How to Run a Club

Clubs and teams.

A talk about building and making a club. I am going to start off with my little club, Momolanders. (https://www.chess.com/club/momolanders).

Decide how much effort you want to put in. Not right now as you make the club, but as your circumstance changes and as the club grows. This will help decide how to run it. If you want a club with10.000 members, are you retired, out of work etc?

I want to keep my club at 500 members or below. I keep an eye open on the membership, I remove the closed/banned accounts most weekends. 500 is a sensible amount to keep an eye on.

We run mini tournaments and match games of all sizes; we are a stepping stone club. I look for new players to chess.com and mostly lower rated people (but not all). So, we make match games against other clubs of 3 v 3, sometimes to help other new clubs it can be 1v1. It is about a little fun for our inexperienced members to get the feel of club match games. We have tons of match games and if you have a new club throw out the challenges, we have these at the moment if you need an example these are filling, we have a lot running :-  https://www.chess.com/clubs/upcomingevents/momolanders

Match games build your club.

Tournaments:

We make loads of 3-day STD tournaments, I mean tons, they are asked for a lot. I have several hundred people playing in our tournaments. These are good for your club. You can use them to make your club brand familiar which will bring in good active members. Apart from the ones going these are filling up, all branded. https://www.chess.com/tournaments/all?keyword=momoland&type=upcoming&filter=all&sort=start_date remember, these add to your clubs brand.

We do the same thing with 960: https://www.chess.com/tournaments/all?keyword=momoland&type=upcoming&filter=chess960&sort=start_date

A great recent addition to what we offer.

So decide what ya want, we want about 500 members, small matches, tournaments and 9060’s, all mixed premiums and free.

We also want the club to be relaxed, so we don’t care about the club forums so much, we do use them though a little.

So what I am saying is work out what you want for your club.

I would really love to hear what you guys think, and what tips and tricks for running a great club.

BTW we accept challenges of all kinds. Right down to 1 v 1 match challenges!

Lets see what we can come up with.