Hey there Pokebeach,
I've written up this article about expanding your local Pokémon scene. I think everyone wishes there were more events nearby, more often, and with better attendance — but that isn’t going to happen overnight. Indeed, a lot of time and effort go into creating a consistent positive experience that people can visit at their leisure.
My goal in writing this article is to share my experiences with starting a University Pokémon Club. In the three years since I started the club, we’ve gone from a small student-attended university club to a thriving weekly league for the video game and card game. So let’s go over what my experience running the club has been. There have been many ups and downs over the years, and I think there’s a lot of experience that others can appreciate. I don’t know the exact recipe for success, but it is my hope that this article can generate discussion to help improve our club, and maybe help start yours!
Sections
Some Background
The University of Victoria Pokémon Club was founded in the summer of 2011 after I hosted a Pokémon league event at our local anime convention. We gathered a group together to act as eight Gym Leaders and four Elite Four members. The event was a big success and we realized we had a community that would appreciate a chance to meet up more frequently. We looked into our student society’s club regulations and went through with establishing our club and booking a room to meet in. We were pretty happy as a close-knit group of friends under the guise of a club.
Later on, we found out about the Play! Pokémon weekly league program. We thought it would be awesome to get free swag to give to club members. Additionally, it would encourage Play! Pokémon to host events in our city if we ever became big enough. I became a registered Tournament Organizer (TO) through applying on Pokemon.com, and our league application was approved. We were an official league!
In pursuit of becoming a bigger league that had a chance to host a premier event like a City Championships (TCG), I started a movement to advertise our club to the community at large. I went around to local card/game shops and asked if I could put a poster in their window. Most places were happy to put our poster up for a couple weeks at least. Using this advertising, we managed to bring some kids and others in from around the area. As a university club and registered league, we also had kids find out about our league via pokemon.com, or parents find out by visiting/working at the university. The only major advertising on campus I do nowadays is the club advertisement days at the beginning of the semester and setting my StreetPass message to “FacebookUVicPkMn.” StreetPass is a more valuable tool than you might think!
And that’s about where we stand today. We’re a league that runs every week and that league is run by the UVic Pokémon Club!
What We Do & What We Have Done
Before becoming a weekly league, our weekly activities usually just involved hanging out and playing games. We’d have fun days sometimes. Here’s a list of some of the more memorable fun days we’ve put on:
At our university, clubs get a budget each semester to put on club events and we’ve done fundraising ventures like selling booster packs at club to help pay for some of the event materials (e.g. printing costs). Selling t-shirts or pins is another great way to raise funds. We are also friends with the UVic Anime Club, who is gracious enough to lend us a projector for movie nights.
What Has Worked Really Well
Having a weekly league has worked really well for having consistent attendance, albeit from a non-student crowd. We get a lot of kids and teens from the surrounding area attending every week. I think this is great for building a Pokémon community in Victoria, but maybe not the best aim for a university club.
Fun days are always positively received. Pokémon is light-hearted childhood nostalgia for a lot of people. Very few university students are interested in the competitive scene and don’t have much to do on days where nothing special is going on. Having regular fun days keeps people coming even if they aren’t competitive.
I’d say the fun days that work out best for us in terms of “effort in : reward out” would be movie nights, finger painting, pumpkin carving and fun format tournaments. Movie nights can be anything from Pokémon episodes to movies to OVAs (like the Pokémon Origins series). Finger painting is just a fun thing to do that people should really do more often. All it takes is a trip to the dollar store to get some poster-board and paints. This also results in a poster you can proudly display to advertise your club! Win-win! Pumpkin carving is just a neat idea and everyone is looking for an excuse to carve a Pokémon pumpkin. The biggest concern is cleanliness, so it’s a good idea to bring spare tools, newspaper, and plastic bags for garbage. Lastly, fun format tournaments are easy to approach and have a lower skill cap so they aren’t as daunting to get into.
For some examples of fun formats we’ve tried, we’ve done:
As much fun as the scavenger hunts are, the cost of printing cool cards on card stock (double sided in colour) is pretty expensive. And you need to print enough cards to hide that people won’t find them all in the first five minutes. The event cost runs something around $30 when I do it and it only entertains for about a half hour. It also requires you to print and cut the cards in advance, and then hide all the cards ~1 hour before the event. I would still run another one, but this is not something I could recommend as a frequent event (at least how we run it).
