CYC Home

Club Needs Younger Members, Plans to Start Junior Instructional Program

July, 2010

By John Rahn
Commodore

There are a number of important developments you all should know about.

The Long Range Planning Committee has completed its report on the Leschi clubhouse issue. You can read it on the CYC web site. There is no easy solution, but we worked hard to identify what could not work, and what might work. As noted in the report, you will be seeing a survey with questions on this and other issues this summer, followed by a CYC Town Meeting on September 11.

Membership is our most important strategic issue. The most shocking aspect of the problem is shown by some preliminary statistics on the breakdown of membership by age, from our database:

2% - over 90
11% - 80 to 90
7% - 70 to 80
16% - 60 to 70
25% - 50 to 60
21% - 40 to 50
7% - 30 to 40
6% - 21 to 30
5% - under 21

While the 2% over 90 years old is certainly encouraging to each of us, 61% of our membership is over 50 years old. Clearly we must gain new members in younger age groups for the club to continue to be successful. We need to reshape what we do to appeal to new members in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, as well as juniors.

I will be forming two Working Groups in the weeks ahead:

• The Junior Instruction Group, to form a proposal for a CYC junior (and adult) instructional program. This has so far met lots of enthusiasm, and raising money for boats appears easy at this point. The thornier issues will involve ongoing staffing and organization.
• The Recent College Sailor Group, to come up with ideas of how CYC can attract people in their 20s and 30s who were sailors in college, and who have now started working and dropped off the sailing cliff (how do we go sailing now that we are not in a college racing program?).

The good news is that the CYC Board and membership does contain a number of individuals who have the commitment and intelligence to address our pressing problems. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Director Jim Frazier, who has worked on the re-roofing project for the clubhouse and brought it to a successfully signed contract, and to thank the members of the LRPC-Leschi Committee: Chair Remmert Wolters, Wayne Balsiger, Harry Dursch, Sandy Pratt, and John Fry. We had many long meetings, which were always both amiable and productive, and it was a pleasure to work together.

If you would like to help, let us know. Inaction is not an option for the club.