wondering where all of their members are going. We used strong language in the title to get your attention. We hope this note will act as a wakeup call.

Nobody is talking about it.

Nobody’s talking about it because only a few people are aware of it, but the truth is that the growth of pickleball is slowly killing seasonal tennis in Canada.

For most the past 20 years, seasonal tennis clubs have relied on grey-haired members to fill out their memberships and serve as the financial bedrock upon which everything else is built. Take these members away and the collapse of many Canadian tennis clubs — especially seasonal clubs — will certainly be at hand.

Well, that time has come. In the past three years, clubs across Canada have been watching their memberships dip to all time lows thanks to an exodus of the greys. Seniors are switching from tennis to pickleball because it’s easier, it’s more social and there are more people to play with.

As a sport, tennis is professionalized. Every club has a pro and that pro sees his or her primary responsibility as preserving his or her turf. Pickleball, by contrast is run by volunteers whose livelihoods are not tied to membership sales or revenue from private lessons. They have a genuine enthusiasm for their game and are on a quasi-religious mission to share it.

Pickleball clubs lead the way in integrating new players. In the vast majority of pickleball clubs, everybody plays with everybody. In fact, beginners often can’t wait to go back to pickleball because they feel so popular and so wanted. Compare that to tennis clubs where the number one complaint from new members, especially beginners, is that they have nobody to play with.

Every tennis club should follow the pickleball model. They should have a group of volunteers who help organize the beginners and get them playing immediately. The clubs should take a lesson from pickleball organizers and learn to dumb the game down so that it is fun for beginners and immediately easy to play.

Rather than following the advice of outspoken 4.0 players and stressing how hard tennis is, how technical it is and how essential it is for beginners to sign up for weeks of lessons with the club pro before they are good enough to play, club organizers should adopt the Tennis Express model and just get beginners playing.

Later, if they want to improve, the beginners can choose take some lessons. But first, get them playing. Connect them with other beginners and make sure that every beginner session is FUN.

Or, if making tennis fun for beginners seems like too much trouble, you can follow an easier path. Just lock the gates, turn off the lights and head over to the pickleball courts where you are likely to find most of your former members anyway.

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How to Add New Members to Your Club

This article was created as a resource for club promoters who are trying to enlist the assistance of their members in the task of attracting new members. All of the articles in this series offer suggestions to club members regarding how they can help to attract new members. Club promoters are encouraged to link to it if they wish to provide suggestions to their members.

How to Add New Members to Your Club

Racquet Network has thousands of customers in Calgary and across Canada. In addition to that, we have thousands of daily readers of our blogs, newsletters, and social media channels. Compared to most racquet sports clubs, our reach is frankly enormous. We talk to people every day that your club might never be able to reach

The good news is that we use this power for good. We use our reach to help increase participation in racquet sports, especially here in Calgary, where our family owned business first got its start in 2004.

Our simple and highly effective strategy for helping clubs grow is this:

  1. We follow you <--> You follow us
  2. We like you <--> You like us
  3. We share your posts <--> You share our posts
  4. We talk about you <--> You talk about us
  5. We link to your website <--> You link to our website

It is astonishing to us how often customers come into our store who are completely unaware of racquet sports clubs and facilities that are practically in their backyards. We are equally astonished how often people who are aware of these clubs, are too afraid to find out what is going on there.

They often imagine the worst: expensive memberships, high-pressure sales tactics, high prices, surly members, nobody to play with and much, much worse.

By connecting with us and by networking with our staff, your club’s members help make us aware of what is happening in your club. We can tell people about all of the great things that are happening. This helps us encourage our customers to check your club out. It helps us guide potential new members your way.

Everybody understands how social searching works. You drive by a restaurant day after day and wonder if it is any good. But it is not until someone you know recommends it that you decide to check it out.

The same is true for clubs and facilities. Potential new members drive by every day, but until they hear from somebody who is enthusiastic about what happens there, they may not venture inside.

We can be that enthusiastic person. Our staff can help your club connect with new members by providing them with recommendations and referrals. If our staff know what is happening and who to talk to, we can help you grow your membership.

Once again, our very simple and highly effective strategy for helping clubs grow is this:

  1. We follow you <--> You follow us
  2. We like you <--> You like us
  3. We share your posts <--> You share our posts
  4. We talk about you <--> You talk about us
  5. We link to your website <--> You link to our website

In this way, we help each other and together we help grow and strengthen the sports we all love.

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How to Raise Funds for Your Club

If you are reading this, it is probably because your club is affiliated with Racquet Network under our Sponsorship Credits Program and somebody at your club wants you to understand how this program works.

How it Works

You are a member of an affiliated racquet sports club. Therefore part of your online purchases are rebated back to your home club every time you make an online purchase.

This super simple online system makes fundraising easy for affiliated clubs whose players shop at Racquet Network.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Players only need to remember two things.

1. Purchase online through this website.
2. Choose your club’s name from the list of affiliates when you place your order.

If you want to avoid shipping charges and just want to pick your order up in our store, choose LOCAL PICKUP from the list of shipping options. Or you can choose to have the order shipped to you.

We do the rest.

How Clubs Redeem Sponsorship Credits

At the end of the year, your club will have a number of accumulated sponsorship credits that they can spend on court equipment or prizes for tournaments or prizes for silent auctions or anything they choose.

The number of credits is entirely up to the members of your club who shop on racquetnetwork.com.

Help with Fundraising

Racquet Network gets fundraising requests from more than 200 clubs from across Canada every year. This program makes fundraising super simple for clubs of every size.

It is especially simple for clubs right here in Calgary because they already have members who shop here regularly anyway.

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Alberta Netball Shoes

Netball Alberta LogoRacquet Network’s southwest Calgary store is just a few minutes drive away from the Southland Leisure Centre, which is the birthplace of netball in Alberta. As a result, we see a lot of young ladies coming in for netball shoes.

What is netball, you ask? It’s a variation of basketball that was created accidentally in 1895 when a US sports teacher misinterpreted a letter outlining the rules of basketball sent to her by James Naismith — basketball’s inventor. Originally called “women’s basketball”, the sport’s name changed to netball as it crossed the North Atlantic and landed in Great Britain.

Fast forward a century and netball is played by 20 million people (mostly women) in 80 countries. In Canada, there are four provincial netball associations: in Quebec, Ontario, BC and Alberta. Calgary is home to Netball Alberta and most of the netball players in Alberta, but there are growing contingents of netball players in Edmonton and Drumheller as well.

As a court sport, netball is a perfect fit for Racquet Network. As with all of our other court sports, netball players are required to move athletically on hardwood floors. They run short distances — usually a few steps — and sometimes have to stop or change direction suddenly. Therefore traction is a primary consideration.

Racquet Network carries a large selection of court shoes for netball, badminton, dodgeball, squash, tennis and other court sports. Netball players can stop by anytime. We carry sizes and half sizes in ladies 5.0 to 10.5. We carry all three price points (competition, recreation and budget) and we are open 7 days a week. In fact, the only days we are ever closed are holidays.

Netball Shoes