This week we have been looking at growing club membership and retaining current members.
One of the most important requirements for a project of this nature to be successful is a cohesive team where every member is aware of the goals and is committed to achieving success.
To work effectively and for one common goal within the club it is very important for all involved to share the same vision. This vision should be clearly defined so that all involved understand the direction in which the club is heading.
The key to achieving this level of commitment is Read more
Yesterday we looked at how your club might be organised in order to fulfil the expectations of its target audience and we boiled that down to a very distinct goal that any club would do well to work towards:
Deliver a little bit more than you promised!
We then went on to look at how this might be achieved consistently. We discussed how the seemingly endless task of business strategy development could be boiled down to its essence, making it a lot more tangible and do-able in the process.
Business strategy for me is about three things; three mini strategies if you like and these are people, finance and innovation.
Today, I wanted to briefly fill out these 3 bullet points to give you a clearer picture of how you can use them to your advantage and guarantee that your club members, user groups, customers or what have you, will always Read more
In all walks of life we see success and failure on a regular basis and we never seek to question why this happens; it’s obvious isn’t it?
One shop is successful and one fails to attract enough customers to survive; one tennis player wins Wimbledon and many others don’t; at closest quarters we see a friend narrowly lose a bowls match despite his or her best efforts and its sometimes difficult to see what they could possibly have done to beat that opponent.
Strange that we all understand this, but as a sport we are so readily accepting of the doom and gloom that says that bowling as a whole is on the downward spiral and is on the way out; whilst observing with our own eyes that some clubs are doing better than others!
Half a million bowlers aren’t about to disappear overnight, there are still plenty of opportunities for clubs who want success and longevity badly enough, but the world is a lot different today than it was in bowling’s heyday.
Differentiation; the art of making your club better and stronger should be the key goal. Ensuring that your club is an attractive proposition for as many and as diverse a set of users/members/customers as possible should be the target for every club today.
Its no longer good enough to try to attract more bowlers, set up a half hearted junior program or ignore the larger community that lives around your area.
Focus on what makes or could make your club “different” instead of what makes you the same; that’s the way to stand out from the crowd and the starting point for long term success.
Scientists in South America are developing a new strain of turfgrass that responds to applications of beer slops by only growing at half the rate of normal grasses.
Turf managers are already getting excited about the development saying that the beer swilling turf drastically reduces labour costs for bowling green maintenance and potentially creates a use for beer slops and half drunk pints from the clubhouse bar.
The breakthrough was spotted by accident by a greenkeeper at Lirpa Premia Bowling Club. When interviewed by Bowls-Central, greenkeeper Avril Primo said “its amazing, the grass seems to come up “half cut”, it’s going to revolutionise bowling greenkeeping the world over and I can finally put all of the half pints left over on Sunday night to good use”.
We tried to contact the Science team involved but we were told that we couldn’t speak to anyone until the second day of April.
If your green has suffered the blight of localised dry patch (LDP), sometimes called bowling green dry patch in the past, this is the most critical time of the year to take action to minimise the chances of another outbreak.
It’s unlikely that you will be thinking about irrigation of the green just yet, but dry weather in March and April, usually accompanied by drying winds which cause further moisture loss from the green surface can allow LDP to take a firm grip on the green.
The main effects of this might not show up until June, but the damage will already be done and no amount of irrigation will correct this once it has taken hold.
With this in mind and especially if your green has suffered in the past, you should at minimum be keeping an eye on your water balance chart and making irrigation applications to replenish any deficiencies, even if it seems counter intuitive…trust your water balance sheet!
Now is also a good time to mini-tine the green and apply a granular wetting agent, making sure it is washed into the tine holes thoroughly.
Monthly liquid wetting agent applications should also commence now and the water balance sheet (not Charlie, the club champion in 1977, who doesn’t believe in watering greens!) should rule the roost as far as irrigation decisions are concerned.
