I am from the Eau Claire area in west-central Wisconsin. We had a club briefly a few years ago but currently there is none. How would I go about trying to get one started up?
Some big things are:
Finding a site (free is great but often difficult to get, with a free site a club can survive the periodic waning of the membership before the next waxing);
Finding players (leave flyers at tournaments, give publicity notices, get a link on the state website, etc., etc.);
Determining the format (skittles, non-USCF-rated ladders, rated tournaments, mixed-events, chess-classes, adult-focused, scholastic-focused, community-focused, etc.);
Determining who will run it (many clubs end up having elections that default into a benevolent monarchy of the only one or ones willing to actually do the work, while a few actually have some politics ---- rated events require a TD);
Determining the dues (the type of site will influence this).
Here’s how we did it: Find cheap or free meeting space, such as the public library. Put a notice in the newspaper that you’re holding an informational meeting for people interested in forming a chess club. If you live in a slow news town, like I do, watch your story end up on the front page (!). Make a few fliers and put them up at the library, coffeehouses, bookstores, local colleges. Get about half a dozen other people in a room with you. Run a formal meeting, with rules and an agenda. Thank everyone for coming. Have a round of introductions. Build your meeting agenda around the eight points in this article. Find out what everyone else wants before you talk about what you want. Try to meet again a week later, to vote on the stuff you talked about the week before and pick a name. Write and approve bylaws. Elect officers. (It may seem nitpicky and overly formal, but it gets you a degree of commitment that will reassure people that your club won’t fall apart when you go away on vacation for a month.) Once you’ve reached agreement on all the basics, relocate to your chosen site, bust out the sets, and presto, you’re a club.
Problem in my area is that there is no major university (only UW-Eau Claire, a division III school). I am about 180 miles NW of Madison and 90 miles east of Minneapolis, MN which are the 2 closest places that have any kind of chess activity.
Eau Claire is predominantly a redneck blue-collar beer-swilling town with little culture or intelligence and therefore tough to find enough people that would have an interest in a game as intellectual as chess.
I would like this to be an open club (not scholastic or group based, but one the whole community is welcome to),
and this would primarially be a ‘casual’ club (ie no structured events or organization; just a set time where chess fans can gather once a week for a few games).
Unfortunetly Wisconsin is not a real hotbed of chess, but does have a few events a year. I just don’t have the money to attend a bunch of tournaments, hotels, etc.
I also suck at this game. I know the rules (the USCF rulebook is probably the chess book I have read most LOL) but little else. Don’t spend 4-6-8 hours a day going over chess games, theories, openings, etc. I have run Scrabble clubs before though and should be able to run a small simple chess club.
Elect officers? I’ll be lucky if I can attract one person to play in a club (then we have a Pres-me and other person-VP). At least for now I think that’s a bit overkill. Just would like to have a few players come and play; we can develop structure and organization if the interest sticks.
Please forgive my attempt to give advice. I was under the misapprehension that it was wanted.
No no not at all. I actually clicked the link to your article, and rememberd about the Fresno Club story in CL last year.
It’s just, our area is only about 60,000 people and as I said most of them only care for beer and bars. Those aren’t the kind of people that would be interested in a chess club.
I’m also not in it for the money. You do mention about yearly dues, running tournaments, having ‘logo gear’, and so forth. I’m not envisioning a club that has 40-60 regular players, weekly tournaments, and the like. I do have a place in town that we can hold a club for free (our city’s rec center). All I want is a weekly place where me and a few other chess fans can get together and play. If we can end up getting 10-12 regular weekly players, then maybe we can consider being a little more ‘formal’ and established. That will come with time. I just want to get started.
Thank you for your input. I do appreciate it, honestly.
Our area is smaller than yours, and I suspect not that demographically different. However, given that all previous “organized” activity in town fell apart every time the organizer left town, which he did for six months out of every year, I decided it was important to put a structure in place that could keep things going even if I weren’t around. I think it’s smarter to count on stability to promote growth than to count on growth providing future stability.
I started a chess club in an area of no more than 50,000. Being a predominantly Catholic and immigrant area, there is a bar on every other corner and a church on the other (I’m not kidding).
