The Electronic Rugby Team

June 14th, 2006

Blogging to better communication

Communication with players and club members is a continual headache, especially with a junior sports club where the audience you are really trying to get at are not necessarily the ones standing in front of you. As a rule teenage rugby players are no different to any others people of their age in that they make lousy postmen! Yet try you must. Fixture list changes, meeting times, training camps, county and regional trials, lost (and found) kit – the list goes one and on. So you round it all up in newsletters and notices and posters – but on a wet rainy evening when everyone wants to get home how many of those soggy papers will get read? And how do you reach those who didn’t make training this week, for whatever reason? Well, email has been a boon here, but even that has its limitations as yet another missive bounces back from a defunct Hotmail mailbox, or even if it gets through remains unread because – as one club discovered when a girl owned up to having nine email addresses – no-one hasn’t checked that particular box this week/month/year (delete as applicable). So what can you do when the printed messages revert to pulp in the bottom of a boot bag, brains (and ears) are turned to the “off” position at the end of training, and your charges between them control enough email addresses to meet the needs of a small country?

The answer… ‘blog!

So – it’s a website then? How dull… Well, yes. And no. Yes ultimately it has a web address, so it is a ‘site’. But it’s a very special one. It is perhaps more like a newspaper than a reference book. It’s very simple – no attachments, no complex design, no clever code. No web writing or design expertise required. Just type your next item into a box, press a button and it appears immediately at the top of the page. Anyone visiting the blog sees the latest news and – if they read on – can also catch up on anything they’ve missed - particularly since they can both ’search’, and view by topic or club. It’s pretty clever as well. If the reader has a ‘personal page’ (and most of your girls probably will) they can add a ‘feed’ from the ‘blog to their page and as you add a new article, a link will magically appear. Automatically. So who needs email?

That is the theory – and for once it’s worked in parctice as well. Following the success of the Herts 7s blog, which was used as the main tool for organising the tournament, Letchworth launched a blog for their girls . Within a week of starting it the main response was “why are you still sending emails” – because with around 100 “hits” per week each girl (and parent) was accessing the blog at least twice a week (most of the time while at school, it seems). Okay, its not perfect.
Occasionally paper is still needed. Parents still have to sign things
(especially those funny shaped bits of paper called ‘cheques’), and for the really vital stuff you still need to drum it in by any means available – but overall it works!

So why try it for yourself at your club? You can either use this blog, or set your own up. Look at some of the links on the home page here, then play around a bit.

Go on – save a tree!

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