Clay sculptures was an event put on by a sculptor friend who donated clay for cheaper. Again, I think this is a super fun event, but without someone who has loads of coloured clay they can bring by, it’s hard to justify the cost of purchasing blocks of every colour of clay for a once-a-year thing. We reimbursed my friend for the clay by writing up an invoice for the approximate cost of the clay we ended up using.
What I Wish We Did Better or More
Fun days as a whole. This is more a problem with myself being busy with a Masters degree than a failure of any concept. It’s really important that events be run frequently to make sure people don’t lose interest. I also think we could do a much better job of supporting the singles format for people who are just learning about the competitive scene. Fun formats are one way of doing this, but I’m sure people who play by singles-ladder rules would appreciate having somewhere in-person to practice. I think it would also go a long way in keeping people interested, as not everyone is able/wants to make the the jump to Standard. By only hosting serious tournaments in doubles, I think we might leave a portion of our potential member base disinterested.
I also think that the weekly league is great for the Victoria Pokémon community, but not that good for the UVic Pokémon community. The kids that show up at weekly league tend to scare off new members who were looking for a relaxing night to chill. I’m currently toying with an idea to split the club into two entities: One will be the “Nintendo Club” and the second will be the weekly Pokémon League, hosted by the Nintendo Club. By giving them different titles, it’s easier to get the message across to parents that one is for everyone and the other is intended to be students-only.
Lastly, club leadership is a big problem right now. University clubs are ephemeral things. People graduate and move on, and someone else needs to pick up the reigns and carry the club into the new year. I’ve been running the club for three years now (moving onto four), and the only reason I’ve been able to do so is because I’m doing a Masters at the same university as my undergrad. Generally, a healthy leadership turnaround for a university club is to have a new leader every two years. But finding someone willing to take on that responsibility is often a challenge. Moreover, finding someone you think is right for the role is another problem altogether. I’ll talk about solutions for this a bit later, but I’m still at the chalkboard for a good idea for this one.
What I Try To Keep In Mind
As far as I can tell, the recipe for a successful club or community is this:
It’s important to not only host events regularly, but do so at the same time on the same day. If you’re having trouble booking a room for instance, it’s important to keep things as people expect them to be. Many students plan their semester’s schedule around attending clubs, so you can’t just switch days or times up without giving people a lot of notice. Otherwise, you’re going to lose half your attendance. The same goes for weekly leagues.
I can’t stress enough how important fun days are. If your goal is to build a competitive community, you need to understand the population pyramid of such a community. The base of any large community is built from the casuals-up. It’s important for the energy in the room and the vibe that the club gives off; there should be lots of people having a good time. Competitive games aren’t for everyone, but Pokémon can be. And if people stick around long enough, sooner or later they get their feet wet in the competitive scene. Sometimes they jump back out of the water immediately, but other times they’ll wade a little deeper. It’s important to not lose these people before they ever get the chance to try things out! And even more important is to make them feel welcome even if they’ve decided competitive Pokemon isn’t for them. Groups like this are built from word-of-mouth, and that means you’re going to need mouths to spread the word.
Tournaments are fun ways to encourage people to try out the competitive aspect of the game; they don’t have to be a competitive format. Having prizes for tournaments is very important. These can be little toys like Pokémon Kids, but it’s important that people come away with something. That little $2 prize is a trophy that sits on their shelf saying “remember how much fun this was?” I think it’s important to hand out little prizes randomly to non-winners as well, for the same reason. Everyone should remember a tournament fondly, no matter how they placed. For the random prizes, we give out league promos which helps keep our costs down.
One of the biggest challenges with running a club around Pokémon is that your member base can be more socially awkward than the average person (I’m generalizing). A lot of people have a tougher time making friends because they have a bunch of niche, introverted hobbies with little in-person interaction; Pokemon can be like this. There are groups of friends that are happy to come together and they keep each other entertained and have a good time. But really keep in mind: for university groups, first-years have often moved across the country and don’t have (m)any friends in their new city. University clubs offer a social experience where people can meet and greet. As a leader, you have to make a conscious effort to introduce yourself to anyone new, explain how it works, and become a friend. At the same time, it’s good to encourage members to meet new people. This can be as simple as saying “Hey, I think ____ is looking for a game, would you be interested?” Tournaments and fun days also offer a chance for people to meet and greet. It’s important to help shy individuals become part of the community.
