On Recruitment
So this post is not directly related to ultimate, but I think it is extremely important to the team, especially in the long term. The fall season is about to start and a HUGE part of the fall is recruitment. We are trying to build the best team we can get, and hopefully try to continue that in the next year. There are a couple of very easy ways for the team to help make this recruitment season successful. Being in a fraternity (which a big percentage of the team is) gets you to learn some recruitment strategies and I am going to try and give the ones here that are most appropriate.
1. Go to orientation frisbee. For those of you who have not taken part in this, there is pickup just about every night (usually starting around 10:00pm or 11:00pm) on the turf. Frisbee is the kind of thing that attracts freshmen for some reason, so come out and start meeting people here. Hint at the fact that they should go to the information session. Talk to them a little bit about how the ultimate team works. Help them out with their forehand if they need it. This is a really great time for ultimate recruitment. Try and get to school by the Saturday before classes start so you can show up to these orientation games. Usually a TON of kids show up to this.
2. Learn kid's names. At each practice try to introduce yourself to some of the freshmen. Learn their names and talk to them when you see them around school or at the following practice. There is a certain ex-captain whose name I will not reveal who once said, "there are so many freshmen, I am not even going to bother learning names until most of them quit in the winter." This strategy is terrible and will end up causing the new kids to not feel welcome.
3. Show up to practice. This is also good because it will start teaching the new kids that even the most experienced players treat practice as important, so they will be more inclined to keep coming. Also, seeing the new kids at every practice makes doing #2 that much easier.
4. Persuade kids to come out. If you meet some cool kids, it is okay to ask them, "hey, are you coming to practice tonight?" I mean don't get really annoying and pester them every time you see them, but sometimes they don't have the schedules memorized and especially when they are just getting to college trying to figure stuff out, practice may slip their mind. But if you are telling them to show up to practice and then you don't yourself, it is going to look stupid, so keep doing #3 while doing this one.
5. Don't just focus on the really, really, ridiculously good kids. Yeah sure when we find a PC or Tim we should make sure that we get them to join because they are going to be great for the team. But keep the long term in mind, people can grow. I know I didn't have a forehand coming into my freshman year, and was not very athletic, but I (hopefully) have improved a lot and have become an important member of the team even if it took me a while to achieve this. So keep talking to kids even if they are not the kind of kids that are going to be on the A team in the spring.
That is all I will post for now. Remember that we are COMPETING with other clubs, organizations, sports teams, etc. We are also competing with laziness, so we have to make the team seem like a welcome place for everyone there and hopefully we can even steal some of the more athletic kids from their "real" sports (I know of a lot of kids who would have been on the team, but are doing crew or whatever instead. Come on, who would choose that over ultimate?) This past year, we barely had a B team. We should have at least as many kids on the B team as we had on the A team by the spring. These are the kids who should be replacing the A teamers when they graduate or become lazy and need to get kicked off the team. Keep all this in mind, and I will see you in the fall.
-Ravi
PS Captains, when is that club expo thing on the Quad? Make sure to email that out to the team so we have a ton of people their trying to recruit.
1. Go to orientation frisbee. For those of you who have not taken part in this, there is pickup just about every night (usually starting around 10:00pm or 11:00pm) on the turf. Frisbee is the kind of thing that attracts freshmen for some reason, so come out and start meeting people here. Hint at the fact that they should go to the information session. Talk to them a little bit about how the ultimate team works. Help them out with their forehand if they need it. This is a really great time for ultimate recruitment. Try and get to school by the Saturday before classes start so you can show up to these orientation games. Usually a TON of kids show up to this.
2. Learn kid's names. At each practice try to introduce yourself to some of the freshmen. Learn their names and talk to them when you see them around school or at the following practice. There is a certain ex-captain whose name I will not reveal who once said, "there are so many freshmen, I am not even going to bother learning names until most of them quit in the winter." This strategy is terrible and will end up causing the new kids to not feel welcome.
3. Show up to practice. This is also good because it will start teaching the new kids that even the most experienced players treat practice as important, so they will be more inclined to keep coming. Also, seeing the new kids at every practice makes doing #2 that much easier.
4. Persuade kids to come out. If you meet some cool kids, it is okay to ask them, "hey, are you coming to practice tonight?" I mean don't get really annoying and pester them every time you see them, but sometimes they don't have the schedules memorized and especially when they are just getting to college trying to figure stuff out, practice may slip their mind. But if you are telling them to show up to practice and then you don't yourself, it is going to look stupid, so keep doing #3 while doing this one.
5. Don't just focus on the really, really, ridiculously good kids. Yeah sure when we find a PC or Tim we should make sure that we get them to join because they are going to be great for the team. But keep the long term in mind, people can grow. I know I didn't have a forehand coming into my freshman year, and was not very athletic, but I (hopefully) have improved a lot and have become an important member of the team even if it took me a while to achieve this. So keep talking to kids even if they are not the kind of kids that are going to be on the A team in the spring.
That is all I will post for now. Remember that we are COMPETING with other clubs, organizations, sports teams, etc. We are also competing with laziness, so we have to make the team seem like a welcome place for everyone there and hopefully we can even steal some of the more athletic kids from their "real" sports (I know of a lot of kids who would have been on the team, but are doing crew or whatever instead. Come on, who would choose that over ultimate?) This past year, we barely had a B team. We should have at least as many kids on the B team as we had on the A team by the spring. These are the kids who should be replacing the A teamers when they graduate or become lazy and need to get kicked off the team. Keep all this in mind, and I will see you in the fall.
-Ravi
PS Captains, when is that club expo thing on the Quad? Make sure to email that out to the team so we have a ton of people their trying to recruit.
2 Comments:
the activities fair on the quad is usually sometime in the middle of freshmen orientation, and is usually 10-12, or 12-2, or something like that.
good post ravi.
just so it is clear, the "ex-captain" mentioned in the blog is NOT me.
also i wanted to add that when you play during orientation, make sure you go there with some amount of seriousness and effort but still have fun, we don't the freshmen coming in to think they're better than us because it might make them not want to play (for those of you who remember travis). we also don't want to come off as dicks either, so be lighthearted and encourage people if they drop the disc.
a little tidbit from my experience as a freshman... before long i identified scheid as a good player, i could tell he was on the team by the way he played and the way he talked to other players. scheid was good and i wanted to prove that i was too so i always made an effort to cover him and be around him so he could see that i could play. everyone that goes to nso should strive to be like that, if we have the freshman wanting to prove themselves to us then they'll keep coming back until they feel like they have, hopefully they'll be hooked by then.
one more thing, scheid and some of the others quickly gave me the nickname of (kid in the red shorts) it's a dumb nickname but always used it when refering to my speed and whatnot so it made me feel immediately accepted, i knew they were impressed and wanted to see me come out more...so do that too, pinpoint the good players and give them extra attention
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