A little story.

Some years back we almost lost our club. Financial pressures were mounting as membership dwindled, and many thought this was just another manifestation that soaring in the US is dying. We had put a number of rules in place that prevented ab-initiates from qualifying in club equipment, and this made us dependent on local commercial training operations. As capacity in those operations declined, our life blood (new members) was being cut off.

Instead we took a decisions and actions to make it easier for new members to find instructors and train in our club ships. Almost magically, our financial problems began to ease. We have even been able to grow our fleet, and have enjoyed slow, steady growth ever since.

Until this year. Bruno decided to increase his involvement in recruiting, and suddenly we have had more students than we can handle. So he helped recruit more instructors. Now our biggest concerns involve figuring out how to maintain and allocate our fleet so that everyone who wants to can fly -- and, by the way, that can be a big job. In some ways it is hard to manage double-digit annualized growth rates, but that is a good problem to have.

I think our sport isn't dying. Instead, we sometimes have an inadvertent hand in killing it. Our experience suggests all we have to do is make it easy for students to get their butts into a nice-ish glider with a qualified instructor, and the rest takes care of itself.

And it helps to have an energetic, passionate guy on the recruiting staff.

Lynn Alley
"2KA"