Plans For The Future
First and foremost, our leadership scheme needs to change. I’ve been running it as a monarchy because I’m treating my job as a 1-person job, when it really isn’t. I’ve generally asked a friend to help with leadership duties, but this has completely avoided the normal 2-year turnover we should have strived for, and now I’m left scrambling for a new league leader and a new club president. I’m very thankful that a friend (that’s you Ben!) has stepped in and expressed interest in running the club. But by running our weekly league and inviting kids to attend, we’ve really reduced our student attendance. This makes the club aspects of our… club… kind of difficult. For instance, we don’t have many go-to people to sit at our booth during the Club Advertisement days. We also have a very small group of people to potentially take over the club.
Moving forward, I think I’m going to take a page from our local Anime Club which I help with. At the first meeting of every semester, they vote on Club deputies. These deputies don’t really have much of a leadership role, but they do highlight people who are willing to help out. They also help deputies recognize themselves as someone who can take an active role in helping the club. Jokingly, I describe them when describing the positions as people who can help run the club in a pinch, and maybe bring cookies once. This has the positive side-effect of getting free cookies sometimes! Candidates would then give a 30 second speech about why you should elect them, and then we do a “face down thumbs up” vote. The club would also then (ideally) elect a vice president and president. This creates a stable leadership group with potential up-and-comers who would be more comfortable stepping into the role in the future.
The only issue with this system is that you need an appreciable student attendance in the first place. I think if attendance is low (~10), just asking for a couple of deputies to nominate themselves is appropriate. As the leader, you can talk to people on the side about stepping up into a club president role later. However, if you get a larger group of students together (~20), then adding in presidential elections would be good. Presidential candidates should also hopefully have expressed interest prior to the voting night, and maybe have been a deputy for one semester.
I’ve also been considering splitting our Pokemon club into two entities: the “Nintendo Club” and the weekly “Pokemon League.” The big advantage of this is to regain a student-based club. Community members would be welcome, but by re-branding the club as a separate entity from our weekly league, it would define a time that’s for everyone, and a time that’s for students/older folks. I really really love having the weekly league and I don’t want to see it go, but at the same time, we have to start recruiting more student members and the kids that attend league aren’t helping. If we were a local games shop, it’d be a different story; but we’re not.
The additional advantage of this approach is that we would be able to schedule our club meetings at the same time as other related clubs like the UVic Smash Bros. Club and the UVic Anime Club. These communities have a large overlap of potential member bases, and people often appreciate the chance to attend multiple clubs on their one free night a week. It also helps people organize their schedules, as they don’t have to choose between two clubs that interest them. This would expose members of the other clubs to our group, and members of our group to the larger UVic club community. The problem with this has been the kids, and the fact that other UVic clubs are not an all-ages atmosphere. Another reason for splitting into two entities.
Lastly, there have been grassroots efforts to unite university clubs, but I don’t know of any that ever got off the ground. I think it would be amazing to have a competitive circuit with competition between universities, but before a club can really put together a team of VGCers, it needs the base membership. I think there’s a lot of promise in an organization like the National Collegiate Pokémon Association, but I think the bar was set way too high when everyone was really just taking their first baby steps. For anyone that is reading this article and has a university or high school Pokémon club, or is now interested in starting one, I’d love to propose an annual tournament as a starting point. I think the details for such an event are best left to the forums for discussion. All I can say is we could totally order a plaque to ship to the winning school as a point of pride.
In Closing
So, there you have it. This has been an in-depth view of my experience running the UVic Pokémon Club. Hopefully I’ve been able to offer insight you can take and use for running your own club. No two areas are the same, and I don’t think you can approach things exactly the same from all four corners of the globe, but hopefully I’ve provided some ideas you can take on board or sparked new ideas you can share with me!
My main goal in posting this article is to try and generate discussion about how people can get into running clubs. So hopefully everyone doesn’t leave it here. I really look forward to hearing about all the neat ideas people have, and feedback they can offer, in the forums.
I've written up this article about expanding your local Pokémon scene. I think everyone wishes there were more events nearby, more often, and with better attendance — but that isn’t going to happen overnight. Indeed, a lot of time and effort go into creating a consistent positive experience that people can visit at their leisure.
My goal in writing this article is to share my experiences with starting a University Pokémon Club. In the three years since I started the club, we’ve gone from a small student-attended university club to a thriving weekly league for the video game and card game. So let’s go over what my experience running the club has been. There have been many ups and downs over the years, and I think there’s a lot of experience that others can appreciate. I don’t know the exact recipe for success, but it is my hope that this article can generate discussion to help improve our club, and maybe help start yours!
