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General Climbing Discussion

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who learnt to climb from a uni club? (re VSU) 20-Mar-2005 At 11:46:21 PM AlanD

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On 20/03/2005 Hatman wrote:
>Other thoughts on this?

I can't talk with respect to climbing clubs, but I effectively ran combined all the Sydney based University Sailing Clubs for about 6 years in the 80's and was also involved with taking beginners away caving during the same period for the UNSW Speleo's.

What you describe was always a huge risk with any university club, particularly at the start of the year where there is a huge rush of new members, your older more experienced members have moved off into the workforce etc. This was part of the reason why we unofficially combined all the uni sailing clubs, as we could pool our equipment and human resources. Sydney uni went back a week earlier, which allowed us to look after Sydney uni the first week and the other unis a week later (and not have new Sydney Uni members there unless they had the skills to assist) . In the latter years we also attempted get people to nominate which day they were going to turn up for the first 3-4 weeks. With the weather cooling off in April, the numbers tended to drop off rather quickly which really allowed us to sort out who were likely to be members that stuck around for the long term.

We generally tried to let people know what they would experience for the first few weeks and told them that things would improve in the coming weeks and months. We often found that the members that stuck with the club were those that joined half way through the year, probably because they received far more attention / assistance.

A couple of interesting rules which we brought in.
1. No hitting on the new members. You'll be amazed at how many members you lose because your senior members thought of 1st year students as fresh meat.
2. No drugs to be used in front of new members and no drugs were to be offered either. Amongst any university club you'll always find a few wanting to use drugs and we turned a blind eye to it, but they accepted our argument that pulling drugs out in front of a 17 year old kid who's lead a sheltered life was not acceptable and it wasn't for us to introduce drugs to them. If they were that way inclined they'd find the members of the club into drugs.

With respect to our impact on others, on trips away this was always difficult to manage, but we tried our best by selecting areas away from others to have camp sites and do any (lots) drinking. Often it paid to get one person to liase with the management of the camping area and for that person to introduce themselves before the main group arrived and make sure any issues that arose, was dealt with via that liason person. We actually found we copped the blame for problems that weren't associated with us, but because we had a liason person, thing could be sorted out before it became a major problem.

Caving was a different situation, we were often cosidered less of a problem than many of the general public when we went to public access areas. We tended to work with the parm management to assit them with the public in what was acceptable behaviour, so again getting someone to liase with the management was important.

Ultimately it just comes down to management skills gained through past experience