Starting a dive club - What now...

[theskull]

Just set up a site for members to stay in contact with each other and before long a "club" will happen..

We started with 4 people that wanted to dive all the time but could not always get together at the same time. We started a web and a forum to post our planned dives and before you know it NCDivers.com became the #1 site for finding a dive buddy, dive shop or dive location in NC. Our group has gathered to build DIY O2 analyzers, Christmas parties, Key West trips, Cave trips and most importantly, weekly local dives.

IMO, the worse thing you could do is start a structured club with officers and dues and such.. money and power struggles will kill a club before it has a chance to mature...

Fer sure, fer sure. Our "local" bulletin board, www.midwestdive.com , has helped many a diver to find buddies or book charter boat trips in the past couple years. And, like my fun-dive "club", there are no dues or meetings or officers, just fun diving!

theskull

 

[sflabrkr]

I want to say after reading these posts I feel extremly lucky to live in South Florida. Bob B you might want to re-think pay-pal. If I pay for your trip with pay-pal and ask for a refund I understand I can get it a lot easier than if I had a merchant account. I'm on the board of directors of a dive club now we have about 150 members, very structured. If you offer quantity and quality dives the members will come. I plan on holding a dive almost every weekend and a weekend trip every two months. Such as the Bahamas, Mighty O, N.C., Keys...
Stefan

 

[Diveral]

I am the president of a local dive club in North Alabama. We have some advantages that many of you do not. We are sponsored as an activity club by our company and have about 35 members. We were started 3 years ago by a NAUI instructor who worked at our factory. He gathered up about 15 certified divers who worked there and he certified a class of 8 his first year. We had five new divers that certified our second year. We will have about 5 more certify next year. We have encouraged about 1/2 the club to AOW and continue to create advanced diving opportunities.

We have two very popular organized cookouts at local quarries every year and attendance has gone up for every one of them. We started out with 19 at the first one and had 39 at the last one. We have at least two organized trips a year. We live about 6 hours from the Florida Panhandle so we have a dive trip there every year. This year we went to Cape Lookout NC and next year we are going to the Keys.

We also do many informal pick-up dives for 2-10 of us. We usually average at least one dive a month during diving season.We have a fall planning luncheon and publish 2 newsletters a year and maintain a club e-mail list. We also have allied ourselves with two other dive club and maintain communications with them and participate in their events as well.

 

[BabyDuck]

i dunno, al, that everyone would see that much structure as an advantage. if that's what y'all want, wonderful! i'm glad you're getting what you like.

i'm with bob & charles (sparticle) - literally. they are part of my 'club', but that's not the right word. they are my support, friends, mentors, buddies, confidantes - oh, and sometimes we dive. ok, every weekend...all year long. we made a conscious decision not to have officers etc, and not to be affiliated with shops or whatever, and to make any money donations totally voluntary. the website gets from 20-150 new posts a day, which i think is because the core of us know each other in person. the only drudgery is web maintenance, which for some reason bob & a few others think is amusing, so we make them do it. everything else is strictly for fun! but that's what's right for *us*. we would also make very poor candidates for those 'led' dives in the carribean or where ever, because we're fiercely independent & not good at playing 'follow the dm leader'. some folks enjoy those.

so to the op, i think it all depends on what type of structure *you're* looking for. tight or loose? talking and lectures about diving while having snacks or a meal, or diving? meeting in a shop once a month or at a dive site every week? once you think these things through & have a good idea what you're looking for, i bet you can make it happen.

 

[spectrum]

Remember above all that diving is about having fun. Having a club, network or whatever does add to the social dimension. Be careful not to add too much overhead to the endeavor.

 

[fire_diver]

so to the op, i think it all depends on what type of structure *you're* looking for. tight or loose? talking and lectures about diving while having snacks or a meal, or diving? meeting in a shop once a month or at a dive site every week? once you think these things through & have a good idea what you're looking for, i bet you can make it happen.

I am going through and setting up the outline for a "structured" dive club. When I get the other people together, they can decide whether they want it that way or not.

I wish we could all just meet every weekend at the "local" dive spot like many of the posters here. Sadly it's a 4 hour drive (with toll roads) just to get there. I think we really need a local, regular meeting so that new members can find and meet us. A local meeting could also allow people to car-pool and save money for the dive trips. Groups could also pool money and rent a Pontoon to really open up the lake diving possibilities.

FD

 

[Diveral]

i dunno, al, that everyone would see that much structure as an advantage. if that's what y'all want, wonderful! i'm glad you're getting what you like.

i'm with bob & charles (sparticle) - literally. they are part of my 'club', but that's not the right word. they are my support, friends, mentors, buddies, confidantes - oh, and sometimes we dive. ok, every weekend...all year long. we made a conscious decision not to have officers etc, and not to be affiliated with shops or whatever, and to make any money donations totally voluntary. the website gets from 20-150 new posts a day, which i think is because the core of us know each other in person. the only drudgery is web maintenance, which for some reason bob & a few others think is amusing, so we make them do it. everything else is strictly for fun! but that's what's right for *us*. we would also make very poor candidates for those 'led' dives in the carribean or where ever, because we're fiercely independent & not good at playing 'follow the dm leader'. some folks enjoy those.

so to the op, i think it all depends on what type of structure *you're* looking for. tight or loose? talking and lectures about diving while having snacks or a meal, or diving? meeting in a shop once a month or at a dive site every week? once you think these things through & have a good idea what you're looking for, i bet you can make it happen.

We have more structure than we really want. Since we are a company sponsored club we have the minimum structure that is required to receive funding. Every trip in the past year we've had a couple of divers (friends & guests) join us from scubaboard or NC Divers forums.

The club is good in that we have brought back 6 inactive divers (including myself), created 13 new divers, and all of us are more active than we were before creating the club.

 

[sflabrkr]

I am a member of 2 dive clubs one is a social club and one is strictly a dive club. I can tell you the good and bad of both. The social club has about 150 members. They dive about twice a month and have 3 or 4 major trips such as australia. The strictly dive club has a scheduled dive every weekend from April to November. They both have great attributes. My club will have the best of both worlds. We will dive every weekend during dive season march to October (or so) and every other month a trip such as, I'm scheduling a trip to the bahamas in February, Transportation, six dives, hotel and all meals for about $500.00. It will be a weekend Friday morning to Sunday Night. If your interested let me know.
Stefan