Running a judo club ain't easy

It's sad to see this club in Australia closing down.

I was shocked and saddened to learn that the Noblesoul Academy, a judo club in Australia run by a Japanese sensei named Ryosuke Miwa, is closing down after more than three years of existence.

I can't claim to know Ryosuke well. I've only met him once when I did some randori with him during his visit to Singapore. He's a very strong and technical judo player. And through his blog postings, which were written in English, I could tell he was very philosophical about judo as well.

At one time he had a club for senior players. That closed down some time back and he then focused on children. Now, that's closing down too. I don't know the reasons why he is closing down his club but I do know that in general, running a judo club isn't easy.

I should know. I've been running one for slightly more than three years as well. Fortunately, we are not in danger of closing our club anytime soon. That doesn't mean it hasn't been a bumpy ride. Our club has seen many ups and downs.

We've seen our membership dwindle down to just a couple of players. At one point, our -52kg female player had only a -90kg male player as a training partner. But if there's one thing that judo teaches us, it's perseverance. So we hung on and we kept plugging away on a wing and a prayer.

A big breakthrough happened when we decided to do online marketing in a big way. We've always had an online presence from the start: a website, a blog and a Facebook Page. But we didn't really invest a lot of time on these until about a year ago. That's when we decided to start blogging regularly and making videos for our Facebook Page. Later on we started live-streaming our sessions. All these things helped to raise awareness about our club.

Judo is not a popular sport in Malaysia. It's very hard to recruit beginners. And even if you do manage to recruit some, it's a challenge to retain them long enough for them to get good at judo and therefore want to stay on.

So the first challenge is recruiting people to your club. The second one is retaining them. Both take a lot of effort.

Different clubs have different ways of recruitment. I've heard of clubs in Singapore doing on-the-ground recruitment giving away brochures and balloons and holding demos and competitions in shopping malls.

Our approach has been to do our publicity online. Through trial and error we have found three things work really well:
i) Blogging: In the age of Instagram, you never would have thought blogging would work but our blog has quite a following which shows that people still do want to read about judo.
ii) Live-streaming: You never would have thought live-streaming would work either. But whenever we live-stream our training sessions we get quite a lot of views. I guess people want to see how our sessions are conducted.
iii) Video highlights: Something else we like to do are short highlights of drills that we do or best moments from randori or shiai. These are quite popular.

It's important to have a strong online presence because when people are searching online for judo clubs, they will naturally want to know more about your club. A few pictures here and there will never properly convey what training is like. But if they can read blog postings, watch live-streams of whole sessions and view highlights of the best moments, they would have a good idea of what to expect if they join.

More than a few new newcomers have told us that they had followed our blog or Facebook Page for some time before approaching us. There are probably several others out there right now reading our blog, watching our videos and contemplating whether to make that call to arrange for a trial session. It might take them weeks or months to decide but eventually they will come around to it. So, we know that content marketing is crucial. It's something we will continue to do.

As mentioned earlier, recruiting is only part of the challenge. The other part, which is just as challenging (if not more so) is retaining them. It's very important to have a critical mass of players on the mat. When players come for training and they see only one or two other players on the mat, they get disheartened. Or when a girl comes for training and she sees only one other girl (or none at all) on the mat, it's also very discouraging. In contrast, everybody loves it when they come for training and see 20 people -- a good mix of guys and girls -- on the mat ready to train.

It's not possible to have a full attendance. When Player A is free, Player B is not, etc. So, you can never have all of them on the mat at the same time. But what's important is that you have a decent number of players for training at each session. The ideal is to have about 20 people on the mat. That would be great. But that's rare. If you can get eight to 12, that's a really good number.

Key to that is having a big base and having a core group of dedicated players. If you have a big base and only half of them show up, you'd still have a decent number. Let's say you have 30 players (a number we have not reached yet), even if half show up that's 15 which is pretty good. Even if one-third show up, which is 10, that's still pretty good. So it's important to keep recruiting to grow your numbers so that you have a big base to work with.

The other thing is have a core group of dedicated players. These are the ones who are really keen and on training and will come two to three times per week. There will always be some who can only come for training irregularly. Maybe once a week, maybe once in two weeks, maybe once a month. But if you have that core group which is always there training, you can always have a good session.

Let's say you have a core group of about eight players and you have two to four irregulars who decided to attend that day's session, you'd then have 10 to 12 players on the mat, which is pretty good. Even on a bad day when you have no irregulars coming for training, you'll still have that core group of eight which is sufficient to have a good session. So having a core group is crucial.

At KL Judo we've doing something that's really different, which flies against the face of conventional wisdom. We've built a club for seniors and we train competitively.

If you ask most judo people for their views on what you should do to have a thriving judo club, they would say firstly, build a club for kids. Everybody knows kids are the "cash cow" for judo. Secondly, they would say make it a recreational club. Don't train them so hard. Don't emphasize competition. Make it light and easy. That's not our approach.

We aren't going against conventional wisdom just to be different. We are doing it because we believe in what we are doing. We think there are adults out there who want to train in judo and we want to provide an avenue for them to do that. (We do have a few students training with us but these are not kids. They are teens who are able to train with adults).

Judo is a safe sport. There are many rules in place to minimize the chances of injury. But it is undeniably a hard, full-contact sport. The only way to really experience the sport as it's meant to be is to train competitively. It's also by training competitively that our players benefit from the lessons in life that judo is supposed to impart. Things like perseverance, hard work, discipline, fighting spirit, creativity and so on. All these come into play only when you are training competitively. If you take it light and easy and don't mind getting thrown about, you will never learn any of these things. And frankly, you won't enjoy judo. That's why randori is such a big part of our training and so is shiai. These things give our players a chance to test their skills and to gauge their progress.

It's not easy building up and running a private, competitive judo club aimed at adults. But it's what we believe in and something we will continue to work hard on.