What the best way to start a Uni club?

KJP · February 1, 2002, 10:15pm

Any suggestions on starting a unicycling club would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks! JP

AccordNSX · February 1, 2002, 11:33pm

move out of alaska for starters

jagur · February 2, 2002, 2:13am

the first person you see riding a uni .,is your next member of the club

thats the way i see it. i’m the only one in my town and if i ever see anybody else,i would chase them down and say HEY,I, MUni to!!!

yoopers · February 2, 2002, 5:25am

I’ll share a bit of our story and maybe it’ll help.

My family and I started riding unicycles during Christmas 2000 riding in the house until weather permitted newbies to venture outside to practice. Over the next few months we rode everywhere, after church in the parking lot, around the little league games, on the bike path. I think what happened is our small northern Illinois farm town had never seen anyone riding a unicycle before and was getting an introduction to the sport through seeing us wobble around town. We sure turned a lot of heads and even got our picture in the paper delivering newspapers on our uni’s.

Then the kicker…a friend is the head of the Community Action Network (CAN), a committee that sponsors community events for the town and schools. I mentioned the committee once to John Drummond and he told me about this guy named Dustin Kelm, a travelling professional unicyclist and motivational speaker. Through CAN, we were able to line up Dustin in April last year for an event at our church youth night and then in the Jr. High the next morning. Dustin and crew stayed in our home we were able to get to know him. What a great person, we highly recommended his presentation! Through Dustin, our town kids got a big jumpstart intro into unicycling so much so that we were able to start a club with a whoppin’ five charter members last summer.

The hard part is that my family has about $600 in out-of-pocket money invested in the club not including the $2000 trailer we just purchased. We purchased 3 Torkers from Unicycle.com just to have something for newcomers to try out. Our small club met publically at a community pavilion in town and slowly gained a few more interested parties. Then we hit our community again last fall through CAN with Bruce Crevier and family. Bruce is a professional basketball handler and his entire family of 9 are unicyclists. Through the Crevier’s visit, we gained a few more in our club. Again, a very high recommendation for Bruce and family. Just last Christmas, Rochelle families gave 14 unicycles to their children for Christmas. The unicycle seemed to be the hot item on Christmas lists this year.

We now have an established club that meets weekly with 20-30 people in attendance and growing. Here are some of the keys I think:

We meetly weekly and consistantly. The kids really look forward to Monday nights.
We maintain our passion for the sport. My family and I really look forward to Monday nights.
We developed policy, application forms, built fun appartus, designed a logo and obtained club tee-shirts etc, anything to be more “official”.
We focus on skill-building and reward progress with the skill level patches from the national organization. The kids absolutely love receiving the patches as rewards and sew them on their shirts (http://www.geocities.com/unicycle_univ). And we stop all activity when someone passes a skill level and make a big deal of presenting the patches in front of the whole group. It’s akin to scouting badges I think.
We take all opportunities to promote our club, i.e., riding in parades (we have nice signs), our kids wear their shirts and patches to school. On our kid’s invitations, we have even had several of their teachers stop by our meetings just to see.

This spring, we’re planning a field trip to the Twin Cities Unicycle Club’s mini-convention in Minneapolis. It will help to give our club members a much more broad view of our sport and see that unicycling exists far beyond the walls of our club.

There’s probably a lot more but I’ve been rather windy with this post. If you’d like to talk more about it, please email me at yoopers at inwave.com

Make it a great day!
Bruce

system · February 2, 2002, 10:29am

forum.member@unicyclist.com writes:
>Any suggestions on starting a unicycling club would be greatly
>appreciated.
>
>Thanks! JP

Joe Merrill, the other co-founder of my club, was instrumental in getting
the word out via the internet. You can also contact all area bike stores
to let them know of your existence. If there are likely a few unicyclists
in the area, then you have a base. If not, you have a harder road ahead,
but as Bruce’s post attests, you can get kids (esp) interested and then
they have their parents buy them unis later. Putting in $ of your own
helps, tho in our case, Joe and I didn’t put in more than a few hundred
total since we already had a ton of our own unis and have been meeting
outdoors (we still don’t even have insurance – waiting till we’re indoors
for that).

David Stone
Co-founder, Unatics of NY
1st Sunday / 3rd Saturday
@ Central Park Bandshell
1:30 start time after 11/1/01

yoopers · February 2, 2002, 1:57pm

I forgot to mention our insurance. We moved indoors for the winter into an elementary school gymnasium. The local schools are wonderful in that they allow non-profit organizations to use their facilities for free as long as they have insurance. So…we had to come up with insurance. One of my best friends in town just happens to own a local insurance agency and found us a $1M policy for $200 annually. What a find! The $200 had to come out of our pocket at first but then I wrote a letter to the local Rotary Club explaining our situation and they gave us a $50 grant. Doesn’t cover the whole thing but its something. In return, we’re going to put on a small presentation at one of their meetings. I’m considering approaching other service organizations about the same.

My wife, Mary, suggests that organizations also exist that will grant funds to groups that assist children in some way. She suggests that we might be able to qualify as a recipient of such funds because we provide a certain type of program for our kids. Almost half of our kids come from some sort of dysfunctional home or have a type of learning disability or some other abnormality. Its neat watching some of these kids grasp on to a sport or even an extra-curricular activity for the first time in their life. For some, it may be the first time they’ve ever felt good about themselves or something they’ve accomplished and it thrills us to watch it happen.

