Growing a judo club

While I was in Sandakan for the Borneo Cup, I had conversations with two other judo coaches about how difficult it is to grow a judo club. Anybody who has ever attempted to start and run a judo club will know this to be true.

One of the coaches, from a nearby country, had an interesting membership demographic. Like ours, his club has mainly adults as members. We have kids classes now but we started out as purely an adults class and today, our members are still mainly adults (which is an anomaly here in Malaysia).

He said they don't have many members, which sounds very much like how we were just a few years ago. I told him how important it was to post pictures and videos on social media. It's amazing to me that other clubs don't do it. Social media has brought us most of our members. It's how people get to know about our club.

Yes, editing video takes time. Writing blogs takes time. Even taking pictures and writing interesting captions take quite a bit of time. But we do all that because we realize how important it is. So, I really tried to emphasize this point to the coach.

I told him about how small our membership base was at one time but we slowly grew it with the help of social media. Now, thankfully, we have entered a virtuous cycle whereby when people check out our club, they are pleased to see that there are other adults to train. For beginners, we have many other beginners. For experienced players, we've also got a decent number of players with experience. But to get to where we are today, it took a long time and plenty of social media postings.

Another coach told me the problem he has is that most of his players are juniors who eventually go to college or start working and they leave their hometown to do so. Many go to bigger cities for these things. I told him this is not just a problem he faces. Many clubs face exactly the same problem. That's why I always say that Malaysian judo has an "seniors" problem. We have lots of kids doing judo. By the time they turn to cadets, they start dropping off. By the time they are in their late teens, there's only a few of them left. And by the time they are in university, most of them would have dropped out. Don't even talk about what happens when they graduate!

I told this coach, you've got to recruit some working adults to your club. Adults who take up judo want to do judo. Unlike kids, who are sent to judo by their parents, with adults it's 100% voluntary and you can be sure they are doing judo because they want to, not because somebody told them to. So they tend to stay a bit longer. They are also less likely to suddenly move away to a new city.

Yes, it's easier to recruit kids. Judo is a fairly easy sell to parents because they know judo is a good sport with a strong moral code. So, many parents like the idea of their kids doing judo. It's much, much harder to recruit adults because adults are so busy and caught up with so many "adult" things like work and family obligations. But they are a more stable demographic than kids when it comes to sticking to the sport.

So, in a nutshell, my two pieces of advice to anyone who wants to start a sustainable judo club are:
i) be active on social media
ii) recruit some adults to be the anchor or backbone of your club