Sections
- Some Background
- What We Do & What We Have Done
- What Has Worked Really Well
- What I Wish We Did Better or More
- What I Try To Keep In Mind
- Plans For the Future
- In Closing
Some Background
The University of Victoria Pokémon Club was founded in the summer of 2011 after I hosted a Pokémon league event at our local anime convention. We gathered a group together to act as eight Gym Leaders and four Elite Four members. The event was a big success and we realized we had a community that would appreciate a chance to meet up more frequently. We looked into our student society’s club regulations and went through with establishing our club and booking a room to meet in. We were pretty happy as a close-knit group of friends under the guise of a club.
Later on, we found out about the Play! Pokémon weekly league program. We thought it would be awesome to get free swag to give to club members. Additionally, it would encourage Play! Pokémon to host events in our city if we ever became big enough. I became a registered Tournament Organizer (TO) through applying on Pokemon.com, and our league application was approved. We were an official league!
In pursuit of becoming a bigger league that had a chance to host a premier event like a City Championships (TCG), I started a movement to advertise our club to the community at large. I went around to local card/game shops and asked if I could put a poster in their window. Most places were happy to put our poster up for a couple weeks at least. Using this advertising, we managed to bring some kids and others in from around the area. As a university club and registered league, we also had kids find out about our league via pokemon.com, or parents find out by visiting/working at the university. The only major advertising on campus I do nowadays is the club advertisement days at the beginning of the semester and setting my StreetPass message to “FacebookUVicPkMn.” StreetPass is a more valuable tool than you might think!
And that’s about where we stand today. We’re a league that runs every week and that league is run by the UVic Pokémon Club!
What We Do & What We Have Done
Before becoming a weekly league, our weekly activities usually just involved hanging out and playing games. We’d have fun days sometimes. Here’s a list of some of the more memorable fun days we’ve put on:
- Safari Zone-themed scavenger hunt (also Bug Catching Contest)
- “Finger painting and cookies!” night, which got us posters to display
- Pokémon movie nights
- Clay sculpture night (plastecine)
- Group Pumpkin carving
- Halloween Pokémon-themed costume contest
- Fun-format tournaments
- Special events at our local anime convention
At our university, clubs get a budget each semester to put on club events and we’ve done fundraising ventures like selling booster packs at club to help pay for some of the event materials (e.g. printing costs). Selling t-shirts or pins is another great way to raise funds. We are also friends with the UVic Anime Club, who is gracious enough to lend us a projector for movie nights.
What Has Worked Really Well
Having a weekly league has worked really well for having consistent attendance, albeit from a non-student crowd. We get a lot of kids and teens from the surrounding area attending every week. I think this is great for building a Pokémon community in Victoria, but maybe not the best aim for a university club.
Fun days are always positively received. Pokémon is light-hearted childhood nostalgia for a lot of people. Very few university students are interested in the competitive scene and don’t have much to do on days where nothing special is going on. Having regular fun days keeps people coming even if they aren’t competitive.
I’d say the fun days that work out best for us in terms of “effort in : reward out” would be movie nights, finger painting, pumpkin carving and fun format tournaments. Movie nights can be anything from Pokémon episodes to movies to OVAs (like the Pokémon Origins series). Finger painting is just a fun thing to do that people should really do more often. All it takes is a trip to the dollar store to get some poster-board and paints. This also results in a poster you can proudly display to advertise your club! Win-win! Pumpkin carving is just a neat idea and everyone is looking for an excuse to carve a Pokémon pumpkin. The biggest concern is cleanliness, so it’s a good idea to bring spare tools, newspaper, and plastic bags for garbage. Lastly, fun format tournaments are easy to approach and have a lower skill cap so they aren’t as daunting to get into.
For some examples of fun formats we’ve tried, we’ve done:
- Challenge Cup (tell everyone to bring their own computers)
- Restricted Rock-Paper-Scissors (Click here for rules!)
- Battle Spot Special formats (e.g. Eeveelutions only)
- What I’ve Found Is More Trouble Than It’s Worth
As much fun as the scavenger hunts are, the cost of printing cool cards on card stock (double sided in colour) is pretty expensive. And you need to print enough cards to hide that people won’t find them all in the first five minutes. The event cost runs something around $30 when I do it and it only entertains for about a half hour. It also requires you to print and cut the cards in advance, and then hide all the cards ~1 hour before the event. I would still run another one, but this is not something I could recommend as a frequent event (at least how we run it).
