How is your local attendance?

[Jman]

With Tues Nite Steal and Drillmasters we had roughly 1100 attendees at Rio in JULY. That's only counting USPSA (type) pistol matches. Pretty good number considering the desert heat. It's our hydrate or die season.

Jim

[Rayden]

Anybody in Area 4 in the Houston area?

[Jon Merricks]

Here in Milan we charge $10 for 5 stages. Round count usually around 100.

Wow I'm not sure how you guys do it, must just barley be breaking even. Good Job!

[TNK]

Our club in Reno, WNPL, attracts 40-50 shooters in the summer months and around 30 in the winter. We shoot six stages; the match fee is $20. These numbers have not varied much since I started shooting with the club five years ago. We have a core group of shooters who attend the matches regularly. There is also a fair number of other shooters who show up about five times a year.

We see many new shooters, most of whom shoot Production Division. We are also beginning to see more Single Stack shooters. I would say that these divisions present the best possibilities for growth in the club. Whether the new shooters return is another question. I agree with the comments above about how to attract and retain shooters. Maintaining a welcoming environment for the U, D, C, and B class shooters is vital. These people are the ones who will keep the club going.

[shooterbenedetto]

Mike,

attendance could depend on a lot of factors --- in our busy months we get 55-60; in slow months around 30. Factors we've noticed:

Weather -- we shoot year round, people skip matches in the heat, the cold, or rain

Competition -- we notice a drop off against matches like the Summer Blast, World Class Steel Challenge, other big events on the same weekend --- sometimes even if they're 100s of miles away.

Factors at the club level -- things that in our experience can cause a drop off:

Cancelling matches --- probably the #1 reason. If you're scheduled and it's not a hurricane or blizzard, put on the match for whoever shows up. Have a good time doing it.

Be nice to people --- let them reshoot a bad classifier run -- they're supposed to be representative of the shooter's ability -- for submission, not match score. Help people out, don't beat them over the head with the rulebook, but apply the rules consistently and fairly.

Thank people for showing up, for helping, for playing with you.

Design a variety of freestyle stages. Avoid taking Level 1 exemptions or designing things that conflict with the principles of stage design as outlined in the rulebook. Try to offer stages that can be shot in multiple ways. Try to limit gimmicks to 1 stage in the match --- almost anything is fun once, but if every one of your stages has a non-shooting or non-freestyle gimmick, it stops being a fun match.

Try to squad people with their friends if at all possible. If that's not possible, try to break up a large group of friends into two smaller ones.

Deliver all the scores to the competitors --- whether you deliver a zip file of all the results that EZWinscore is capable of, or whether you insert the data into a Word document. It allows competitors to see how they did in their division, and how they did against their friends in other divisions. Yeah, it's a few extra mouse clicks --- mut it's not that much extra work.

Try to spread the work around and recruit new people to help --- it'll keep everyone from burning out, and ensure that the worker bees are having more fun too....

I learned most of this from Dave Marques, Jim Norman, Dave Olhasso, Bucky Pollard, Howard Krams, Vlad, Raz-0 and a host of others from Old Bridge when I became the Central Jersey match director five years ago --- a job I recently turned over to Vlad. When I started we were averaging around 27 shooters a match, now we're closer to the low fifties. It took a lot of time and effort from everyone involved in those monthly matches; I couldn't have done it without the help I received. If I had to do it all over again, I'd focus on recruiting more people earlier --- that would have made life a lot easier.

+1 on That!! i remember a club I went to and it was my first time. A lot of shooter yelled at me!! They didn't even guide on how to shoot and what the rules were? I NEVER WENT BACK!