BEGINNERS’ COURSES THAT WORK
Pete Hill continues his series on developing a great club
If we spend a little time thinking about what we call beginners’ courses, we might be swayed to consider how we run them. For a club struggling for income, a series of beginners’ courses can raise a considerable sum. An elite-focused club might target athletics clubs, schools, colleges or universities. More often, however, clubs are doing their best to grow membership. We will also need to be cognisant of what our beginner archers are seeking. Depending on the time of year, or the time in a person’s life, a beginners’ course might serve as a holiday distraction, a person’s new go-to activity or even, and rarely, a directed focus on chasing down athletic prowess. What makes your courses work for you may be a result of what you call them. How you go about setting up your course to make it work for you may have a significant outcome: good or not so good. The naming of your beginners’ courses may not, at first, seem important, but attendees might want to know what is expected of them after they have attended their course. If you, as a club, are not getting what you are seeking, subsequent to all that work, it may be time to consider a refocus and renaming session.
A not-for-profit archery club may well want to obtain members. Members make a club, make it a sociable place. Members make and hold records. And sometimes make a good cup of coffee for the coaches: win-win. In addition to gaining members, raising funds will also feature as one of the club’s major considerations. Course fees, though, will need to meet the prevailing affluence in your area. Even so, unless you or someone in your club is a prolific beginner coach, you are unlikely to make huge amounts of money.
Altering the name of the beginner course gives our new archer something more to consider. It also gives the coach clear direction in terms of what they are trying to achieve. ‘Archery & Club Induction Course’, although a bit of a mouthful, clearly states the outcome: ‘We are very happy to teach you archery and we want you as a member of our club.’ Taking this approach should coincide with any work you might do on club development.
If we think about the course itself, from the moment your beginner walks in the front door they will be assessing your space, the ambience, the welcome – and you. Your coaches reflect the character of your club; they are key to its success. Their job (mostly undertaken voluntarily, of course) is to build a safe archer, grow membership, raise funds and enable fun. They are the ‘front of house’ for your new people – a significant role indeed. Investing in your coaches is pivotal to ensuring that what you are seeking is what you get.
run them regularly
Beginners’ courses are the membership sustenance for pretty much any club. Research shows that many of our members remain with us for only a relatively short time, something like 18 months to three years. By not embedding beginners’ courses into your dayto-day considerations, you may be heading for a slow but nevertheless terminal end. If you are wanting to build a fantastic archery club, you might want to consider running beginners’ courses more often.
We love what we do, so why are we not showing people that we do this year-round? Providing beginners’ courses all year, if you have the space, will enable club growth. I am one of those (prolific) beginner coaches mentioned earlier. My experience with Wymondham Archers, the club I teach at in Norfolk, is to witness a definite calling from prospective archers all year round. We make space indoors and out each week for our beginners. Sadly, if clubs are not running courses all year they are probably shrinking in membership. Wymondham Archers’ calculations, before we put other factors into play, can see around 30% of our club membership leave the club at the start of most new years of archery – October in the UK. With beginners’ courses running all year, clubs will see a steady growth even during our coldest months. Since 1 October 2022 Wymondham Archers warmly welcomed just under 80 new members.
Two beginner attendees a week on a fourweek course can create around 14 new archers for a club over the winter period alone. If the two a week is applied for the entire year, with something like an 80% transition to membership from each course, a club could gain around 20 new archers a year. Running courses in each session may increase your members by multiples of four or more.
Making it easy to get on to a beginners’ course sounds simple, but it can be far from easy. If you worked through my most recent article in Bow (issue 168), you will have seen the discussion on customer relationship management systems (CRMS). These work very well and can be personalised. In relation to beginner courses, you can go a step further by adopting an event manager. Trybooking (trybooking.com) is a superb tool to create events (beginner courses, tournaments, coaching days or even curry nights). Links to these events can be published anywhere: email signatures, QR codes, websites, Facebook, Google and more. Once set up, a calendar shows the dates your club runs beginner courses. You will need a regular and reliable set of coaches to make this work but, once established, the system is strikingly effective.
Beginner archers can select their own dates from those provided and will receive confirmation emails prior to coming along, providing location details and more. Contact information for the event organiser can also be provided for folk who may need more support. The downside of using an event manager is the cost. Each ticket may be loaded with a fee, although these apply only if the event has a fee attached. An upside is that
attendees are unable to progress a booking unless they have paid.
people focus
Now you’ve decided to run courses all year round and have found a system to get people on to your courses, you’ll now need to consider who might attend. People come to archery for more reasons than this brief article could ever cover. We live in changing times. Language changes, meaning changes, people change. At the start of each of the courses I run now, I begin with a question relating to pronouns. Fortunately, once that part of the course is done I can relate to all our beginners as archers – a new ‘pronoun’ that can be applied to everyone. At a recent course, after asking the pronoun question, I was thanked for being so understanding. That archer joined our club, as did their partner, mother and father.
Making the course work will need flexibility, tenacity and imagination in order to resolve some of the issues of people who present themselves. People arrive with significant disabilities or they might have chronic health issues. Teaching archery to beginners can be challenging although the rewards are huge as you watch them develop their skills.
Being ready to accept anyone through your door is probably one of the only ways that archery is to become more mainstream. The time is ripe for such a sea change. People of all shapes and sizes want to get active, outdoors or indoors. They want to be around other people but not necessarily as part of a team – just a little nearer. They don’t want to pass a metaphorical ball, they just want to be doing something rewarding. We’re a niche sport and we can get excited about what we do, but our newbies are not there yet. You’ll be surprised how long some coaches take getting a bow in people’s hands to shoot an arrow at their first session. We need to get moving, get that bow in their hands and get that first arrow shot.
Our approach looks like this:
• Arrive, introductions (of you) and find out about the archer – five minutes
• Safety – learn the dialogue and get it delivered quickly – three minutes
• Bow preparation – 10 minutes
• A gentle warm-up – five minutes
• A few tips on shooting – two minutes
• Shoot
This should take no more than 25 minutes. Remember, these introductions are the ‘boring but necessary’ part of your course. Make it slick. Beginners don’t pay good money to hear us chatter about the Battle of Agincourt, the vagaries of using a clicker or the delights of a horse bow. That comes later.
Consider your coaches
Undertaking beginners’ courses without considering your (mostly) volunteers who run them is tantamount to failure. Making the course too long will discourage coach participation, too short may be insufficient for appropriate acquisition of skills. Organising volunteers is the main reason that many archery clubs set a period of time of once to maybe four times a year for such courses to run. Obtaining volunteer support is tremendously difficult. At Wymondham Archers we run beginners’ courses week on week. We do this because we have reliable coaches; we are lucky. Nothing happens without these wonderful folk who put in so much of their own time.
Our course consists of two sections: acquisition and application of skills. Our goal is to achieve a safe and autonomous archer who knows how their kit works, what might help their performance and where all the facilities are at the club. We enable coaches to run courses flexibly. This means that should a coach determine that a beginner needs more attention, they simply extend the course in order to see that development before moving on. The coaches now grow in their own development, learning what works and what doesn’t.