Previously in my post on this subject, see 9/13/12, I wondered what flyballers thought about a flyball promotion article that mentioned 'thick-skin' and 'rampant' team splits being part of the success and growth of flyball. I decided to put the numbers to the test and see if they prove anything one way or the other.
I was able to find some statistics on the NAFA website. Kudos to their website which contains lots of fun facts and interesting statistics. Thus far, I have not discovered similar statistics for U-FLI. I wish I could compare total combined numbers for both organizations and get the entire big-picture.
Based on the Growth Trend chart found on NAFA's website along with published BoD and/or AGM meeting minutes from 2006-2011, I believe the numbers do, in fact, prove something. Here's the stats I used from the last six(6) years:
2006 - 2011
- Tournaments: varied from 325-352 per year; trending downward last 3 years
- Racing Clubs: varied from 347 to 372; trending upward
- Hosting Clubs: varied from 134 to 148; trending downward last 4 years
- Newly registered dogs: varied from 1,266 to 1,081; trending around 1,100 last 3 years
- Newly retired dogs: trending around 1,200 (2006-2009)
> 2010 & 2011 data not available
- Racing dogs: trending each year around 5,700 dogs
> 2011 data not available
Looking at these stats, overall for the past six years, the trend has been stagnation to downward. The retired dogs to newly registered is a wash; slightly less new registered dogs per year, so no growth there. Total racing dogs has remained consistent each year; again, no real growth overall. Tournaments are trending down as are number of hosting clubs. The only upward tick is in number of clubs; but, the rest of the numbers reveal having more clubs has not meant having more participants/dogs nor more tournaments.
Even if the numbers proved something different, I still do not believe the 'thick-skinned-club-split-up-method' is a good way to go. I believe the fallout in morale is too high a price to pay.
I still prefer the opposite method of forming new clubs and getting more people and dogs involved in flyball as I mentioned in my earlier post on this topic. Perhaps if you agree, we can start a new trend together toward increased growth by providing a better flyball experience from the ground up through a more supportive and happier way of creating more clubs, people and dogs.
Sincerely,
I Like Flyball!
Footnotes:
- NAFA website chart contained a few possible errors in the numbers when I compared them to the meeting minutes.
- Information for years 2010 and 2011 are currently found in minutes; not in the chart yet.
- I passed along the potential errors/corrections to NAFA.
- I chose to start with year 2006 because going back to 2000 was too much and because '06 was a few years after U-FLI formed (and perhaps as someone said to me, the dust had settled by then).
- I wish I had stats for U-FLI. I apologize to you, the readers of this post, that I am unable to provide a comparison of NAFA and U-FLI, nor a combined total picture of all of flyball.
- I hope the U-FLI generation and the next generation NAFA has adopted/will adopt a different growth strategy than has been done in the past; I'm thinking positive :o).
2 comments:
I agree that the numbers are somewhat interesting. But, as they say on the Internet, "correlation is not causation". Just because you have a bunch of trends that happen together doesn't always support a particular conclusion.
One potential root cause of the problem, for example, might have something to do with this global recession we've been having since around 2007.
You've got a combination of job loss, underemployment (i.e. more people with crappier jobs), a foreclosure epidemic, and just plain crazy gas prices that covers the same period as your numbers.
I'd expect to see more team breakups happen when the economy tanks. If one or two members of a club are suddenly out of a job or otherwise can't afford to play (i.e. working weekends, sold the RV, etc), that's often enough to break a club. And smaller clubs means fewer to host tournaments. I'd also expect to see tournament entries drop.
Having some U-FLI numbers to compare against would be useful either way. It would also be interesting to see a regional breakout and how it corresponds to the local economies as well as signs of changes in NAFA/U-FLI allegiance in particular areas.
Possibly, C. Although I have read studies/articles that claim during hard financial times, most people actually spend more money on/for their pets; so, I couldn't say for certain stagnation or a decline in flyball participation is truly related to the economy.
I also noticed in the numbers but did not include in my post the number of 'tournament entries' over the previous 6 years had been steadily increasing year over year by about 1,000 each year then in '05 entries went down and stayed roughly the same until '08 when there was a slight rise of about 400 entries. That new number has stayed pretty steady up to 2011 (around 8,600 each year, one blip in 2010).
I didn't include these statistics for 2 reasons; 1) the meeting minutes for '08 - '11 all conflicted with the numbers for 'entries' on the website and 2) I think there may have been a noticeable change in 1-day vs. 2-day tourneys during those years and I'm not certain how the tourney entries were counted. I couldn't make a comparison without knowing if they were counted apples to apples or apples to oranges.
Another thing I noticed but didn't post was a huge jump (over 100% increase) in Open entries each year from '08 - '11 (I could not find previous year's information for Open entries). During the last 4 years, Open increased each year and went from roughly 1,300 to over 2,900 entries. Regular and Multi appeared to stay the same.
I'm not sure what to make of this and I don't have any conclusion as to where all the Open entries came from. Possibly they came from a few of the new clubs that formed, but perhaps they came from the existing clubs and are simply the result of reconfiguration and not any sort of increase in participation.
I don't know.
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