Dear Collegiate Club Organizer

Dear Collegiate Club-or-Team Organizer/Captain/President:

Your job is not to produce great dancers.

Your goal is not to have the best dance club/team in the country.

You are not running a dance academy.

These people are not here because their parents paid a large sum of money with the intent of one day producing the best-of-the-best.

Most of these people are well-educated adults that know how to seek additional information. They do not need the hand-holding or direction that youth dancers are coddled with.

For that matter, they don't need an ambitious curriculum forced down their throat. Many of them are seeking release from being told what to do, and are instead asking what to do.

Your job is this:

To create an environment where people can fall in love with Ballroom Dancing, and give them the resources to explore that love to their hearts' content.

You'll have higher retention, happier dancers, and believe it or not, more skilled dancers that decide to take their dance education into their own hands in order to excel. Focus on recruiting and giving people direction to getting more information. Allow and encourage people to get as good as they'd like at the pace they'd like. It's a club, not a certification program. You'll get people with many different goals:

• You wanna be the best? Join the group that meets twice a week, here are the available practice spaces, and here is the list of coaches in the area, especially the ones that work with the team.
• You wanna improve rapidly? Let's hook you up with a team mentor, and here are a few well-respected amateurs in the area that said they'd help out.
• You wanna just have fun and come to the parties? We have a general lesson once per week and a social every Sunday, and a couple of team parties every semester.

All of these people are important to the organization and to the ballroom community. Don't tell anyone what sort of person they need to be to enjoy the sport. Just give them the tools and opportunity to excel, then get out of the way, and above all, make everyone feel welcome to the ballroom family.

You might accidentally enjoy the community yourself :)