The Atlanta Curling Club is an arena club and has added membership every single year since opening in 2010. Part of that has to do with the demographics of Atlanta, but the biggest reason is our culture of innovating, testing and then systematizing what works. Below are some of the things we have done to reach more people, become more efficient, enhance the experience of curling for participants, and build a large, welcoming, social and friendly club. If you have any questions, or would like help starting a club or building up your existing club, send us an email at ATLcurling@gmail.com Let us know what you’re struggling with and we’ll see if we can help.
Over time this will hopefully grow into a complete “how to start and build a club” guide, or at the very least, a collection of “best practices.” If you would like to add to it to help all arena clubs, please send us an email at ATLcurling@gmail.com
Last updated: 1/21/2018
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Pocket Cheat Sheets
We mostly follow the USA Curling instructor format for learn to curl classes. After check-in, we start with a brief off-ice safety instruction and have the group stretch, practicing the lunge position. We then move onto the ice.
When possible, we have 4 people demonstrate a shot while someone narrates what’s happening. (briefly explain the 4 positions, what/how the skip is telling the person to throw, what’s going on with sweeping for that particular shot [it’s going to be short so the skip is yelling at them to sweep, or that’s fast, they don’t have to sweep at all, etc.])
After the demonstration, we have the big group line up in two lines and we show them how to hold a broom, how to sweep and how to scoot down the ice. One instructor pushes a broom and yells at them on/off while moving down the ice. Once at the far end, we turn around and go back the other way. This warms everyone up and gets people smiling. We then break out into small groups of 4 or 5 to learn how to deliver a stone.
This double sided cheat sheet will help your instructors. Tell them it’s perfectly ok to refer to it while teaching.
Learn to Curl Cheat Sheet R4 – PDF
Print it double sided with no scaling. Fold along the lines for a pocket size guide that walks the instructor through each step. The back side has safety info and some extra info. If you’d like an editable Word version, send us an email at ATLcurling@gmail.com
House Drawing Tool
Can’t paint? Build this house drawing tool that allows a single person to quickly draw all of the houses:
Curling House Drawing Tool – AKA Circle Drawerer R2 – PDF
Protip: see if the rink will let you put small dots in the ice. If so, put them in to locate house centers and hack placement.
If they won’t let you do that, ask if you can put two small stickers on the boards. Get one of those big roll up cloth tape measures and stretch it between the two marks to find the centers of the houses. Mark directly on the tape where the house centers are so that your volunteers don’t have to do math while setting up.
Starting over Summer 2017, the Atlanta Curling Club experimented with embedding LED lights under the ice since the rink wouldn’t let us paint houses. The initial tests worked great and the rink owners were enthusiastic, so we moved forward with the project. All of our houses are now permanently installed under the ice. (12′ circles are in, the remaining circles should be complete by February 2018.)
Setup involves simply plugging in some extension cords, and the lights are invisible when off, even where they cross over the hockey lines. One of the coolest things about the lights is that they’re fully visible from the far hack with the overhead lights at full brightness, and the person throwing knows exactly where the stone stops because they can see the stone slide over each illuminated ring.
Sorry, picture quality sucks — will get better ones later. The ambient lighting in the arena is pretty bright, and the house lines are fairly sharp. You can definitely tell if a stone is in or out.
2 full houses complete. This is after we slushed them in, but before the Zamboni cleaned up the ice.
The LED lights are surprisingly affordable, especially considering the savings if you’re paying for setup time. It is, however, a labor intensive project and the rink has to be fully on-board. We’re installing them in existing ice in a rink with a concrete floor. This is probably not a good project for a sand floor, or at a rink that melts down frequently. Installing the lights while bringing the ice up should be a considerably easier process than getting them in after the fact.
This is an ongoing project that we developed ourselves in-house. As far as we know, it’s the only system like it in the world. If you’d like more info, shoot us an email: ATLcurling@gmail.com
Waivers
Waivers are the biggest wasted opportunity for most clubs. Instead of collecting more useless paper, use them to capture and prioritize new member leads.
We print our waivers double sided and hand them out with a single sheet on each clipboard. This makes sure that the handwriting is likely to be legible and that participants fill out both sides. When they turn them in, give them a name tag. That way you know that everyone with name tags out on the ice has signed a waiver.
As for the document: one side is the standard insurance waiver. The other side has four very important sections: 1. Full contact info. 2. Permission to join the email list. 3. Reason for being here. 4. Photography release.
The amazing part of collecting this is that section 3 has participants self-identify who is super interested in curling, and who is just out on a date night. No more guesswork who your hot leads are! And for those who don’t want to be on the email list, you can still send them snail mail letters or postcards.
