Recruiting Junior Table Tennis Players

By Larry Hodges, USATT Club Programs Director 

The three most important things required to get junior players into your club are:

1)      Have a program. New junior players will rarely join a club if they have to call winners on a table where they get killed, and where most club members avoid them because of their age and because they are beginners.

2)      Promote the program. No one will come to your program if they don’t know about it.

3)      Have other juniors. Junior players want to be in programs with other players their age. 

So the key thing to do is to set up a program – usually a junior training program – and then promote it until you get enough junior players so that you reach “critical mass” – enough junior players that the program is attractive to new juniors. At that point, the program becomes nearly self-supporting, with players joining as fast or faster than they leave. How do you reach this stage?

We will assume you have set up your program, and are now trying to get junior players to join in – i.e. are trying to reach “critical mass.” Here are tried and successful ways of getting junior players into your programs. Before you start on these you will need to put together a flyer about your program, and a press release. (Many programs use a free introductory class, perhaps six weeks long, once per week, as a “hook.”) 

1. Fax or email your press release to the calendar section of every local newspaper. Let’s elaborate:

1. Go to the yellow pages from the phone book.

2. Look up “newspapers,” and write down the phone number of every local newspaper.

3. Call every local newspaper, and ask for the email address and/or fax number for the calendar section of their newspaper.

4. Send a press release to every newspaper that has a calendar section. Make sure to send it at least six weeks in advance, and to send one each time a new program begins.

5. Call the calendar sections a few days later and make sure they received it, and to remind them

2. Distribute flyers at Asian schools.  Look them up in the phone book, or ask local Asian players about them. (They usually meet at local schools on weekends.) Then mail, fax or email the flyer to them. If you call up the school leaders and tell them about your table tennis program, they will probably send students your way. The Asian community (especially Chinese) is the easiest group to reach if you live near any large city, and can be the foundation of your program – or at least get your program to “critical mass.” (This is the same theory used in martial arts in the U.S.) This is probably the single most successful way of getting new junior players.

3. Distribute flyers at local schools. (See article on this by Dan Seemiller in the Jan/Feb 2001 USA Table Tennis Magazine, page 60.) Offer to teach a class during their PE classes, or do exhibitions. An exhibition at a local club is a good “hook” here.

4. Give copies of the class flyer to all local club members to give out to relatives or friends.  Family members of current club members are a treasure trove of new players.  Make sure to give a copy of the flyer to any new player who comes to any local club.

5. Do a mailing of your flyer to all current and past USATT junior members in your region. You can get address labels very cheaply (3 cents each) from USATT. You can get them by age, by zip code, or just about anything else.

6. Put up your flyer in every local Rec Center, YMCA, and Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs that has tables. Look them up in the phone book, and call to find out if they have tables. It might be a good idea to create a flyer with tear-off phone numbers at the bottom. You might also ask if you can teach a class at the facility, and get them to promote it for you.