Starting a Myachi Club

by Crazy Ivan

The signs over the highway on the way to HQ this morning were sure to remind us that school starts today here in Long Island.  Judging from my completely unscientific sampling of Facebook friends, they're some of the last kids in the country going back to school so I'm guessing that most of our readers have been back for at least a few days now.

Going back to school has its pros and cons, of course.  On the downside you've gotta get up early in the morning and stay up late doing homework.  On the upside you have an awesome STWAKOJ opportunity (there's also some kind of education or something that they do).  This is especially true for those of you that got into the game over the summer and will be introducing it to your extended network of friends for the first time, but it is also true for the more long term jammer as well.  Sure, your friends might have seen the game before, but I'm sure you've learned a thing or two since then.

There are a lot of ways to spread the word at school.  You can jam between classes, of course.  You can bring your Myachi to practice for pretty much any sport.  You can get a circle going outside after school lets out.  But one of the most popular and most effective ways is to start a Myachi club in your school.

That's not the right idea for everyone, of course.  If you're the only person in your school that is into the game it might be too early to start a club.  You can't have a one person club, after all.  But if you've got a group of friends that are into it already or if Myachi is already semi-known in your school, a weekly club can be a spectacular vehicle for expanding the reach of the Myachi empire.

Running a Myachi club is a lot of fun and it can be a really effective way of (a) getting people into the game and (b) keeping them in the game for a long time.  It's extremely rewarding for the person who gets it all started, but it can also be a lot of work.  If you want to do it right, you'll be taking on the huge responsibility of making sure that it is fun and fresh every week.  Ask yourself if you'd have time to make it a club everyone would look forward to going to every week.  Be honest with yourself about the amount of spare time you'll be able to devote to it.  If it's an hour long club you'll have to set aside more than an hour a week to it.  You'll need at least twice that much time to prepare for each week's meeting (assuming that you want your club to be awesome).

We'll talk a bit more later this week about what you can do to keep a Myachi club fun week after week, but before we get into details about that, let's tackle the important topic.  You've thought it over and decided that you've got plenty of time on your hands, plenty of eager members-to-be and plenty of ideas for your weekly meetings.  But how do you get things started?

The actual procedure for starting a club will be different at every school, of course.  In my experience, the best person to talk to about finding out those procedures is the school's secretary.  They always seem to be accessible and know where to point you if nothing else.  Sure, the principle will know as well, but they're usually scarcer than the secretary.

Most schools will require that a teacher or coach "sponsor" the team in some way.  They'll have to be at the weekly meetings or, at the very least, have to put their seal of approval on the idea of the club.  For some people this is the hardest step in getting the club going, but the easy way out is to just start teaching your teachers how to play the game.  If you teach 5 or 6 of them, odds are pretty good that at least one of them is going to fall in love with it.  In fact, I'm willing to bet you already know which teacher at your school would be most likely to love it.  A good rule of thumb here is that when in doubt, try the gym teachers.

So the things that you'll (probably) need to get started are:

• A few friends that want to join the club
• A teacher or coach's support for the club
• The school's specific procedures for starting an after school club.

Once you've got that, your club is well on its way to getting started.  Once it's been approved, everything is official and you know what day you'll be meeting, it's time to start advertising your club.  You can put up signs in the school and tell everyone you know, but the most important way to grow membership in your club is to have a ridiculous amount of fun at the first meeting.  If everybody spends Wednesday talking about how much fun the Myachi club was on Tuesday, you'll find a much bigger crowd showing up next week.

Obviously, the next logical question is "How do you make your club fun?" but to tackle that one I'll need a whole new blog post.  Keep an eye out later this week...