KL Judo turns 4!

Our Friday session had 14 players on the mat. That's about half our squad.

We started out with a simple premise: Build a judo club targeted at senior players.

When you look at KL Judo today, it might seem like an obvious thing to do but back when we started  out four years ago, everybody thought we were crazy. "Nobody builds a judo club for adults," they said. "There's no market for it."

Well, I was an adult and I wanted to play judo. I was sure there were others like me out there. So we proceeded with our dream.

It was rough going at first. There was a time when having five players on the mat was our definition of "a good turnout". For the longest time, we had just three or four regular players. There was even a sustained period when had just two players: a -90kg guy and a -52kg girl. Talk about a mismatch. But we carried on.

In judo, players come and players go. This is quite normal. But along the way, we did manage to pick up members who stayed with us. Why did they choose to do so? My guess is two key reasons.

Visitors to our club always notice two very distinctive things about KL Judo. Firstly, they find our players to be really tough, with great fighting spirit. Every visitor gets a great workout at KL Judo.

Secondly, they find our player to be extremely warm, friendly and welcoming. This aspect of our club is something we are very proud of. It really helps with membership too because newbies are able to integrate almost immediately with existing members.

Today we have close to 30 members. Because they are mostly adults, there will always be some who cannot attend training due to work commitments (overtime or out-of-town trips) as well as family obligations. At any one time you'll also have some players who are out of action because of injury (harsh reality of judo).

So, you will never have your full squad training on the mat at the same time. You're lucky if you can get 50% of them on the mat at any one time. I would say 30% is more the norm. But if you have a healthy membership base, even 30% means there are enough bodies on the mat to have a good workout.

We can't afford to be complacent though. Over time, people's circumstances change and sometimes you lose members due to situations beyond anyone's control. That's just how it is. So, we have to continually find new ways to get new members.

One strategy we've employed from Day 1 is to put up a lot of material on social media. We have an active blog and we post up pictures and video highlights on social media. We even have livestreams of our entire training sessions. Having all that content out there gives potential members a good sense of what to expect if they join our club. We will continue to do that.

We will also explore various collaborations that may result in more training sessions and more players coming to our club. This is all still at a very exploratory stage and perhaps nothing will come out of it. But we've got to try. After all, if we didn't try four years ago, KL Judo wouldn't be here today.