Project 1 Final Draft

A Club for Everyone

I’ve never been the type of person who is good at sports. When I was younger, I did cheerleading and soccer, but both of those sports never stuck. I think it was a mixture of not really enjoying them and if I’m truly honest, not doing well at them. However, in high school, I started playing Ultimate Frisbee with my friends and I soon realized that Frisbee was something I really enjoyed, and something I was relatively good at. Ultimate Frisbee is a sport that is comparable to football, although I would consider it more a casual game than a sport. The game consists of two teams playing against each other trying to get the Frisbee in the other team’s end zone. It is a game that involves a lot of communication between the players as well as a little bit of strategy. The best part about Frisbee is that pretty much anyone can play because there is not a lot of athletic ability needed.

My junior year of high school, three of my closest friends and I decided to start an Ultimate Frisbee club at my school. We were tired of all the clubs at our school because they were all taken very seriously which left no room for making friends or any sense of community. We also felt like a lot of the clubs were clubs that people joined so it would look good on their college résumé. Most of the clubs were so focused on volunteer work or unity or competitiveness, which is great, but our school lacked clubs that pursued hobbies or shared interests. We wanted to be a part of a club that was entertaining and unique but still encouraged that sense of community between all different types of students. And that is how the Timber Creek Ultimate Frisbee Club was born. But starting and continuing a club is harder than one might think.

Getting things started was tedious. To make a club at my high school, there needs to be teacher that is willing to sponsor the club and it is also mandatory to send in a “club statement” that details the purpose of the club and all the specifics relating to the club. Luckily for us, we found our sponsor quickly and we filled out the statement form and eventually got permission. Then came the hard part, organizing the events and the entire club. Our sponsor pretty much left everything up to us and gave us plenty of freedom.

Our first task was to raise awareness for the club. We needed to spread it around our high school; we wanted people to hear about it and start talking about it. The three other founders and I decided the best way to do this would be through two different genres. The first genre we used to spread awareness was promotional flyers. We printed out about a hundred papers in bright colors with the important information about our first meeting and put them up everywhere on campus. It was important to us that we made the flyer welcoming. It needed to be short and to the point, so students would not have to spend a lot of time looking at it, but it also needed to share a decent amount of information. On the flyer, we posted the time and place of the first meeting and then we added a basic description of what we wanted the club to be. Then we clearly put “anyone and any skill level welcome.” We really focused on making the club look appealing and available to everyone.

Since we wanted a diverse group of people to be a part of our club, we decided to post the flyers in all the different areas of our school. We put them by the theatre entrance, in the freshman hallway, by the gym locker rooms, near the agricultural department, and many other places. We specifically made sure we did not cater to just one type of student, instead we purposefully catered to everyone. Overall, our intent with the flyers was to make it known that our club was for anyone.

We also used spoken genre to let students know about the club. We had morning announcements on the television every single day during second period, and as a student, it was incredibly easy to get on the announcements. In fact, all that needed to be done was asking for a slot and signing up. For about a month leading up to our first meeting, we had someone go on the announcements and share information and news about our club and our first meeting date. We made sure to share the important information quickly because if we drew it out, the high schoolers would stop listening. Doing the announcements was very successful because all students, no matter what grade or class, had to watch the announcements. Through using those two genres of flyers and spoken word, we quickly got the word out to most, if not, everyone in our school. This played an important role in getting members to not only try out our club, but eventually join it in the end.

After our club was officially set up and we started meeting, we soon realized that we needed a way to get information out to all the members of the club. The club itself met every Sunday afternoon at four, but if we did not have at least eight people come, then we could not play a real game. We decided we needed some type of forum where every member or even a potential member could come to for information and to discuss events. We decided the simplest way to do this would be through utilizing a Facebook page.

A Facebook page is probably the most ideal form of communication when it comes to smaller clubs. For the whole time our club existed, the largest number of members we had was probably around forty people. Our Facebook page was simple enough to be efficient for the size of our club and it served us well. The main purpose of our page was to share updates. Every Sunday, a couple of hours before our meeting time, we would post whether we would be meeting that day. Sometimes we would need to cancel because of weather or a holiday so this gave us a way to let everyone know. The page also served as a place of communication. If we were having a meeting, we would post that the meeting was happening and then all the members that could come that day would comment on the post that they were coming. This way, we knew whether we would have enough people to make an official game. All the members knew to check the page for updates before showing up.

At some points, the Facebook page also became a place for people to talk and post other important events that were happening in our high school community. Through doing this, all the members became better acquainted with each other. We became less of a club and more of a large friend group that met every Sunday to have fun. In the end, we truly accomplished our very first goal: creating a club that valued the community of people from all different groups in our high school. We came together over a shared interest, where anyone was invited to play and celebrate friendship.