Do you know who plays (or doesn't play) squash?

Doing market research and a membership gap analysis every year is becoming more and more important. It can give your club an understanding of where it is at, where it is heading and the opportunities that are available by identifying who is playing and more importantly, who isn’t. Once you have this information available, you can start putting together solutions to meet the different motivations of the identified groups you can target.

Athlete pathway

New Zealand’s squash athlete pathway details the various stages of participation that people go through in squash. Put another way, it outlines the different groups of people who play squash. It is important to understand that we, as people, all have different needs at each stage some of us can even fall into multiple areas within this pathway.

An example, we may have a 17 year old female playing squash in our club. Using our Athlete Pathway their needs would be covered under the following playing communities: Club Youth 13-19 yrs, School and Tertiary and Women. Depending on their playing habits they may be considered a Social Club Player, Club Teams player or a Club Graded Competitive player. They may also represent their District as an ‘Individual’ and ‘Juniors Boys and Girls’ player, and could potentially be involved in the ‘National Development Squad’.

This means we need to be aware of the varying needs that every player has and be able to provide athlete-centred coaching to support this. Our Coach Development Framework has been designed to provide you with all the knowledge and tools so you can easily achieve this.

What your club can do:

• Look at your current membership database. What age, gender, ethnicity, social status, occupations and playing habits do your existing members have?
• Look at the Athlete Pathway and try to identify where your members sit on this. Does this information point to any gaps in types of members? Are there opportunities for your club to target some of these identified groups of people? What could you do better to keep the types of members you already have?

Now you have an understanding of who, you can start to look at how you will communicate with these various groups of people and what you can offer them by way of solutions that meet their needs. Find out more

More information

We know our population is maturing, urbanising and becoming more ethnically diverse. The Sport New Zealand Insights tool can give us predictions into how our communities will change over the coming years. Find out more