BUDS, BUISC, KINGS... The competitive side.

Another important aspect of LUSSC is the competitive side. A problem we had to face at the start of the year was that a lot of the best competitors were leaving. This meant we had to work hard to build up our teams and get as many people trying out racing/freestyle as possible!

Our strategy....

• Promoting our training sessions every Tuesday and Wednesday for racing and freestyle was important, and making sure people felt comfortable enough to try it out as it can be quite intimidating if you're new - we did this at freshers fair and at sign up sessions every Monday and Friday
• We used our grant funding provided by the Student's Union to make Wednesday sessions free and Tuesday sessions subsidised - this meant that more people would be able to come to training sessions as well as money not being a hindrance to people not going
• Creating a Womens Team - one thing LUSSC hasn't been able to have is a Women's team due to the lack of women interested. This is one thing we were determined to develop
• Developing freestylers - freestyling needed to be more accessible to everyone and our best freestylers had left, it was imperative to train up some new ones!

Brendan Jackson - Freestyler

Our Successes....

• To our two biggest competitions of the year, BUDS and BUISC, we managed to take 16 people to compete and everyone performed well
• For Kings, we managed to bring a womens team and also have some reserves! As well as this we built up a very strong mixed team and have performed strongly so far
• Brendan, who started freestyling this year, took part in BUISC for his first freestyling competition and performed extremely well
• We have more racers than we've ever had before, which is fantastic and means that we have reserves if people cannot compete. People that were new to skiing have also being trying out the race course which demonstrates a determination which we love to see in LUSSC!

LUSSC Womens Racers!

Competitive reflection:

• We have developed our teams to include a womens team and a 2nd mixed team, as well as this many LUSSCers are happy to try out racing even if they are complete beginners
• We feel that we have managed to create a friendly atmosphere which is so important when developing team members and means that people are more likely to persevere in achieving top racing/freestyle skills. 
• It was a challenge to ensure that we could recruit enough people to fill our teams, especially as the first competition was only a week after Fresher's fair, however, with the use of promotion at Freshers fair, social media and a taster session at our training venue we managed to spark enough interest
• A challenge that we didn't foresee is that due to the fact that we have a lot more competitors, we can't accommodate all of them racing. This means we needed to make sure we were giving people a fair chance at competing. The ways we did this was the use of a rota, and holding race trials so we could find out the fastest racers. It meant that we were doing it in a fair way as people couldn't dispute race times.

Career Future:

Competition in the classroom is healthy in small doses i.e. getting children into groups and the group that completes something the fastest and correctly gets a prize! It keeps children motivated and adds an element of fun into learning. I feel that I would be able to allow a good amount of competitiveness into the classroom, and having dealt with it in an intense situation such as putting people into sports team, I feel i would be able to manage the situation well.

LUSSC Ski Trip!

LUSSC has two trips to the alps which are a highlight of being in LUSSC, therefore, a lot of planning and organisation needs to go into it to make sure it's a success!

1. Ski Companies

One of the most important things we needed to decide was what ski company we were going to book our trip with. There are multiple companies that offer competitive prices to universities. The companies we considered were:

• Ski Alpine
• Off the Piste
• Wasteland
• Outgoing

What LUSSC is looking for:

• They can accommodate the amount of members we want to bring on the trip for a competitive price
• As LUSSC is one of the smaller university groups, that we will have the same access to facilities and will receive the same attention as the larger groups
• Support on getting members onto the trip and having a contact that we can reach if we have any problems.

To evaluate the companies, the holiday rep and myself went to meet with them all. Ski alpine seemed the most personal service, however, Outgoing had more competitive prices. We wanted both of those for our ski trips so negotiations had to happen! Using the prices we'd been offered with Outgoing, we managed to get the prices down with Ski Alpine and ended up with a contract that would benefit our members immensely. 

2. Leading up to the trip

Promotion of the holiday:

• We incorporated promotion of the holiday with freshers fair, that I talked about in my last post. This was the best way to get new members to join and also to promote it to non members. 
• We took flyers to halls and had a ski alpine representative up for the duration of freshers fair to advertise Ski Alpine as a company and get people onto the trip. 
• The same rep also joined us on our first social which had approximately 150 people attending.
• Using social media such as Facebook and email, we could update all our members on the holiday and advertise the booking date.
• We created a video to show people what the trip last year looked like which gave people an idea of the trip

LUSSC's Homemade Video:

We managed to book 96 people onto the trip which exceeded 55 from the Christmas before. The increase in promotion as well as the great deal we managed to get meant we managed to exceed our expectations!