After recording everyone’s info (highlighting the ones that shouldn’t be uploaded to the email list) we staple that day’s waivers together, 3-hole punch them and stick them in a Pressboard Side-Bound Report Binder with Fasteners for long term storage. You should keep them as long as your insurance company or lawyer recommends, and at a minimum for as long as your state’s statute of limitations are for filing injury lawsuits. (In several states, that’s as little as 2 years.)
Check out the waiver here: 2018 Curling Waiver R4 – Atlanta Curling Club Email us if you’d like the editable Word version: ATLcurling@gmail.com
Protip: figure out roughly how many waivers you’ll need for a season and just print all of them at once. Also, buy the low profile clipboards, not the ones with the huge clip. They store easier in a bin with all of your other check-in materials.
Learn-to-Curl Gift Bags
In early Fall 2016, the Atlanta Curling Club tested giving all learn to curl students gift bags. The purpose of the bag was to give them something of value along with a bunch of information on the club. The gift bag included the following:
- 3″ vinyl logo sticker
- 6″ “I curled in Atlanta” oval Euro sticker (vinyl)
- Free game wooden nickel
- Full-size koozie (one side had the logo and website, the other had a list of offerings (League, Learn to Curl, Corporate Events, Etc.)
- 2 Atlanta Curling Club business cards
- Upcoming social events flyer
- League schedule, FAQ, and instructions for joining flyer
- 5 postcard style flyers of various sizes to encourage people to look through them. Topics covered: Broomstacking, Corporate Events, League, Trading Pins and Bonspiels, Club info & making donations
- Small candy (Nerds or Smarties — avoid chocolate! it doesn’t hold up. Halloween size Nerds are great because they make noise.)
- Everything was placed in a white paper sandwich bag (typical brown bag size) with a “Learn to Curl – Thanks!” business card stapled to the front.
Unit cost for the whole bag was $3.25 each which we covered by raising learn-to-curl pricing by $5 (from $25 to $30.) The point of the bag was to push information. Each item had a specific function… Nerds made sound. The Koozie was advertising and added bulk to the bag. The postcard flyers were easy to stuff in the bag, and were different sizes to encourage people to look through them. Stapling the “Thanks” business card was cheaper than getting “Thank you” stickers printed to seal the bag.
Email us at ATLcurling@gmail.com if you’d like to know which vendors we used, and/or the results we achieved by adding gift bags.
Texting Service
Beginning Summer 2015, The Atlanta Curling Club has made it a point to hold an off-ice social event every month. Events vary, but they’re usually brewery tours, bar trivia nights, bowling, etc.
In January 2017, we signed up for a text service so that we could send text reminders of upcoming events to our members. We use www.GetClearstream.com We’re still on the $9/month plan and it’s super easy to use and our members really like it.
League & Learn to Curl Scheduling
The Atlanta Curling Club runs league and learn to curl at the same time. This has been one of the most important factors for converting students to league members. The overall energy in the building is high because of league, and students have something to look at while others are taking turns learning the delivery steps.
You can also point to the league games and say, “some of those people were in a learn to curl class a week or two ago. You can come back next week and we’ll put you in a full game with them. The experienced members will help get you trained up. And honestly, as long as you can get the stone over the hog line, it’s the skip’s job to figure out how to use it, so don’t worry. You’re not going to bring a team down or anything. We’re a growing club and all of the experienced members like helping the new members out.”
Another huge benefit is that students and league members are all standing around at broomstacking the same time. People have a lot of fun and feel included, which is key to getting them to come back.
We have 6 sheets. The inside 4 are for league and the outside sheets are for Learn to Curl. If you are short on space or only have one draw, consider adding a bye week or two to your league. Whichever teams are off can be responsible for teaching that week. Ideally, if you have double draws, you’d hold the learn to curl classes the early draw (along with some league) and then just do pure league for the 2nd draw. This lets the instructors play, and any super enthusiastic students can stick around and play a full game.
Free Game, Payment Plan and 100% Money Back Guarantee
One of the biggest challenges is getting people over the hurdle of joining the league. They don’t want to drag a team down, they’re usually expecting people to yell at them for messing up like at kid’s baseball game or whatever, so anything you can do to reduce barriers to entry will help your club grow.
We tell all of our learn to curl students to come back and play a full game for free. Most don’t for various reasons (bucket list, etc.) but the ones that do usually join the league, or sub in as often as possible if they have a crazy work schedule.
For league, we offer a payment plan. 50% now, 50% a few weeks later. $250 or $300 for something they’re not sure about is a much tougher sell than $125.
