Setting up a Go club

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Setting up a go club is not so hard. All that is necessary is to have a place (or places) to meet. If you want to do it formally you could advertise an organizational meeting, with contact information for people who can't attend. Post notices at local universities or other places where go players might be found. Contact people from clubs in other cities (or your national organization) to find out whether they know of any players in your area or have any useful advice. Post a notice at the meeting place of the local chess club or at local game stores (if any). Use Places without a Club to find nearby players.

At the organizational meeting discuss meeting places and times and what people want or expect from a club. If you plan to have official club activities such as tournaments, ladders, equipment and/or books for members to use, affilliation with national go organizations, membership or participation fees, etc., you may need to have some formal administrative structure for the club. But the most important things for a go club are people to play and a place to do it. Some of the most successful clubs have grown from a group of friends who meet periodically to play at one another's homes. It often happens, though, that a successful, active club needs a few "spark plugs" who keep things going, calling or emailing members to make sure people are there at meeting times, organizing events, and making publicity.

Some web resources:

Hikaru79: Hm... it hasn't been this easy at all for me. I've tried starting one at my high-school, and there've been lots of problems. First, there's lack of interest -- very few people at my school play except for those I taught. Second, we have to have a sponsor teacher to supervise the meetings--you can imagine how hard it is to get a teacher to give up two hours daily of his/her time to watch kids playing a game they've never heard of. Then there's the equipment-- me and my friends have had to start sewing cloth boards and using bingo chips as stones... it gets the job done, but not exactly what we were looking for. Then there's people dropping out, people who want to participate but have all sorts of extracurriculars... ugh. x_x

StormCrow: One suggestion for school clubs is to see if there is a chess club or other intellectual club you can piggyback onto. It may not be daily (a daily high school club seems too frequent anyway), but you'll probabaly find an advisor willing to help out. As for equipment, if you contact the AGA, they may be able to help out. Through their association with the ING foundation, they may be able provide equipment or matching funds for equipment purchases for a school club.
Hikaru79: Hmm, already tried that, but there are disadvantages. First, there is little interest there. (It's a daily club, and me and another Go-playing friend play there every day, and yet nobody else has shown anything more than casual interest.) Second, there's a certain, erm... stigma that comes with being associated with a chess club. Other people think Go is like a chess variant or something, and shun it by default. So while piggybacking the chess club is OK for private games, it's definetly not an attention-seeker. Also, I live in Canada, so I doubt the AGA will be jumping at the opportunity :P But thanks for the suggestion ^^ I suppose I could try canvassing the CGA ^^;


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