Where does your club want to be next year?
- Bowling News
- Mar 7, 2021
- 2 min read
Bowling News
Apart from being top of the league where do you want your club to be this time next year? Does anyone in your club know?
Who in your club has the foresight to think and plan ahead? Anyone? Or is your club just doing what it has always done and views those who criticise the lack of improvements to your club, clubhouse, green and surrounds as trouble-makers.
Does your club look at falling membership and fewer teams as a sign of the times and something a club cannot do anything about? Do you really believe that? So why are some clubs thriving with a growing membership and an improvement programme that makes visiting that club a real pleasure for their members and visiting teams?
Clubs that are prepared to put a little thought into looking ahead will feel the benefit of that in the short and long term future. Maybe document what you would like to achieve and when. Nothing ever suffered for being well thought through in advance of doing anything about it.
Where does your club want to be in 2 years time, or maybe a little longer and planning for a 5 year period. It is up to you where you set the parameters. The excellent 'Club Matters' service is a subsidiary of Sport England and provides a wide range of service to sports clubs and one of those areas covered is about how to plan the future of your club. It advocates the need for producing a documented plan involving many members to ensure majority support in taking your club forward. Once agreed then any funding issues can be tackled by a number of opportunities for financial support and many grant-providing organisations will want to see how your bid fits into an approved forward plan for your club.
The Club Matters approach indicates that developing a plan won't cost anything other than your time and is a 6-Stage process as listed below:
Steps to create a Development Plan
Think about who should be involved
Consider where your club is at now
Where do you want your club to be in the future?
What are you aims and objectives?
What content needs to be in your plan?
Use and review your plan regularly
The PDF document below expands on those headings to guide you through the process which ends with you producing a plan for your club for a period that you want it to cover. Once produced it acts as the guide to members on where your club is going in the future and shows a sense of leadership that may have stagnated over time. Good luck.
Not sure where you want to start and need help in thinking about what changes and improvements you would like to make to your club? Then again the Club Matters website comes up with some help in the form of a Club Improvement Tool.
The Club Improvement Tool is designed to get you thinking about your club, where it performs well, and where there are opportunities to improve. For areas where you need help, the tool will generate a club improvement plan and signpost you to recommended resources to help you develop your club. Watch a video of a real club's experiences to find out how to use the tool and learn how it benefitted them.
Most bowlers will switch off if asked where do you want your Club to be next year. Expect a response of eg - I can’t do that, it’s the job of others, I just want the Club to stay the same. But to undertake what is being suggested isn’t difficult. It’s all about coming up with an achievable plan , written in simple English, and deciding how it will be achieved and who will do it. Then we come to the real problem as it seems to be getting more and more difficult to get bowlers to do anything.
It’s always the same few people who aren’t getting any younger. Its not as if all bowlers don’t have time or …