Hi GBM friends,
Earlier this year it was my honor to be asked by your Board to succeed Darwin, and before him Ed, as club President. I wanted to write to you all to give you a report on our club, and to ask for your continued support in helping our club flourish and grow.
This is a LONG email, for which I apologize, but I would appreciate it if you would read through to the end.
How are we doing?
Our mission is to foster a fun, supportive and active environment for adult/masters swimming in seacoast NH. Thanks to the excellent masters programs at Dover, Durham and Portsmouth, our members have a variety of quality coached workout opportunities. In Coach Crystie we have a dedicated and engaged professional coach, who not only guides us from the pool deck, but also puts in many hours (unpaid) behind the scenes on club administration and meet direction. Our summer meet at JT and our winter meet at Phillips Exeter offer friendly racing opportunities close to home, and the NE SCM championship meet we host at Boston University in December is among the premier short course meters masters meets in the US. We have large GBM groups, of all ages and states of race readiness, attending these meets as well as the annual NE short course yards meet held at Harvard.
We have a growing crew of swimmers who are venturing into the open water to swim and race through the summer. Our members are well represented as coaches, officials and volunteers supporting our age group clubs and are involved in the ongoing efforts to keep the Portsmouth and Dover pools open for all. We have an active and diverse membership of swimmers and triathletes across the age groups. Despite our decentralized nature, our younger members especially are building the social side of the club.
We are very fortunate to have members who, together with friends and family, have been generous with their time supporting our meets and events, and as swimmers supporting each other. Our volunteer Board has worked behind the scenes to ensure that the club is professionally managed, and our club is well represented within NELMSC and USMS.
I believe that together we are doing well for members, making a positive contribution throughout the seacoast swimming community, and most importantly having fun in our swimming.
How can you best support the club?
- Participate in the workouts at Dover, Durham and Portsmouth. Strong levels of participation in these programs ensure that they are successful for the respective pool operators, which in turn ensures that they will be sustained for the benefit of GBM and the wider adult/masters swim community.
- Sign up as a member of GBM with USMS.
- Swim our GBM meets – the entry fee revenues directly benefit GBM.
- Volunteer at our swim meets (or bring +1's to help)! We need your help to make them successful and its a great way to meet everyone else!
- Participate when you can in the various fund-raising initiatives we will be pursuing in the coming year or support them as a volunteer.
How is our financial position?
The club is in a strong financial position. Thanks to Ed's personal efforts and his stewardship of the club in its first years, the club built up a substantial financial balance. This was primarily due to a succession of years in which the club enjoyed significant surpluses from the BU meet in particular, while our expenses remained low. This has allowed us in recent years to increase our investment in coaching, has given us the financial flexibility to continue to host major meets in a period of increasing pool hire costs and meet management costs, and has allowed us to make modest, but symbolically important, contributions to the ongoing funding efforts to keep open the Dover and Portsmouth pools.
It is very important that the club sustains its strong financial position. We need to maintain significant resources to handle the $20k or so financial commitment associated with the BU meet, which is our biggest revenue opportunity each year. We also need to generate the net revenue necessary to continue to invest in providing quality coaching at our workouts. Although we are not at present under financial pressure, we need to address the challenge of sustaining the financial position of the club.
Our key issues are:
- As a relatively small club in membership terms (roughly 120 sign up annually), our membership revenue of less than $2k ($15 per member) is much less than our annual expenses.
- A combination of increasing meet expenses and declining meet participation after the end of the "supersuit" era has meant significantly lower meet net revenues in recent years.
- We currently have no other revenue sources.
We are working to address our financial challenges in two principal ways:
Restoring financial surplus of our major meet. For several years the BU meet has been the major source of GBM revenue. In the past we achieved positive income of around $6k per meet, but this has declined in recent years to net revenues of less than $3k. This is not sufficient to cover our annual expenses and in 2012 we operated in the red.. This cannot be sustained in the the long term so we need to markedly increase BU participation to bring our cash flow back into positive numbers. In 2012 we had just under 500 participants. We need over six hundred to reverse this downward attendance trend. We will be working this year to promote the BU meet more actively with the objective of raising participation. By ensuring that the meet is planned well in advance, and that information on the meet is shared widely in "markets" adjacent to New England we hope to attract increased participation from clubs in the mid-Atlantic, who have in the past been major participants in the meet, and clubs in Quebec and the Canadian Maritimes, who are beginning to show increasing interest in swimming meets in New England.
New revenue initiatives. 1. We are establishing a club affiliate account with on-line swim gear supplier SwimOutlet. Under this arrangement a small portion of purchases by club members using this account (at no extra cost to you), will be returned as revenue to GBM. SwimOutlet has very competitive prices, good service and good product selection. So we encourage you to purchase your future swim needs through them using our affiliate account. 2. We will be having occasional club social fundraisers - informal dinners at local restaurant for club, friends and family - with a small share of revenue coming back to the club, again with no extra cost to you. 3. Crystie is also planning GBM fundraiser swim clinics at Dover. Other initiatives may follow.
Administration update
We have moved the club's email list to a Google group to allow us to send out emails much more quickly than with the old server. We hope that this will allow us to get news of pool closures or similar time sensitive news to you more promptly. As before, we will keep you on the email list unless you ask to be taken off.
We welcome your feedback
Please do not hesitate to let me, or any of the Board, know if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback - this is your club :). We aim to be open and transparent in the conduct of the club. All members are welcome to attend our (occasional) Board meetings - most of our business is conducted by email.
Let's make it a big Anniversary Year!
This year is the 10th year of our club. Let's make it a great year! Our founding President, Ed Gendreau, had a great idea about how we can make a big splash – 100 GBM swimmers at the BU meet! This would be our biggest ever team, it would guarantee a fun time with LOTS and LOTS of relays, and it would make a very large direct financial contribution to the club. Let's do it GBM! I can guarantee that you will be hearing from our very own Motivation Man, Darwin, as the year progresses.
Thank you for reading to the end and thank you for your support of GBM. Happy Swimming!
--Guy
PS: The best source of day to day updates on GBM is our Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/groups/31774839843/
Club information available on: http://www.greatbaymasters.org/
For a history of our Enews emails: http://gbmenews.blogspot.com/
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