Clay sculptures was an event put on by a sculptor friend who donated clay for cheaper. Again, I think this is a super fun event, but without someone who has loads of coloured clay they can bring by, it’s hard to justify the cost of purchasing blocks of every colour of clay for a once-a-year thing. We reimbursed my friend for the clay by writing up an invoice for the approximate cost of the clay we ended up using.
What I Wish We Did Better or More
Fun days as a whole. This is more a problem with myself being busy with a Masters degree than a failure of any concept. It’s really important that events be run frequently to make sure people don’t lose interest. I also think we could do a much better job of supporting the singles format for people who are just learning about the competitive scene. Fun formats are one way of doing this, but I’m sure people who play by singles-ladder rules would appreciate having somewhere in-person to practice. I think it would also go a long way in keeping people interested, as not everyone is able/wants to make the the jump to Standard. By only hosting serious tournaments in doubles, I think we might leave a portion of our potential member base disinterested.
I also think that the weekly league is great for the Victoria Pokémon community, but not that good for the UVic Pokémon community. The kids that show up at weekly league tend to scare off new members who were looking for a relaxing night to chill. I’m currently toying with an idea to split the club into two entities: One will be the “Nintendo Club” and the second will be the weekly Pokémon League, hosted by the Nintendo Club. By giving them different titles, it’s easier to get the message across to parents that one is for everyone and the other is intended to be students-only.
Lastly, club leadership is a big problem right now. University clubs are ephemeral things. People graduate and move on, and someone else needs to pick up the reigns and carry the club into the new year. I’ve been running the club for three years now (moving onto four), and the only reason I’ve been able to do so is because I’m doing a Masters at the same university as my undergrad. Generally, a healthy leadership turnaround for a university club is to have a new leader every two years. But finding someone willing to take on that responsibility is often a challenge. Moreover, finding someone you think is right for the role is another problem altogether. I’ll talk about solutions for this a bit later, but I’m still at the chalkboard for a good idea for this one.
What I Try To Keep In Mind
As far as I can tell, the recipe for a successful club or community is this:
- Regular and consistent events
- Ample events with a broad target audience
- Prizes for tournaments (even if it means charging $1 attendance)
- A healthy community is open to new members
It’s important to not only host events regularly, but do so at the same time on the same day. If you’re having trouble booking a room for instance, it’s important to keep things as people expect them to be. Many students plan their semester’s schedule around attending clubs, so you can’t just switch days or times up without giving people a lot of notice. Otherwise, you’re going to lose half your attendance. The same goes for weekly leagues.
I can’t stress enough how important fun days are. If your goal is to build a competitive community, you need to understand the population pyramid of such a community. The base of any large community is built from the casuals-up. It’s important for the energy in the room and the vibe that the club gives off; there should be lots of people having a good time. Competitive games aren’t for everyone, but Pokémon can be. And if people stick around long enough, sooner or later they get their feet wet in the competitive scene. Sometimes they jump back out of the water immediately, but other times they’ll wade a little deeper. It’s important to not lose these people before they ever get the chance to try things out! And even more important is to make them feel welcome even if they’ve decided competitive Pokemon isn’t for them. Groups like this are built from word-of-mouth, and that means you’re going to need mouths to spread the word.
Tournaments are fun ways to encourage people to try out the competitive aspect of the game; they don’t have to be a competitive format. Having prizes for tournaments is very important. These can be little toys like Pokémon Kids, but it’s important that people come away with something. That little $2 prize is a trophy that sits on their shelf saying “remember how much fun this was?” I think it’s important to hand out little prizes randomly to non-winners as well, for the same reason. Everyone should remember a tournament fondly, no matter how they placed. For the random prizes, we give out league promos which helps keep our costs down.
One of the biggest challenges with running a club around Pokémon is that your member base can be more socially awkward than the average person (I’m generalizing). A lot of people have a tougher time making friends because they have a bunch of niche, introverted hobbies with little in-person interaction; Pokemon can be like this. There are groups of friends that are happy to come together and they keep each other entertained and have a good time. But really keep in mind: for university groups, first-years have often moved across the country and don’t have (m)any friends in their new city. University clubs offer a social experience where people can meet and greet. As a leader, you have to make a conscious effort to introduce yourself to anyone new, explain how it works, and become a friend. At the same time, it’s good to encourage members to meet new people. This can be as simple as saying “Hey, I think ____ is looking for a game, would you be interested?” Tournaments and fun days also offer a chance for people to meet and greet. It’s important to help shy individuals become part of the community.
