Bowls Club Blues

Since my last post on this subject I decided to bite the bullet and try to find out more information about joining a bowls club...

If you are currently a member of a bowls club, and you are wondering why your club isn't attracting any new members, I would like to ask you the following questions:

1. If someone looks up your club online, do they find any information at all?
2. If someone walks up to your building and through the front door, do they find any information at all?

If you can't answer these questions with a resounding "Yes!  Of course!  Loads of useful information about what our club does, what you can do here and why you should join us - as well as how you can join us." Then you're doing it wrong.

There are no fewer than seven bowls clubs in my town.  When I tried to find information about them online, only two clubs had any online presence at all.  Of those two clubs, only one of them seemed to understand that the website should make the club seem like a nice, welcoming place where you are likely to encounter nice, welcoming people.  That club is situated on the other side of town to where I live.  The other one was closer but, after looking at their website, I actually felt less welcome than I did before I looked at their website.

So I thought to myself:  "What the heck.  Bowls clubs are probably too full of old people to understand all this web stuff anyway.  I will walk into my nearest bowls club and pick up a brochure or something."

My nearest bowls club is the Jubilee Bowling Club.  Having now mentioned the words Jubilee Bowling Club a couple of times in this post, I am creating a situation where I have mentioned the Jubilee Bowling Club online more often than the Jubilee Bowling Club has.  Now, anyone who looks up the Jubilee Bowling Club in Google will find this post long before they find anything the Jubilee Bowls Club actually wants to say about itself.

I don't think this will be a problem, though, because the Jubilee Bowls Club doesn't say anything about itself at all.  Anywhere.  Ever.  I walked up to the front door expecting to have my first question "is the club open?" answered.  Not so much.

There is nothing on the building to state what the opening hours of the club are.  Well, there is the sign that tells me what hours they are licensed to serve alcohol, but nothing to indicate when a visitor might be able to go in and drink one of those alcoholic beverages.  Or, for that matter, whether or not you have to be a member of any description to do so.

There were people walking in and out of the door, though (dressed in their party best, so I'm assuming the hall had been hired for some function), so I walked in to see if they had any information near the door.  I found a notice board full of notices... just none about the club.  I spent a full five minutes looking in vain for a piece of paper that said:  "Hello, welcome to our club.  This is what we do here.  This is what you can do here.  This is why you should stick around or come back later..."

If you have never walked into a bowls club before, the Jubilee Bowling Club does not offer any help at all.

I walked out of the club, none-the-wiser for walking into it.

My second attempt was the Cutheringa Bowls Club.  This one at least had a sign out the front saying "we invite you to play bowls here" (or something similar... actually, it mostly said they had pokies).  However, the Cutheringa Bowls Club has taken the unusual step of giving up its front door.  To enter the club you have to walk around the side and enter something that looks, for all the world, like it's the staff entrance.

It feels like you're trespassing, rather than actually gaining entrance to the club.  If you wanted a sign encouraging you to enter... well you're out of luck.  All you get is a sign asking gentlemen to wear clothes (as opposed to singlets and thongs).  Once again, opening hours are to be guessed (as is whether or not the club sells food, and is therefore a legitimate option for a counter meal on a Saturday night).

Oh, and if I thought the Jubilee Bowls Club was uninformative... they had nothing on Cutheringa.  The Cutheringa Bowls Club happily tells you it only costs $10 to join as a social member.  It just doesn't have any member ship forms or information about membership anywhere where an interested passerby might be able to read it.

I think I would have had to front up to the bar to ask about the club - which is something I wasn't interested in doing, to be frank.  The bar was propping up a handful of boozy blokes who were nursing their packets of cigarettes as though they were on the verge of smoking.  There was some sort of match happening on the lawns - being played by people with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other.

I took one look at the bar, and one good long look at the club members, and thought:  "I hardly drink, I don't play pokies and I don't like smokey environments.  Does this place have anything for me at all?"

I couldn't see an answer anywhere, so I left.

Bowled over?

I am secretly fascinated by lawn bowls.

Well, I’ve just admitted it rather publicly, and I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, so I guess it’s not really a secret, is it?  I am openly fascinated by lawn bowls…?

I’ve never played bowls in my life (bocce – yes, lawn bowls – no), although I suspect it’s just a matter of time.  I keep looking at bowls clubs and thinking: “I want to go there.”  I sometimes look at the lawn bowls results in the paper, even though I have no idea what any of it means.  Occasionally, I’ll watch lawn bowls on TV, even though I’m sure it’s a ridiculous sport to televise.  Surely lawn bowls is up there with cricket and golf as being sports that are “rather boring to watch, really”?

