Seasonal?

[Buka]

Something JR 137 said in another thread got me to thinking. About Martial Arts having seasons. Or not having seasons. So....

I'm from Boston. In the winter it's cold and gets dark real early. In the winter months the dojos I knew were booming. Always. In the summer, they were slow as all get out. (The guys in my dojo that kept up their attendance regardless of the time of year used to step it up in order to gain an advantage over the seasonal guys.)

All the guys I knew who ran dojos all had the same thing. Heavy attendance in the winter, much lighter in the summer. Out here the seasons aren't as pronounced, but my buddy has a lot of kids at his school. They tend to come (driven by their folks) more during the school year than in the summer.

Also, back east, tournaments ran from late spring to early fall. Nobody would ever host a tournament in winter. A snow storm would financially ruin you.

I'm wondering how it is with all you guys, your schools and other schools you know of. And what about the tournament scene in your neck of the woods?

 

[WaterGal]

For us, summer is a mixed bag. A bunch of families go on vacation for a month or two at a time, but other people don't and want to find someone productive for their kid to get into while school is out and like that we offer unlimited classes. So in June, we usually get both a bunch of people who disappear and a bunch of new signups.

As for tournaments, yeah, you don't really see any tournaments between Thanksgiving to St Paddy's Day around here either, and I figured that was why. Too much risk of getting snowed out.

 

[dvcochran]

What @WaterGal said. We usually see a drop around the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years holidays. Then you get a surge from people making resolutions to get fit. We sometimes see an overall higher attendance for kids in the summer because we run summer programs. On average we see about 30% retainage from the kids for over one year. For whatever reason we see more people miss time for vacations in the spring.

The same for tournaments. Very few in the winter months. The most in the spring and fall. The summers very hot in TN. I guess people figure they have already sweated enough.

 

[Danny T]

In Louisiana; we get a good influx of summer only members and we lose almost the same number for the summer so our overall attendance stays about the same. We have BJJ and MMA competitions all year round.

 

[JR 137]

We’re a small dojo, so even a handful of people missing seems like it’s a lot. We don’t mix kids’ and adult’s classes, so I don’t have a true sense of the kids’ numbers. There are a few families who are gone for several weeks every summer. One family of 4 kids is gone the entire month of August.

The adult numbers start going down the beginning of July and dwindle in August. It isn’t uncommon to have 4 or 5 adults in class in August. I’ve had several classes where there was one other person, and a few where I was the only one. All during August. Once school starts again in September, everyone’s back. And we always get a few more families join.

We also don’t have very effective air conditioning. It’s a window unit built in above the door, and it’s too small for the dojo, which isn’t very big. And it gets turned on about 20 minutes before class starts at best. The Tuesday night teacher doesn’t turn it on because, direct quote “I don’t believe in air conditioning.” The best the thing does is drop the New York humidity, which is awful in August especially. It’s pretty easy to say it’s too hot and take the night off. I like it as I think it adds an element of mental toughness, but a lot of people don’t share that mentality

 

[Headhunter]

It happens everywhere. Summer it's to hot, they're away, doing BBQs or whatever. Plus in winter people exercise more because just after Christmas they want to get back in shape or want to get summer bodies etc and after summer people want to burn off stuff they've eaten. Plus kids are off school etc

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Something JR 137 said in another thread got me to thinking. About Martial Arts having seasons. Or not having seasons. So....

I'm from Boston. In the winter it's cold and gets dark real early. In the winter months the dojos I knew were booming. Always. In the summer, they were slow as all get out. (The guys in my dojo that kept up their attendance regardless of the time of year used to step it up in order to gain an advantage over the seasonal guys.)

All the guys I knew who ran dojos all had the same thing. Heavy attendance in the winter, much lighter in the summer. Out here the seasons aren't as pronounced, but my buddy has a lot of kids at his school. They tend to come (driven by their folks) more during the school year than in the summer.

Also, back east, tournaments ran from late spring to early fall. Nobody would ever host a tournament in winter. A snow storm would financially ruin you.

I'm wondering how it is with all you guys, your schools and other schools you know of. And what about the tournament scene in your neck of the woods?

We (at the school I trained in the longest - the only one I can really remember seasonality for) had mostly the reverse of what you experienced. Southerners wimp out in the winter. We don't like to be out in the cold, so people find any excuse to go straight home. That's often our rainy time of the year, too. There was a bit of a downturn in the Summer - just folks getting out of the habit when they went on vacation, or parents whose kids changed their schedule in the summer - but it was less pronounced. The kids classes definitely followed the boom and bust cycle you saw, but when I was there, kids were probably 25-30% of the school.

 

[CB Jones]

For us, Tournaments run almost year around with a small break in late December for the holidays.

Slows down a little in June.

Here is the tourney schedule so far for next season for example

Upcoming Tournaments with Flyers

 

[Yokozuna514]

The biggest attendance we have follows the school year. Summer months tend to be lighter and populated by the more serious practitioners that train 12 months out of the year.

The tournament season runs from Sept. to June. A quarter of them are in the first half of the year with the remaining falling after January.

 

[donald1]

This is the first I'm hearing of seasonal members. I don't know any of those people. I don't like the idea of seasonal membership. However to each their own I guess. It would be nice if they continue training outside the dojo so when they come back the following year they haven't completely regressed.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

This is the first I'm hearing of seasonal members. I don't know any of those people. I don't like the idea of seasonal membership. However to each their own I guess. It would be nice if they continue training outside the dojo so when they come back the following year they haven't completely regressed.

It has been my experience that most folks who stop training for the Summer don't ever make it back. Breaking the routine lets other stuff fill the schedule.

 

[JP3]

Since I started really paying attention to such things... which was in '95 when I started playing judo at a buddy's dojo... and since his family owned it and he talked about enrollments, class retention and fall-offs etc... it occurred to me that I didn't ever want to run a school for "profit."

Later on, when I was in my initial Tomiki school under Ray, I was like, "Man, all he's trying to do is keep the doors open and even that is hard." About once a year enough bills would be coming due, and late, Ray'd have to put back into the school from his own wallet.

Also... every year (once I got to shodan and got to go to black belt meetings, woo hoo since I'd already had the first one in the bag for 20 years but "it didn't count") I noticed that Ray's cash infusion happened at the end of December. Thinking about it, it was about the start of Christmas shopping season that we'd start seeing fewer and fewer folks training... and nobody would really Ever "start" classes from about October on, not until the New Year, and then we'd get a few who had a resolution, or decided " to get back into it," or some such.

Eyeballing with my mind's eye back to the TKD/HKD days... the experience was very much as the above folks put it, Buka. We weren't dealing with Boston's weather, at that time it was mid-Missouri weather, so we had tournaments pretty much year-round except uring the Holiday Season. Lots of kids programs in the summer... but they didn't really "Do" TKD, they did the summer program... which really wasn't much of a curriculum, it being "too hard and strenuous" for all the poor little turnips.