On achieving self-sufficiency

It's nice having a big group to train with.

An ideal scenario for judo players is to have:
i) lots of visitors so they can train with lots of different people
ii) training camps so they can train with lots of different people
iii) training trips to other countries so they can train with lots of different people

In judo it's good to be exposed to lots of different fighters. But unfortunately it's difficult to achieve any of the three points above.

Lots of visitors? That doesn't happen. There is no culture here of joint training or exchanges between clubs. Training camps? It doesn't exist here. Training trips is something we could do but it's expensive to travel to another country.

So, given that (i), (ii) and (iii) are hard to achieve, what can you do? You aim to achieve self sufficiency, meaning you get a critical mass of players so that your players can have enough randori and shiai opportunities in-house.

Of course it'll never be like Japan where you'll find 50 black belts on the mat at one of the famous judo universities like Tokai. But you must aim to have a critical mass of members so that even when people miss training (for whatever reasons), you still have enough people on the mat to have a good training session.

My idea of a critical mass would be about 30 members. That way if half show up you'd still have 15 and if only a third showed up,  you'd still have 10.

We don't quite have 30 members yet but we have about 20 right now so we are two-thirds there. Once we have 30 regular members we'll be in good shape.

Judo is a niche sport and it's hard to recruit new members but we are slowly getting there.

Our form of recruitment is mainly online. We do lots of content marketing, churning out video clips of our training sessions, our randori sesions and our shiai sessions. Sometimes these are highlights, sometimes we have full livestreams where you can watch practically the whole session.

We are very transparent and prospective members will have a good sense of what to expect if they were to join our club.

For example, from watching the videos they will know that we are very technical and very practical. We teach modern competition techniques that actually work. A person who watches our videos will also know that we are a very competition-oriented club. We encourage our players to compete and even those who are just doing it recreationally, with no intention of competing, train alongside the competitors because that's the only option available. There is no such thing as "social judo" or "recreational judo" at our club. The only type of judo we teach is competition judo.

We've been pretty lucky. In the past year, many people have discovered our club and some of them have actually signed up and become members. I'm confident in the months ahead we'll be able to recruit more members and hopefully, achieve that magic number of 30 regular members before the year is through.