Articles by Dartes Swimmers Past and Present
Every now and again, someone pops up out of the deep end and writes an article for the website.
Sometimes these are former Dartes swimmers with happy memories to share.
Often they're current members with something special or interesting to shout about.
Either way, if it's interesting and in some way connected to Dartes or Doncaster Swimming, we'll probably publish it.
Here's one of those articles.
Recruitment Poster Challenge
The Challenge
Swimming has always been seen as a gender neutral sport. A sport that boys and girls take up in roughly equal numbers. Just recently however, a few clubs in Doncaster and most performance clubs we've spoken to around Yorkshire have expressed concern about the lack of young boys taking up the sport.
The challenge being laid down to you then is to help reverse that trend.
Your task is to design a poster or leaflet that can be distributed to Primary Schools, local shops, and businesses to sell the sport of swimming to young boys and (probably more importantly) their parents.
By Way of Inspiration -- A Few Examples
The following examples were produced by Simon Wright at GBSwimStars.com precisely for the purpose of promoting swimming in the community. These are focused on Dartes purely because that's the club he visited, a more inclusive poster may be more appropriate for this campaign.
Simon's Gallery pages have 100s of high quality photos (and other poster examples) to inspire you. Feel free to use any of them or any of the photos found on this website.
The Detail
This is about enticing more boys into the sport at the grass roots level -- not the performance end. So this is really about selling the sport to young families to get them interested in learning to swim at our clubs.
By all means use the success that Dartes has enjoyed this year (and previously) to get the message across, but primarily this is about raising the profile of our clubs within the community and selling what they offer.
Think about how you or your children got involved in swimming. For me it was a simple written advert stuck up on the wall in a local supermarket. What is it that grabbed your attention and made you join your club? Can you produce a poster that will have the same effect on others?
Ideally the poster will be inclusive of all our clubs and sell Doncaster Swimming as a whole, or else be easily customised to one specific club.
Things you might like to include are:
- Location of our clubs
- Learn to swim
- The fun of being part of a team
- Health and Fitness benefits
- Fun of competition
- Make new friends
- Anything else you can think of
Above all, be creative and try to appeal to young boys and their families.
Potential Uses
We've mentioned a few possible uses for the posters/leaflets you produce, but here are a few more (send in your own suggestions and we'll add them to the list):
- Send to schools for notice boards or hand out to parents
- Local shops and supermarkets
- Community Centres
- Sports centres and club noticeboards
- Hand out during bag packing events
- Local village magazines, Free Press, Doncaster Star
Send in your attempts (the more the merrier) and we'll make them available here for our clubs to use in any way they see fit. It doesn't matter how rough they are, maybe your rough design will inspire someone else to polish it up in to the finished article.