As a couple of others have mentioned, a free meeting spot is a great way to start. I started at a local Burger King with a large lobby. We meet on Thursday nights which is a dead time for the “restaurant”. After about a year, we found better and still free meeting places that came available as we became better recognized in the area.
The public library is OK but most in our small area close at 9:00 pm. If there is a local bookstore or something that would work out well. Another place would be a coffee place. Other places that have worked for me (I have started 4 chess clubs successfully) were a senior citizen center (it is usually open and free on evenings), a local community center, the local junior college cafeteria, the local hospital cafeteria, a restaurant like a Denny’s that has a spare/backup dining room that you can use on a week night when they aren’t in need of it, a local Motel breakfast area (I recently got a Fairfield Inn to let us use theirs for free) and other community places like a YMCA, museum (we use this in Peoria now for 9 years), even church dining areas.
In these smaller areas, the local media is a great source for free publicity. They are bound to provide free public service announcements. The local newspaper both in the LaSalle-Peru area and in Quincy, Illinois were my primary source of advertising to get growth. I still have a tournament every 4-6 weeks that I hold on the meeting night. I come up with a seasonal, catchy name. We recently had the Jingle Bells Chess Tournament. In April it will be the Tax Free Chess Tournament. The newspapers love it as well. The Quincy paper came and did a feature article on us with pictures after I had run the club there for a little over a year. The most recent one in the LaSalle-Peru area had the local newspaper do a feature article with a color picture on their front page after only 3 months of being there!
I certainly would not worry that there would be no one in your area that wants to play chess. With 60,000 people I bet you will easily have at least 6 - 8 people coming.
The important thing is to have the club meet regularly at the same place and time. I find a weekly meeting time is best. I also tell members that I certainly don’t expect everyone to come every week.
I also am a fan of having people bring their own equipment. We use tournament standard equipment as well.
I charge no dues in this latest club, but I have charged dues in the earlier ones. One nice way to get dues is to have a membership tournament, still on a club night. I would get donations from local merchants, small dollar items like a six pack of Pepsi. These would be the prizes, and of course I got enough so everyone got a prize. The entry fee to the tournament was the annual dues for the membership to the club. If someone wanted to join the club after the tournament, they would simply pay the dues. Of course once we got 3 or more months into the year, I would pro-rate the dues.
The dues are good to pay affiliate dues to the USCF and your state organization, if they have such. Understand though that I have never run rated tournaments in any of my successful clubs until the club was at least 18 - 30 months old. The players in the club need to mature as tournament players before they are ready to play USCF rated games. I started this LaSalle-Peru club 2 1/2 years ago, and we are having our 1st USCF rated tournament on Feb. 20, 2010. I plan on using the proceeds from this tournament to pay for the club’s affiliate fees.
Good luck in getting a nice group of people together that want to play chess and have fun doing that.
Hey,
If I were you I would try to find a student or staff member at university. I know that the UW system typically provides some funds for student groups including chess. (I was one of the students to revitalitzed the UW-Milwaukee club when I was there and they provided us enough funds to buy some boards and what not.)
The key thing is, that aslong as there are students who offically run the club they can open the meetings to non-students as well. So you can typically get a free room at the University, maybe a few chess boards provided by them and be able to hook a few students. The key is finding some students to start and run the club. But in my experience at UWM that wasn’t that difficult a task.
You might also want to contact some people from the WCA to see if they can help at all. I never really worked with that group but it seems that they are somewhat active and might be able to help out as well.
Good luck…
Like it really matters anyways. I suck at this game, and will probably never see a personal rating above 1000 again in my life. Don’t know why I even bother trying; keep making the same stupid moves again and again, keep leaving pieces en price, etc…
I was trying to help get a club going in a similar area about 18 months ago. I ordered a list of USCF membership labels and found that there were 30 rated players within 25 miles of the club. Once I knew that, I also looked to see which ones were scholastic, knowing that I might be able to create additional interest at their schools.
Using labels and postcards, you may find you have more people in the area than you think (yes I am familiar with the area - I have relatives in the area) who are interested in a club. And if you can get one or two schools interested, you may have ongoing fresh faces.
Good luck.