Reflection:

• Time management: Promoting the trip was a lot of hard work and very time consuming. Keeping the committee motivated to keep on promoting was essential. Making rotas meant that we all could put in the same amount of time and work this around our other commitments and rotas will be used for other purposes.
• Negotiating: Evaluating the different ski companies was essential to make sure we had the best contract that benefited members. Meeting with all the companies meant we knew what was on the market and could negotiate. This will be passed on to the committee next year so they are also able to find the best contract.
• Social media: the facebook group as well as email meant we could access all the people that signed up on freshers fair and could make a bigger awareness of the trip. This allowed us to get a large number booked onto the trip.

Career Future

Another aspect, for teaching, I have developed is my 'classroom management' skills. If i can control 100 university students on holiday in the Alps, I feel more confident that I can control 30 pupils in a classroom! As well as this, we had multiple issues on the trips such as illnesses, injuries, and small problems like people losing things. All of which I had to deal with and as well would be common problems in a classroom!

Becoming Ski Club Captain and making LUSSC, LUSSC!

Having been part of LUSSC for two years, my thoughts when elections came around for the new committee of 2012/13 were that this is a job I could do: I knew what the club did, I took part in ski racing for LUSSC and as well I had made friends with many of LUSSC's members, not to mention having attended two of the infamous ski trips to the alps! So I took the initiative, applied and got the place for Club captain, slightly naive to the experiences I would come across undertaking this role...

My first role as Club Captain was getting all the new committee members together for a meeting on how we want next year to go; where we can improve from last year as well as carry on what had been successful. As we were all new members of the committee, there were a lot of things we hadn't experienced before such as handling money for the club, liaising with sponsors that would benefit our club and liaising with the union for funding and management. However, all the new committee members are strong willed and hard workers, so when solving problems, we are successful!

One of the main things that I felt was challenging for us this year was the change in membership to all sports clubs at the University of Leicester. All members joining sports clubs have to buy a sports card costing minimum £100. This is a much larger amount compared to the £25 membership people only had to pay the year before, so getting members would be harder for us.

This meant we had to make a game plan: we needed to make LUSSC as appealing as possible for members and show them that membership is worth £125!

Our Step by Step Guide on getting LUSSC it's members:

Action plan - This year we received extra funding from the union, so our first step was to evaluate where we could put this extra money into making membership of LUSSC more worthwhile. One of our main goals was to make skiing/snowboarding more accessible to beginners as well as experts. With careful work from our Treasurer, we managed to budget the extra funding so that we could give our Wednesday training sessions to members for free (including ski hire, travel, lessons and slope time!) We hoped this would be an incentive for people to join LUSSC as well as attracting more beginners to try out the sport.

Advertising - The design and Merchandise Officer got to work on designing leaflets, hoodies, flyers, posters and LUSSC personalised sunglasses to make our club unique and special against the other sports clubs the University had to offer. We used our great value Christmas Ski trip as the main selling point for membership.

Action - Fresher's week was our time to show how much LUSSC was worth being part of to new prospective members. We had a stall for the week where we all gave out leaflets, explained the history of the club and what we do to the new freshers. As well as this we visited halls and advertised our club there in case people hadn't made it to Freshers Fair and missed out on seeing our stall. This generated a buzz about our club, with lots of people starting to gain interest in becoming members of LUSSC!

Future  - We had generated an interest in LUSSC, now our aim was to keep up that interest as well as carry on encouraging people to join LUSSC. So what is better than to organise the 'LUSSC Camera Social'? The Design and Merchandise officer designed our own t shirts which managed to sell out, meaning 150 were attending the social. The night was overall successful and definitely helped in terms of letting members see the benefits in joining LUSSC. As well it meant we could sell LUSSC in a friendly and social environment.

Reflection on the skills used/gained, and improvements for the future.

We now have 82 members and we are still growing. This demonstrates the success of our advertising and marketing schemes as well as the commitment the whole committee put into selling LUSSC.

I felt challenged by the change in the membership scheme, however I felt that we managed to overcome this challenge. I also enjoyed the fact that it was challenging and that we did have to work harder to achieve what we did. I also used skills that are vital to run a club such as communication skills, organisation, efficiency and problem solving skills.

One of the main things that I have learnt from this experience is that communication between the committee is the most vital thing to ensure what we are doing is successful. The use of our 'LUSSC Committee' facebook page has become valuable for communication of ideas and problems to each other and will be used for future discussions.

I've been thinking about my future, and the career I've been aiming to pursue is becoming a Primary School teacher. I have realised how the skills from being LUSSC captain can help in developing the skills I need to become a teacher i.e. management; I will have to plan lessons, and schedule day to day plans, communication; i will need to be able to communicate to pupils clearly at their level and as well with pupils' parents which will be using different communication skills.