We also offer a 100% Money Back Guarantee, and describe it as: “If after the first week or two of league you decide that curling is not for you, we’ll refund 100% of your league fee.” Simple, no qualifiers, no risk for them. And no one has ever asked us for a refund.
We also recommend rolling membership fees in with league. There’s nothing worse than debating whether to sign up for something and getting hit with another $125 or whatever. Suddenly a $250 league now costs almost $400 for new members who aren’t even sure if they’re going to like it. That’s a pretty significant hurdle.
Learn to Curl Class – Don’t get too technical or too long
We have ice time from 9:10 PM until 11:45 PM on Friday nights. From a student’s perspective, a learn-to-curl class is pretty long. They get off at work at 5, home around 6-ish, dinner at 7:30 or 8:00, get to the rink at 9:00, and they don’t get off the ice until around midnight. By the time class is over they’re physically tired and haven’t eaten in 4 or 5 hours. Not the best time for the hard sell for league.
Keep the off-ice portion of your learn to curl to an absolute minimum. 10 – 15 minutes in a big group for safety (key points are on the back of the cheat sheet) and do some lunges. Tell people, “if you have any mobility issues (knees, hips, ankles, back), tell your instructor when we split up into groups after getting on the ice. We have delivery sticks that you can use instead of getting down in the lunge position. One of the cool things about curling is it doesn’t matter how you get the stone started. As long as you release it by a certain point you’re good to go. That means a wheelchair participant, someone using stick delivery and someone using hack delivery can all be on the same team.” That’s all they need. At this point they don’t need to know about scoring, handle, free guard zone, detailed club history or anything else. They just want to get out there throwing stones.
We find that people are generally reserved until we do the group sweeping drill. Part of the fun is yelling “On, go go go go, Off! Keep moving! Yeah yep yep, all the way! No no no! Yeah!” really really loud. And once you get down the ice, tell them “Great Job! Now we’re going back the other way.” The sweeping drill is a great ice-breaker and after that they’re all smiles.
After you’ve taught delivery and play a game, don’t get crazy with the rules. Ignore it if they burn a stone. If you’re on a bad sheet and stones fall off the side, kick them back towards the middle. If a stone is close to the hog line, kick it over a bit. And if they keep throwing stones through the house, put a few in front of it so they have something to hit. New curlers want to throw stones and hit stuff. Let them do that.
Try to mention league a few times during class. Mention it when you’re talking about scoring and broomstacking. If they have trouble with one part of the delivery, say something like, “I know there’s a bazillion things to coordinate, but once you throw a few stones, and especially when you come back and join league, you won’t even think about the details. It’s like riding a bike.”
Toward the end, right before letting them go, remind them to stop at broomstacking and grab a snack and beverage, and if they had fun tonight they should join the league. League is exactly the same as class – fun and friendly and your team will help train you up.
Finances, Minutes and Document Retention
For an all volunteer arena club, dealing with documents and records can be a challenge. The key is to keep things simple, turn it into a system, always think “if someone needs this info 4 years from now, can they figure out what we did and why?” and keep everything together in a bin that can be passed from board to board each year. Also, keep in mind that someone elected to a position in the future may not know how to use a particular system (such as quickbooks) so keep things as simple, generic and documented as possible.
Minutes
Minutes are legal documents and should be kept for the life of the organization. They also should contain a lot of very specific information.
Secretary Instructions:
Minutes Template:
Your secretary can have them mostly filled out before your board meeting and can add the details during and immediately after the meeting. The board should review the last meeting’s minutes, approve it as is, or with noted changes, and then the Secretary should save the minutes in a non-editable format (PDF). Old minutes should be reviewed and approved within 30 days, but no longer than 60 days out.
Print a copy and keep in a binder, and email a copy to the club’s email address to hopefully archive it digitally in system somewhere. It’s important to have both paper and digital copies because at some point one or the other will disappear and you will likely need to review old ones at some point.
Finances
Arena clubs usually don’t have a ton of transactions or complicated accounting. Furthermore, the all-volunteer nature of most clubs means you may end up with a treasurer with no specialized accounting skills. Keep your bookkeeping simple, but effective so that anyone can step in as treasurer and the board can easily figure out where all of the money comes in and goes out.
Here’s an excel sheet you can use. It’s broken up into four sections: money coming in, money going out, bank account balances, and miscellaneous credits and liabilities. A lot of it auto-tabulates. Feel free to add and remove lines as needed. Also note there are 3 tabs: Monthly Accounting, Budgets & Donations
Monthly Accounting Template: 2018 Monthly Accounting Template – Atlanta Curling Club – Excel
Monthly Accounting Instructions: