Recruiting new Junior Shooters

[LRoland]

I have been coaching rifle and pistol for many years and constantly look for new ways to recruit new juniors. I usually get 2-3 articles per year in our gun club newsletter plus 3-4 press releases to 5 newspapers in our area highlighting junior shooting accomplishments and inviting calls for more information. Calls trickle in but after a year of starting Junior Air Pistol I only have 4 regulars. I am interested in ideas some of you have used to get more kids shooting regularly.

[Nicole Hamilton]

Pizza?

[RobStubbs]

We tend to try and recruit shooters from other sports or youth activities - mainly those that do a little bit of shooting. In the UK we tap into the pony club as well as the cub scouts. If you're allowed you could try contacting one or more local schools, offering to teach them shooting.

If you can get a well known shooter to come in and publicise that, that can also help.

Rob.

[jhmartin]

I'm a 4-H coach, so it is from that perspective.

Our County has shooting sports project leaders for the county .... not individual club project leaders .... resource sharing and all that.

We put an article in the newspaper about a month , then 2 weeks before our county "Shooting Sports Open House".

All the shooting sports put up their own exhibits, tables, trophies and whatnot, (what to do with all those GREAT targets that were shot last year!) and let folks come in and wander thru and ask questions. This is where we get many of our new Novice and Junior (8-13 year olds) 4-H members. Make sure you have the practice times set and ready to hand out. I also email CMP and ask for trinkets to hand out to the kids ... usually they are pretty good to us. CMP also has a "Parents Guide" for Air Rifle that I hand out .... CMP will get them to you for nothing.

[Nicole Hamilton]

If you can get a well known shooter to come in and publicise that, that can also help.

Here in the US, the only shooters the general public ever hears about are the ones that kill themselves at the end of spree.

[RobStubbs]

If you can get a well known shooter to come in and publicise that, that can also help.

Here in the US, the only shooters the general public ever hears about are the ones that kill themselves at the end of spree.

Yeah I guess that's about the sum of the sad state of affairs really.

I also meant one of the shooters say that's shot for the country, in the olympics etc. If you get someone like that you can advertise them as a shooting star, even if no ones heard of them it may help draw in a few extra kids.

Rob.

[jvenskoske]

I work with the local 4-H Shooting Education Club and have good success recruiting youth. Here is what works for us:
+ Setup a shooting gallery at the county fair. An 8X8X16 foot booth with resettable silhouette animals as targets. We use the Crosman 1077 and charge $.50 to shoot. If a youth gets all 4 animals down, we give them a prize. While the older 4-Her are helping the youth shoot, our parents are talking with the parents of the new shooter. Works well
+ Give presentations to civic and other youth groups. Have the youth talk about their experiences, trips, display equipment, targets, etc.
+ Print a brochure of the club. Because we are a 4-H club, the state university printed (full color) brochures for the club.

[Nicole Hamilton]

I actually was serious about pizza, but turning more serious, one "outreach" activity I've helped with was a Scouting day at the range when I still lived in MA. We invited the local Boy Scout troops and they were welcome to pitch tents and play with knots (or whatever it is Boy Scouts do :) and then we let them shoot under close supervision of the instructors. We got new recruits but it was also a really fun day for all of us running it.

Also, I did help coach in our junior rifle program and it became clear that one big impediment for a lot of beginning shooters is convincing Mom and Dad they need a gun when the kid hasn't even been doing it long enough to know if he'll stick with it. So if you want it to work, you really do need some club guns in sizes that fit the kids. Full-size surplus junk is not a workable alternative, especially if you want the kid to come back.

[1813benny]

One method that works well is to coordinate a short demonstration w/ any hunter's safety programs in the area. In many instances, people do not really know anything about competitive shooting.

Put some interesting equipment in front of them along w/ some targets shot by other juniors and then add the aspect of marksmanship, safety and being able to hit what you aim at during hunting and it becomes an interesting sell.

[seemehaha]

roland! nice to see a familiar name :)

i don't know how my home club (CAJRC) gets the numbers they do. they usually post in the news paper before camp and before the season starts then sporadically throughout the year (jo's ect.) it doesn't make sense to me that your club can't get bigger numbers especially with a bigger population in the area. although we get big numbers initially, most drop out eventually. so is your question about retention or getting people there in the first place?

[Ken L OZ]

Try a publicity campaign inviting anybody interested to attend the range for an individualy supervised and coached shoot.
The people having a trial shoot dont handle the weapons untill they are in the shooting position and the weapon is then handed to them to point at the target and fire.
Basic safety instructions are given to the attendees along a welcome cup of coffee / tea/ soft drink depending on age before shooting starts.
It is preferable to start them off on oversize targets and encourage competition between the new potential members.
Be sure that if Dad wants to try shooting then encourage him to bring the wife and chidren along to have a go as well. The wives will be less hostile to the idea if they experience target shooting them selves and see just how diciplined and safe it realy is.

[LRoland]

Lots of great ideas. I hope we can keep the discussion going for awhile and get even more ideas that will help all of us build larger shooting programs and give us a chance to teach shooting safety to more youth.

Nicole and Rob mentioned recruiting from scouts and I am hopeful that will work for us too. We have a scout troop sponsored by our Tri-County Gun Club which has been working on starting an adventure crew focused on shooting. We are still in the planning stage but hope to get this going in the near future.

CAJRC (is that you Bob?) asked if we are talking recruitment or retention? I wanted to address recruitment at this time but certainly retention is another issue that needs thoughtful consideration in another thread.

I liked Jim's idea of a "Shooting Sports Open House" focused on kids. Our club does an open house but it is mostly adult focused and targeted for the immediate neighborhood around the range property. We have been missing this opportunity for kids. I have been thinking about a "Bring Your Kid to the Range Day" like take your kid to work idea. It would be a chance to highlight all the shooting options for kids including shotgun, rifle, pistol, scouts, hunter ed, etc. Benny's idea of demonstrating target shooting for the hunter ed kids is a good one too. Hunter Ed holds classes in the indoor range setup area with lots of trophys and national record plaques and would be a perfect chance to show them what target competition is about.

John described the county fair shooting gallery idea-fantastic. What kid can pass up a chance to test his marksmanship skills? As Oregon has become more and more liberal and more anti-gun it has been challenging to get access for shooting exhibits at some county fairs. This year, however, our state shooting organization is planning a shooting exhibition and information center at the state fair. I am planning to participate in that demonstrating air pistol for kids and adults. Others are demonstrating air rifle and cowboy action with wax bullets.

What other ideas you got?

[Rutty]

quote]So if you want it to work, you really do need some club guns in sizes that fit the kids. Full-size surplus junk is not a workable alternative, especially if you want the kid to come back.[/quote]

I couldn't agree more, I would also add that you need to make time for juniors as well. Try and put some time aside specifically for them and not just fit them in amongst the other activities.

I endorse Rob's remarks about links with other organisations; Pony Club, Scouts; and would add the cadet forces to that list. Air Cadets in the UK, Civil Air Patrol in the USA etc.

Publicity is important (vital) but as well as the special events I believe that maintaining a regular presence in the local press is essential. We try for an item in the local newspaper every two weeks and it does maintain the public profile of the club.

An airgun range at local fairs and events is useful and does result in some enquiries, it is also not a bad little "earner" for club funds

Remember, no juniors today, no sport tomorrow.

Rutty

[n1heu]

I get more members from viewing my webpage that by all other methods. Establish a web presence for your club and tell members to recruit.

[LRoland]

I like the idea of a news item in the paper every 2 weeks but I quickly run out of news items. What kinds of topics, announcements, information do you get in the paper every 2 weeks?

[LRoland]

n1
Do you have a web link to view your junior information for your club?

[RobStubbs]

I like the idea of a news item in the paper every 2 weeks but I quickly run out of news items. What kinds of topics, announcements, information do you get in the paper every 2 weeks?

It has to be new news, noteworthy and interesting to be published that often. You could perhaps intersperse competition results with shooter profiles, reports of youth camps, training / coaching schedules etc. It would be hard work to get something like that in so often and make it interesting but then again our local youth soccer teams often feature in our local papers each week so it can be done.

Rob.

[n1heu]

http://www.brp.org/html/junior_s_program.html

http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/mb/brpc

The top is my juniors section of the club, the bottom is our message board.

[HOSER]

In Nebraska we have around 1700 junior high and high school trapshooters that compete weekly in their conference meets, then at the end of the season, we hold the state championships.

This is a very fertile ground for finding new smallbore shooters. I always invite all trap shooters I meet to come out and give the smallbore prone game a try. Works good around here. But I do think including a sporter rifle class would help the game grow.

Hosé R

[Hemmers]

So if you want it to work, you really do need some club guns in sizes that fit the kids. Full-size surplus junk is not a workable alternative, especially if you want the kid to come back.

I couldn't agree more, I would also add that you need to make time for juniors as well. Try and put some time aside specifically for them and not just fit them in amongst the other activities...

At the Fresher's Fayre we sign people up and run trials shoots, as was mentioned above. What we crucially do is run special fresher's evenings once a week that we invite the most promising shots (from their trial shoots) to attend (most of the people who come down just want to say that they have shot something. Of 150 trial shooters, we get maybe 8 come back regularly). The evenings are partly because we usually need at least 2-3 freshers to fill in the slots of our bottom teams, and the first postal deadlines are just a few weeks into term (so they need very focussed training, very fast), but also to make them feel special, and to focus on them, away from the chaos of regular club nights when everyone is trying to shoot their own cards.

The other thing we do is run an internal fresher's league. Open to all freshers, whether they've made the postal teams or not, but specifically aimed at retaining those people who havent, and stopping them from drifting away.

Of course, these are ways of keeping people when you've got them, not attracting them in the first place. In terms of recruitment, obviosuly we put a lot of effort into the Fresher's Fayre. We also try and get stuff in the Uni newspaper (although that is notoriously difficult since all they want to write about is the city's soccer team, and the club's soccer, american football and rugby teams, not about the "small clubs" - i.e. 95% of them, and interestingly, the ones that tend to win the most stuff!). We have got a few pieces in and are slowly increasing our campus profile.

I also try and wear club tops as often as possible around campus - hey hey, free walking-talking advertising for the club! I've had some very interesting chats with people drawn in by my T-Shirts, including some people who thought all cartridge firearms were banned, and all we could shoot were Air Guns...Definitely need to educate the public.

I want to try and get organised with flyers and posters around campus this year, not just relying on the Fresher's Fayre stand in the middle of a busy hall surrounded by other clubs. We got lucky this year, we were right by the entrance, and stuffed up a 1000yd target on a big frame. They could see it from across the hall! Next year we could be in a poky corner somewhere well away from the main flow if people...tis a gamble as to how much good the fayre does us.

That said, 8 regular freshers a year is about as much as we have space for with range limitations, etc, so we're at pretty much maximum capacity. At this stage, it's just about getting the good word out and making sure people vote pro-shooting, etc and understand what we do, even if they don't do it themselves.