February 21, 2010
Here is a powerful and
simple way to energize support for your team.
The home court advantage
exists only when your stands are filled with friends of your team – not just an
audience, friends. If you want them to
be more than people in the seats, start doing something more for them.
Every time your team
practices on non-game days you start by warming up which usually includes
stretching exercises and drills. Imagine what would happen if at one practice a
week, a “friend of the team” was allowed to participate in warm ups? That would
be attractive to a lot of your friends. Let’s take it one step farther. What if
at the end of warm ups, the team “played” or scrimmaged for just five minutes
and the friend of the team was allowed to play any position on the team he/she chose?
Wouldn’t you enjoy doing
that? To be sure, anyone with interest
in your team would be more energized after playing with you.
What would it take to make
it happen?
Announce it at a game. Put
it in your program. Invite your friends to try. As long as the requests are
few, take them all. When the demand grows, make being the Friend of the Team an
award and a way to say thank you for the specific things people do to support
your team. If it really takes off, you could extend it to every practice and
over the course of a season ignite dozens of your fans.
This is the kind of simple
idea that has the potential to become something really big. If history is any
indicator, one team will try this, have great success, get back to us here on
My Simple Community and it takes off from there. The competitive juices kick in. Another team
from another school says “We can do better than that.” And they improve on the
program.
If you do a Friend of the
Team idea, please come back and comment or send your story to mail@mysimplecommunity.com. We want things like this to grow.