And yet, it’s oddly fascinating.  Especially those weird, tedious one-on-one matches where two people take an awfully long time to battle it out in a very calm and careful manner.  The tension seems to be palpably mounting as nothing much happens at all.

I made an observation some years ago that every single Australian country town I have ever visited – no matter how small – had a bowls club and a Country Women’s Association located somewhere nearby.  Sometimes a cluster of towns will band together to support these things, but I’m almost sure there isn’t a single town in Australia where you could not join a bowls club. 

It’s actually become a bit of a hobby of mine – bowls club and CWA hall spotting.  Whenever I travel I can’t help taking a look at the maps in the hotels’ phone books to see where the bowls clubs are.  They’re marked out with their own special icon – just like churches, hospitals, public toilets and scout halls.  Bowls clubs are *that* fundamental to the community.  No other sport/social club gets that.  Not even the CWA.

The last time I went on a road trip with my mother, I made her drive out to the middle of nowhere, just because the map said there was a bowls club there.  I wanted to confirm it for myself because, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t actually a town anywhere near it.  It was actually on the grounds of a sugar mill.  There were only something like five houses in the area, but there was bowls club.

This ubiquity of bowls clubs and CWA halls made me think that, should I ever move to a small town, I should join the CWA and take up bowls.  My social life would be completely sorted.  Need to feel like you belong to a community?  Bing!  You’re in it.

I actually do a really bad job of joining “communities”.  I’m just not very good at turning up.  I’ll keep it up for a few years, but then I’ll find an excuse to give it a miss for a couple of weeks in a row… and the next thing I know it’s three years later and I’m not even getting the Christmas party invites anymore.  I have to try a bit better with my fencing club, but in the last month I’ve missed several club nights and I’m probably going to miss the first BBQ of the year, so it’s not looking good.

Sadly, I think I’m not alone in this.  I said bowls clubs were *that* important to a community… but I think that’s a historical significance, rather than a current one.  I don’t personally know anyone who is a member of a bowls club.  I know people who play bocce occasionally, in a back yard, but not anyone who bowls.  Additionally, I’m not sure people are building new club grounds.  In the city where I live all of the existing bowls clubs are in the old suburbs.  You know – the suburbs that developed back in the day where a suburb would have everything expected in a small town (at least two churches, a primary school, a pub, a corner store and a park big enough to play football games – and a bowls club).  These were the suburbs that came about before everyone drove everywhere.  None of the newer suburbs have half the stuff that was just standard in the older models – and none of them have bowls clubs.  I would have thought some of the newer satellite suburbs might build one, but nope.

And I don’t know if they are attracting new members.  The stereotypical bowls club member is… well… old.  Little old grey-haired ladies and long-retired gentlemen.  The only time I’ve seen bowls clubs in full use is during the middle of the day, when all the white-haired folk are meeting for their club matches.  These people don’t have a very long life expectancy, and what happens to these clubs and associations when their base of retirees “cross the rainbow bridge”?  Who is replacing these people?

Certainly not people who work for a living.  I would have joined the local CWA ages ago, if they had any meetings that weren’t during business hours.  I have to admit, probably one of the main reasons I haven’t taken up lawn bowls yet is the fact that (last time I checked my local clubs) the games are all played during the day.  Plus, I find the whole "men's days, women's days, mixed days" a bit intimidating   I feel as if I'm not welcome at a club if the only time I can attend happens to be a "men's day".  I’m not interested in the “barefoot bowls” thing, which seems to involve badly dressed men trying to bowl and drink beer at the same time.  But… if that’s what it takes to save the bowls clubs, then that’s what it takes.

Personally, I think they should try diversifying by bringing in other boules related sports:  bocce, petanque, that sort of thing.  Lawn bowls is so very British, but the Australian population is much more diverse.  I say:  Bring in the European sports and fill your thinning ranks with elderly Italians – we have plenty of those.

Actually, what they really need to do is have more of a "just pop in" approach to bowls, like they have with ten-pin bowling.  The clubs in my city all work on the basis that you can only play during club sessions, but I think it would work better if the club sessions were simply the only time when you couldn't just turn up and try for a game.  If I knew I didn't have to wait for a game day (specifically ladies or mixed) but could just pop over and play a "pick-up" match with anyone who happened to be hanging around, I might be more inclined to just pop over:

"Hey, what are you doing after work?  Wanna go play bowls and have a drink?"
"Can we play petanque instead?"
"Sure, why not?"

That could work.