Recently, we had some visitors from Jeju come to train at our dojo. It wasn't something we planned or expected. In fact, it literally came out of the blue for su. Apparently the organizers didn't plan their trip properly and as a result, when the team arrived in Malaysia, they had nowhere to train. Somebody gave their facilitator our contact details and we were happy to play host to them.
As with all our guests and visitors, we tried earnestly to provide them with a good experience. They were high-level athletes -- many of them had competed in top-level international competitions -- so we didn't have the same level of athletes to offer them. But we certainly tried our best to call up some coaches and judo friends to try to get more players for them to train with. With such short notice (or rather, no notice at all) it wasn't surprising that nobody could send their top athletes to KL to train with the Jeju team.
So, we had to rely on our own membership to offer them a worthwhile training session. Many of our members showed up, including some who couldn't train but helped take pictures and videos. The Jeju team seemed to appreciate the effort we had put in.
You would think any guest would appreciate it whenever a club takes great pains to ensure a decent crowd. But over the years, we have had a few people who said they wanted to visit our club, only to cancel on us in the very last moment (after we had called in a lot of players to specially come for training). Some people had postponed their appointments and other activities just to be there for the guest. And what happens? The guest stands us up! It doesn't happen often but it's happened enough times that we are aware this could happen.
They say once bitten, twice shy. Well, that's true to a certain extent. We certainly won't care about people who have stood us up. That's just rude and ungrateful behavior on their part. But the bad behavior of a few rotten apples should not color our judgment of other, new guests who want to visit us. We should not have a cynical view of guests who say they want to visit. Instead, we should assume they are sincere and we should plan for them to have a great, memorable session with us.
It's basically the Golden Rule at play here. If we were to visit another club, we'd certainly want to see many players on the mats. How disappointing it would be if we went all the way to another city or country only to find very few players on the mat. It would mean the host took no effort to ensure that we would have a good session.
If we don't want people doing that to us, we should not do that to others. That's why I always believe if we have guests, we owe it to them to get as many players on the mat as possible. It's the least we could do.
No comments:
Post a Comment