Champion Club results 2005-06 to now

  The following is a table that records where WARC landed in the annual Champion Club awards from 2005-06 to now.

The figures these awards are based on are a little on the rubbery side, but there's a couple of interesting things to see.

It looks a bit like a pattern for WARC where we hit the top, then gradually slide downwards for a while.

Our biggest pitfall is our retention figures (more on that later) and to some extent, our novice recruitment.

Graph 1 shows the overall results, with WARC and Freo singled out. I've singled out Freo as they're a similar sized and similar level club. (And the President of Freo told me they were interested.)

Graph 1: Overall results

Graph 2 is about novice recruitment. The average for 2013 was dramatically affected by UWA's recruitment of 118 novice athletes in one year. Pretty exhaustive. To put that in perspective, Freo was the highest-recruiting club over the seven year period, with a total of 250 recruited. WARC was in line with ANA with 177 - about middle of the road. Our recruitment of just four atheltes from 2011 to 2012 really damaged our scorecard. (No idea what happened there).

Graph 2: New novices

The next graph is actually where WARC shines most: athlete participation. In 2012, we hit a record 20 races per registered athlete - no other club has got near that so far and we have the highest average for any club. However, we plummeted this year (along with everyone else) to a record low of 7.4 races per athlete.

Graph 3: Participation

And finally, we get to the Achilles heel for WARC: Athlete retention. We'are actually not *that* bad, the averages tend to be a bit confounded by some of the smaller clubs that crack out 100 or 90 per cent retention (hello the first two years of Champion Lakes) however we are still below Freo - a good benchmark, I think. So this is something to work on. Peeps, we need you to stick around.

Graph 4: Athlete retention

There's not much else to say here. Some of these figures are a little rubbery as they're largely taken from ROMS or provided to RWA and I think we are well aware of the difficulty of accruing accurate records for our own club, let alone an entire state.

But I think it does show up some of our strengths and weaknesses pretty interestingly, and shows we've not always been the big fish.

Happy rowing,

PBR.