Fun tramp related activities with no tramp??!

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LucyTRA

Coach
Gymnast
Judge
Freshers week is coming up and this is the main time we have to promote the tramp club at my University. I'm pretty invested in it because I set it up a year ago and don't want to see it flop. We had a good first year and competed at 5 comps and won medals at all but 1. If we don't get enough members then we will be shut down.

Last year the best thing we had for pulling people in was the trial session during freshers week. They are all forced to walk through the sports centre when they enrol and it was great to be able to say 'you can go try it now/tomorrow/later today in the next room'. All of the sports clubs got a trial session. We have just been informed that we will NOT be given a trial session this year because it's 'too hard' to move the equipment into the other hall (which is about 10 metres away down a flat hard-floored corridor). The best they could come up with is that we can have a mat and do 'something' on that in the main hall.

Any suggestions?? There is nothing 'trampoline' that I would do with newbies that doesn't involve a trampoline! I'm not making them do conditioning, the whole point is it's meant to be fun!
 
Watch videos of your team doing cool routines and having fun so they know what they can expect. You could do it off an I-pad or laptop. Talk about how fit you can get while having tons of fun. I'd make it more into a presentation than doing stupid things on a mat.
 
That's what I'm thinking too - we will be there doing that sort of stuff for the whole week, and I'm pushing the rest of the girls to come up with some sort of game or activity that people can do at our stall just to get people engaged with us. We have a promo video that will play on loop on an ipad on our table.

'Margo I'm not sure if the uni has a trampette actually! I doubt it, but I suppose it's worth a check. not sure what we could get people to do on it other than shape jumps (maybe DMT style??) but it would be a whole lot better than nothing!
 
I would try to get a single mini or a double mini if you can. I also second the idea of making a trampoline skill montage video to show on a laptop.
 
Can't you just do the trial session at another point? Make sure you hand out a copy of your training timetable and say they can come along and try any time?

I think also you need to remember that clubs are always mentally busy the first few weeks, while people try out new stuff and find their feet. Then it drops off as they discover beer and their coursework piles up.

So maybe have an official "trial week" every half semester, or a bring a friend session. Keep the numbers up all year.

Are you actually signing up to a commitment? Or are you more payg? Do you need numbers on paper (x signed up in freshers week), or actual bodies at each session?
 
@Faith they pay a yearly membership after attending a maximum of 2 sessions without paying, not including freshers try out sessions, so those with try outs actually get to attend more sessions before deciding. That said, membership is only £50 for the whole year (of which the club receives £10) and once you have paid that for your main club you can join as many others as you like at no extra charge, and that includes insurance, coaching hall hire, everything except kit!

We have to get both numbers signing up (£££) and a decent enough number turning up each week too. If we had lots of sign ups and very few at training they would be less bothered than if we had no sign ups and lots of attendees, which is kinda unfair because if we are not someone's main sport then we do not get their sign up but they can still attend.

I'm still fighting them on the trial session issue and I think we are going to insist that we get one on the Friday (freshers week only runs mon-Thursday) if they won't let us have one DURING.
 
What about some sorts of little competitions and keep a running tally of the results posted up? Things like - that game where you jump and move the crashmats further and further apart . You could do longest, strongest etc and maybe have a sweetie for everyone who enters - I know we are talking about adults but everyone loves a sweetie! And I agree have a montage running showing what it all can lead to.
 
That's a strange system. Where I went to uni you paid an anual membership, collected by the club, which, if remember correctly, was £20 of which £10 went to the AU. Or maybe it was £30 with £20 to the AU. I guess if you joined more clubs you wouldn't pay the AU component next time. Then you paid a sessional fee which was £3 per session for non-members and £1.50 for members. I don't think that was standardised across clubs. I think they would have stopped allowing non-members now though because of the change in BG's rules to only cover coaches in BG clubs. So everyone would have to be a member to be covered by the AUs insurance, since BG wouldn't insure the coaches.

Are you not permitted to charge sessional fees on top of the annual membership or you just don't? Trampolining is more expensive to run than a lot of other clubs.

Regarding sign ups I don't know how much it is worth your worrying about if you only get £10 per member. I mean, realistically how many attendees can you handle? You don't really want to end up with more than six to a bed and given you founded the club so it has not been going that long I'm guessing you don't have that many beds. So it seems unlikely to me that you can make enough money from memberships to contribute significantly towards a new trampoline, even secondhand. I would think you'd be hard pressed even to make enough to cover the maintanence of your existing trampolines. Unless you hope to get a lot of people who sign up but then drop of the radar.

Maybe you really need to think about other ways of raising funding. I know you organised a competition so if you can make that an annual event that should help. Maybe you could put on some other fundraisers too that aren't necessarily trampoline related like ticketted social nights?

I can see you want to get enough people for it to have the critical mass to sustain it as a club but perhaps it isn't that important if they don't sign up in Fresher's week as their main club (unfair as it is.)
 
Get a single mini-tramp and big crash mat. You could play 'stick it' ('pass-or-fail') with different jumps (straight, star, tuck, straddle, pike, half turn, etc.). Or get them jumping over something, e.g. pool noodle.
 

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