Brian Watkins Leads a "Restart" meeting at CYC.

By Staff Commodore Bruce Sherman

Racing is to CYC what coffee is to Starbucks. But just as Starbucks couldn’t prosper as it does by selling coffee alone, CYC needs more than racing to sustain itself.

That’s been one of the key messages delivered during “restart” meetings held the last five Monday nights at the Shilshole clubhouse and continuing this week. Forty to sixty people have attended each of the gatherings, a surprisingly high number.

“It shows that a lot of people really care about CYC,” said Brian Watkins, who is acting as facilitator. Those attending the meetings also are forming a core group that is moving the restart effort forward and giving it momentum.

The restart process also has generated broad discussion among club members outside the meetings. Members of the J/24 Fleet, for example, have had a running discussion on their email forum on the club’s challenges and have come forward with a number of ideas that have been forwarded to the club’s leadership group.

But what about the coffee?

Watkins has repeatedly made the point, as did a Starbucks corporate manager who addressed one of the CYC meetings, that Starbucks isn’t just selling coffee. The company is also selling itself as a meeting place, a community gathering spot and a friendly, familiar home away from home.

The coffee alone wouldn’t do the trick for Starbucks. And it has become clear that while CYC offers the best racing program in the region – and probably more races annually than any club in the country – racing alone isn’t doing it for CYC.

The club has continually lost members over the last few years, and in spite of the best efforts of club leaders and volunteers, hasn’t been able to reverse that trend while operating with its existing business model.

So that’s what the meetings have been exploring. How does CYC change its business model to attract more members while continuing to support its racing membership? Who are the potential members, where are they and what can the club do to attract and retain them?

The restart meetings have featured a free-flow of ideas on these subjects, and the club board is being charged with distilling the ideas and translating them into new categories of membership and programs that will move CYC forward.

In the view of this writer, one of the most important lessons of these meetings has been that just tweaking our existing operating and dues structure is unlikely to work. The greatest risk for the club is trying to adhere to who we are, because we know that isn’t working. We need to adopt a new paradigm.

A few other observations:

• The greatest possible source of new members is probably right in front of our faces: the Shilshole boating community, which lost its bar when Charlie’s closed as a result of the marina reconstruction project. Can we attract those people to our underused facility by offering them a dues plan they can afford and a bar that’s open most nights and staffed by volunteers?

• Twenty-to-thirty somethings also are a source of potential members and have been a strong voice at the restart meetings. Do we buy dinghies they can use if they join the club; put a foosball table in the basement? How do we create a dues plan and an atmosphere that would attract them? Two of the candidates proposed by the club nominating committee for open board positions are in this age group and should be able to provide guidance.

• Other possible Corinthians include casual racers, some of whom have told us they are intimidated by our highly competitive program. And how about the growing group of divorced or widowed middle-aged women, who are looking for a community to join? Offering corporate memberships also is a possible source of support and revenue.

The plain truth is that we need to broaden our base, and when we have done that, our club will be different, a notion the current club membership needs to accept if we are to save CYC.

Our just-coffee approach won’t work.

The Oct. 17 meeting, which will begin at 6:30 at the Shilshole clubhouse, will focus on making recommendations to the board on forming committees and taking action to bring some of the groups’ ideas to realty. The group also will be briefed on the board’s current thinking on the restart.

Please join us.