The blog's been quiet for a while. I've been busy. I intend getting back to the Ireland caps topics soon, and there are also a few other topics I've got in mind, but for now, I'm going to talk about recruitment.
The IFDA recently released a very early version 0.5 of their planned college recruitment guide. Basically it's an edited version of the various submissions they had received. If you're on pookas, have a read of it. There's some great stuff in it.
Structuring the Recruitment Document
I think the best thing that could happen to the document next, is for it to get structured in some logical way. Both to make it easier to read, and also to make it easier to build on. Once the document has a sensible structure, deficient sections will stand out and any conflicting opinions also become more obvious. I replied to the email saying as much (and offering to help with it).
A preliminary structure idea could be as follows:
1. overall / being organised / having a meeting about it.
2. PR during the first few weeks.
3. recruiting day.
4. retaining the people that signed up, and turning them into active club members.
How version 0.5 measures up against that proposed structure
As it stands, the document has plenty of thoughts on getting plenty of people to sign up on clubs and socs day (or freshers week or whatever you call it). I find amusing the mentions of the strategic placement of "hot guys" and "hot girls" at the recruitment stand (possibly because its true).
Where I think it might be lacking is in the area of early term PR on campus. I thought there might be more about this in the document version 0.5. Maybe its just that there wasn't much variety in what was said, and plenty of repeated stuff got edited out.
Anyway, that section would focus on PR before sign up day. It would include stuff about posters, about being visible on campus throwing, wearing club merchandise, having as many articles in every campus publication as you can and mentioning ultimate enthusiastically to anyone you're talking to.
Retaining Beginners
Stuff about retaining the beginners could get interesting. I imagine there could be various different opinions on it.
I think this section could get further subdivided into
A - training
B - tournaments
C - club sociability
Possibly what sort of players you want to recruit and retain could be worth some discussion. I think any club has a finite capacity for active membership; you're unlikely to add 100 new active members to a club (although I understand plenty of clubs sign up more than this nowadays). There just isn't the space at practice (and possibly the existing club members haven't the ability to remember that many names). So perhaps a club needs to think about exactly what sort of players they really want to try to keep.
Increasing the Natural Capacity of a Club
Before anyone gets too carried away with being selective, it is possible to expand the natural capacity of a club. Try as hard as you can to recruit and retain more players before you start to pick and choose. I think UCC managed that last year. If you run a few separate practice sessions aimed at different groups, then the practices won't be overcrowded and no one needs to remember absolutely all the beginners names. This probably even holds true for socialising too. There's an upper limit on the size of a tight-knit social group. Only so many people can comfortably hang out in a living room. If a big club has multiple smaller tight-knit groups it allows space for more newbies to become active members.
Anyone from UCC tell me if I've got that right?
What sort of beginners will stay playing
So, once there's room for plenty of newbies, it's probably still true that you'll not be able to get all of those that sign up to stick around. And who sticks around will largely be determined by what you do in the first few weeks after the beginners join. For instance, if you do drills involving quite a bit of sprinting, then people that like sprinting will stick around.
Also, who becomes a regular is determined by who you get to know; who the experienced players become friends with. If all the experienced players spend all their time making friends with final year student newbies and 1 semester foreign students, they'll have no time to get to know the first years (that's bad).
PDF; The Flowers From My Mother's Garden
4 years ago
Donal here. While I appreciate the work gone into the recruitment guide from Ian and Dave, I think it is a little out of date as things develop and change so much every year in these youthful times of the sport and the responses are over a year old. My opinion has changed a lot about recruitment since then. I suppose if there is a future version this will automatically be addressed. Fantastic that it has been released though.
ReplyDeleteGreat post too Mr blogger, I like the structure of it, and the way you phrased a few things.
I think a good way to structure practices is to plan them to ensure everyone plays a lot, so beginner girls should ALWAYS get a chance to play free from beginner guys. Sometimes people get worried that their beginner girls need to experience mixed to love Ultimate, I disagree with this. I think most trainings should be structured so everyone is playing with people of a similar ability, so they all influence the game. Its pointless just playing games with all beginners in together as most girls will never touch the disc. Or all members in together as beginners of both gender will barely touch the disc (experienced people can't help trying to show off to the beginners in their scoring efforts).
In GAA circles some coaches believe a training is only successful if everyone has touched the ball at least 100 times. To allow this to happen, clubs should be organised and trusting of who they have already and have many of their members helping out and taking charge of little groups of players. And lots of little games. No point in having 20 subs. 2nd years are usually the best recruiters too in my opinion.
Also be careful of all the guys in the club that are out to score any new girls. If these girls haven't had a chance to bond together first, they might not stick around to try and bond with people after the short lived romance inevitably sours.
Cheers Donal. Some good points there. Ensuring everyone has a meaningful part in games seems sensible. (would you even play 5s perhaps?)
ReplyDeleteAnd alienating the new girls has often been an issue - usually discussed more in the pub than in the likes of a 'recruitment guide'. Including that sort of thing would be great though.
Oh ya, fives is a great idea. Even two v two is a lovely but very underused way of getting people moving and teaching them the fundamental movements quickly, then slowly introduce more players and let them learn how to be part of a team, after learning how to play as an individual. It's more difficult to keep structure and control of a training with more games going on at once. And more cones becomes an issue
ReplyDelete