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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 USRAs 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. Im
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 cant move
forward to impact the club industry immediately and positively.
Id like to share an example which seems outlandish. Alaskas
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 Leves comments go to the heart of this issue.
The
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 Id 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 dont give a
hoot about tournament players ... so how to deal with that? Im
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
thats how things work. But here I am telling you that my
constituency, the heath club owners, dont 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 isnt concerned with that. So theres 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 wont 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 ... were in town. There will be
racquetball activities and well 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 arent 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. Theres a big fight out there ... and we have to
always fight that fight.
Im not here to tell you what to do...but I would suggest
something I think we shouldnt 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 wasnt a blip on the screen. So I dont 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 dont 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. |