Bruce

system · February 3, 2002, 8:20pm

–part1_3c.18b5365e.298f6602_boundary

We have a lot of kids in our NYC club. Three kids in my neighborhood have
started riding based on seeing me riding. Funny thing is, only one of them
has made it to our club so far. I think the key is not to think of this as
complicated. Just organize getting the people together to ride, and boom,
that’s the beginning of your club. Make cards with your email address, or
make a simple website with the basic info on it, so that when you run into
people who are interested, you can give them information in an accessable
way. If you are friendly and show people how much fun it is, you will soon
have a “club.” David and I have found that of the more than 100 members in
our club, about 10% of them are hardcore and make it to most of the meetings,
so don’t expect everyone to be super-dedicated to the club at first. Hope
this helps, good luck.

Joe

In a message dated 2/2/02 1:36:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, dstone@packer.edu
writes:

> >Any suggestions on starting a unicycling club would be greatly
> >appreciated.
> >
> >Thanks! JP
>
> Joe Merrill, the other co-founder of my club, was instrumental in getting
> the word out via the internet. You can also contact all area bike stores
> to let them know of your existence. If there are likely a few unicyclists
> in the area, then you have a base. If not, you have a harder road ahead,
> but as Bruce’s post attests, you can get kids (esp) interested and then
> they have their parents buy them unis later. Putting in $ of your own
> helps, tho in our case, Joe and I didn’t put in more than a few hundred
> total since we already had a ton of our own unis and have been meeting
> outdoors (we still don’t even have insurance – waiting till we’re indoors
> for that).

–part1_3c.18b5365e.298f6602_boundary
Content-Type: text/html; charset=“US-ASCII”

<HTML>We have a lot of kids in our NYC club. Three kids in my neighborhood have started riding based on seeing me riding. Funny thing is, only one of them has made it to our club so far. I think the key is not to think of this as complicated. Just organize getting the people together to ride, and boom, that’s the beginning of your club. Make cards with your email address, or make a simple website with the basic info on it, so that when you run into people who are interested, you can give them information in an accessable way. If you are friendly and show people how much fun it is, you will soon have a “club.” David and I have found that of the more than 100 members in our club, about 10% of them are hardcore and make it to most of the meetings, so don’t expect everyone to be super-dedicated to the club at first. Hope this helps, good luck. 
 
Joe 
 
In a message dated 2/2/02 1:36:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, dstone@packer.edu writes: 
 
 
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style=“BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px”>>Any suggestions on starting a unicycling club would be greatly 
>appreciated. 
> 
>Thanks! JP 
 
Joe Merrill, the other co-founder of my club, was instrumental in getting 
the word out via the internet. You can also contact all area bike stores 
to let them know of your existence. If there are likely a few unicyclists 
in the area, then you have a base. If not, you have a harder road ahead, 
but as Bruce’s post attests, you can get kids (esp) interested and then 
they have their parents buy them unis later. Putting in $ of your own 
helps, tho in our case, Joe and I didn’t put in more than a few hundred 
total since we already had a ton of our own unis and have been meeting 
outdoors (we still don’t even have insurance – waiting till we’re indoors 
for that).</BLOCKQUOTE> 
 
</HTML>
–part1_3c.18b5365e.298f6602_boundary–

system · February 6, 2002, 5:42pm

<!doctype html public “-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en”>
<html>
I agree, Joe, about making it easily accessible and uncomplicated.
Not only do we meet consistantly so families can plan schedules, we organize
fun stuff outside of club time. For instance, a couple Sundays ago,
it was 65 degrees. I had called all the unicyclists I knew in our
town on Saturday and we got together on Sunday afternoon for a ride in
a local school playground. Another key was the public meeting place.
Quite a few kids were out playing in the warm weather so we actually picked
up another attendee to our Monday night meetings from our public romp in
the warm weather on Sunday. But the best of course is the word of
mouth by the kids in school.
Bruce
Nycjoe@aol.com wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>We have
a lot of kids in our NYC club. Three kids in my neighborhood have
started riding based on seeing me riding. Funny thing is, only one
of them has made it to our club so far. I think the key is not to
think of this as complicated. Just organize getting the people together
to ride, and boom, that’s the beginning of your club. Make cards
with your email address, or make a simple website with the basic info on
it, so that when you run into people who are interested, you can give them
information in an accessable way. If you are friendly and show people
how much fun it is, you will soon have a “club.” David and I have
found that of the more than 100 members in our club, about 10% of them
are hardcore and make it to most of the meetings, so don’t expect everyone
to be super-dedicated to the club at first. Hope this helps, good
luck.
Joe
In a message dated 2/2/02
1:36:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, dstone@packer.edu writes:
 
 
<blockquote TYPE=CITE style=“BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px”>>Any
suggestions on starting a unicycling club would be greatly
 >appreciated.
 >
 >Thanks! JP
Joe Merrill, the other co-founder
of my club, was instrumental in getting
 the word out via the internet.
You can also contact all area bike stores
 to let them know of your
existence. If there are likely a few unicyclists
 in the area, then you have
a base. If not, you have a harder road ahead,
 but as Bruce’s post attests,
you can get kids (esp) interested and then
 they have their parents
buy them unis later. Putting in $ of your own
 helps, tho in our case,
Joe and I didn’t put in more than a few hundred
 total since we already had
a ton of our own unis and have been meeting
 outdoors (we still don’t
even have insurance – waiting till we’re indoors
 for that).</blockquote>

</blockquote>
</html