March - April 1999 | Vol. 10, No. 2

Luke St. Onge

CHANGING TIMES
by Luke St. Onge

I want to share with you some of the comments made by Chuck Leve, National Sales Director for the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association [IHRSA], at the USRA’s annual Leadership Conference this past January in Colorado Springs. I believe that Chuck has summed up our situation quite nicely and even though we might not all agree with him at times, I believe that he offers a unique insight.

By way of background, for over 16 years the USRA has simply not been involved in the club industry scene — in fact, turning our backs on that industry is largely responsible for the position we find ourselves in today. And frankly, it is amazing that our sport has survived and is still able to claim as large a player base as it does. So despite that long period of non-promotion, it remains obvious that we have a built-in feeder system that has never been exploited. Now more than ever before, we as an industry have the opportunity to change attitudes, visibility, and promote our sport in a unified way.

Recent support of the Promus U.S. OPEN, AmPRO, IHRSA, NIRSA, and other grassroots programs has definitely changed attitudes. I’m pleased to report that each and every USRA development program is now sponsored by a racquetball manufacturer, each of which have tremendous potential – in partnership with the USRA – to influence the growth of the sport. By virtue of their sponsorships, each of these manufacturers must now have a solid commitment to working closely with the USRA to maximize these opportunities.

One of our main goals has been to re-establish a bridge to the club owners. Now that we have built — and crossed — that bridge, we must develop long-range plans. With a sponsored player base of well over 6,000 players and an attractive schedule of major USRA, IRT and WIRT events to open doors, there is no reason why we can’t move forward to impact the club industry immediately and positively.

I’d like to share an example which seems outlandish. Alaska’s State President, Steve Arturo, recently shared his situation: A nine-court facility, with 900 members paying $125 per person/per month bring in a total income of $150,000 per court/per year. Of course this is far from the norm, but it is crucial that we convince each and every club owner that racquetball can realize this type of potential. Chuck Leve’s comments go to the heart of this issue.

Chuck LeveThe idea is ... when things are good, that is the time to re-invest in the industry. That is the time to create the plan and to mobilize the people to do it. So a point in our favor is that business is good and clubs are not under the financial pressure to max out the revenue per square foot or to worry about ... “gee racquetball is down a little bit so I’d better get rid of that court.” Because business is good, now is the time to re-energize and remind them [the club owners] of all the good things that racquetball brings to them.

However, there are some harsh realities we have to deal with. Harsh reality number one is that most club owners don’t give a hoot about tournament players ... so how to deal with that? I’m looking at a sea of faces of those who spend the majority of their time promoting and running tournaments. You generate your memberships from those tournaments, and those memberships feed into the USRA and that’s how things work. But here I am telling you that my constituency, the heath club owners, don’t care about tournament players, they care about everyday, recreational players. I love the tour. I ran the tour in the early years. There is a place for it — it can be a catalyst for growth — but the average, common club owner isn’t concerned with that. So there’s work to do in promoting grassroots programs to get people into the sport. It is something that has to happen. So I hope that we — club owners, manufacturers and the USRA — can begin to kick some ideas around, do some brainstorming, set a target at some point in the future and then commit ourselves to creating plans to help us get there.

Harsh reality number two is — IHRSA has a convention every year [San Diego, March 24-27, 1999] and I will tell you that there will be more kickboxing activity in terms of visibility, sponsored activities, classes, and so forth than there will be racquetball. This will be a convention of 10,000 health club owners, managers, fitness directors, fitness club employees as well as another 2500-3000 manufacturer personnel — and there will be kickboxing classes sponsored by Kickboxing Inc., there will be BodyPump classes, YogaFit classes, PowerBoarding classes, but there won’t be any racquetball classes. That has to change. Sure, there are restrictions to holding a racquetball class when there are no courts right in the convention center, but still ... we’re in town. There will be racquetball activities and we’ll get a racquetball group together (like we did last year in Phoenix, where we had a great night of pro exhibition), but these other things aren’t going away. The kickboxers, and the bodypumps, yogafit, whatever. We have to hold our own and push forward against this barrage of whatever the next thing is ... and there is going to be the next thing. Right now you have a 1200-booth trade show occupied by 12-20 booths of racquetball and 1180 booths of everything else ... and the sole purposes of those companies is to sell their products and services to health club owners. There’s a big fight out there ... and we have to – always – fight that fight.

I’m not here to tell you what to do...but I would suggest something I think we shouldn’t do. Someone previously mentioned that tennis is also down. A few years ago when tennis was really down, the tennis people got together and put in a lot of time, effort and generated a lot of money for a “grow their game” initiative. And after several million dollars of expense and 18-24 months of effort, there wasn’t a blip on the screen. So I don’t think this is an issue that we, necessarily, need to throw money against. If someone gave our industry 1-2 million dollars, that would be wonderful, but as an industry we would have to really figure out how to spend that money. I don’t think throwing money at it is the answer. I think the ultimate answer is the people in this room [state association volunteers], the people I represent [club owners], and the manufacturers. We all have to work together with commonality to promote the sport.

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