Plans For The Future
- Leadership
- Splitting of the “club” and the “league” and incorporating into a larger community
- Connecting with other universities
First and foremost, our leadership scheme needs to change. I’ve been running it as a monarchy because I’m treating my job as a 1-person job, when it really isn’t. I’ve generally asked a friend to help with leadership duties, but this has completely avoided the normal 2-year turnover we should have strived for, and now I’m left scrambling for a new league leader and a new club president. I’m very thankful that a friend (that’s you Ben!) has stepped in and expressed interest in running the club. But by running our weekly league and inviting kids to attend, we’ve really reduced our student attendance. This makes the club aspects of our… club… kind of difficult. For instance, we don’t have many go-to people to sit at our booth during the Club Advertisement days. We also have a very small group of people to potentially take over the club.
Moving forward, I think I’m going to take a page from our local Anime Club which I help with. At the first meeting of every semester, they vote on Club deputies. These deputies don’t really have much of a leadership role, but they do highlight people who are willing to help out. They also help deputies recognize themselves as someone who can take an active role in helping the club. Jokingly, I describe them when describing the positions as people who can help run the club in a pinch, and maybe bring cookies once. This has the positive side-effect of getting free cookies sometimes! Candidates would then give a 30 second speech about why you should elect them, and then we do a “face down thumbs up” vote. The club would also then (ideally) elect a vice president and president. This creates a stable leadership group with potential up-and-comers who would be more comfortable stepping into the role in the future.
The only issue with this system is that you need an appreciable student attendance in the first place. I think if attendance is low (~10), just asking for a couple of deputies to nominate themselves is appropriate. As the leader, you can talk to people on the side about stepping up into a club president role later. However, if you get a larger group of students together (~20), then adding in presidential elections would be good. Presidential candidates should also hopefully have expressed interest prior to the voting night, and maybe have been a deputy for one semester.
I’ve also been considering splitting our Pokemon club into two entities: the “Nintendo Club” and the weekly “Pokemon League.” The big advantage of this is to regain a student-based club. Community members would be welcome, but by re-branding the club as a separate entity from our weekly league, it would define a time that’s for everyone, and a time that’s for students/older folks. I really really love having the weekly league and I don’t want to see it go, but at the same time, we have to start recruiting more student members and the kids that attend league aren’t helping. If we were a local games shop, it’d be a different story; but we’re not.
The additional advantage of this approach is that we would be able to schedule our club meetings at the same time as other related clubs like the UVic Smash Bros. Club and the UVic Anime Club. These communities have a large overlap of potential member bases, and people often appreciate the chance to attend multiple clubs on their one free night a week. It also helps people organize their schedules, as they don’t have to choose between two clubs that interest them. This would expose members of the other clubs to our group, and members of our group to the larger UVic club community. The problem with this has been the kids, and the fact that other UVic clubs are not an all-ages atmosphere. Another reason for splitting into two entities.
Lastly, there have been grassroots efforts to unite university clubs, but I don’t know of any that ever got off the ground. I think it would be amazing to have a competitive circuit with competition between universities, but before a club can really put together a team of VGCers, it needs the base membership. I think there’s a lot of promise in an organization like the National Collegiate Pokémon Association, but I think the bar was set way too high when everyone was really just taking their first baby steps. For anyone that is reading this article and has a university or high school Pokémon club, or is now interested in starting one, I’d love to propose an annual tournament as a starting point. I think the details for such an event are best left to the forums for discussion. All I can say is we could totally order a plaque to ship to the winning school as a point of pride.
In Closing
So, there you have it. This has been an in-depth view of my experience running the UVic Pokémon Club. Hopefully I’ve been able to offer insight you can take and use for running your own club. No two areas are the same, and I don’t think you can approach things exactly the same from all four corners of the globe, but hopefully I’ve provided some ideas you can take on board or sparked new ideas you can share with me!
My main goal in posting this article is to try and generate discussion about how people can get into running clubs. So hopefully everyone doesn’t leave it here. I really look forward to hearing about all the neat ideas people have, and feedback they can offer, in the forums.
