snorri wrote:
I wonder if something can be learned from the growth of badminton in the US. Certainly in the S.F. Bay Area it's taking off. I think it faces some of the same challenges as go:
1. Image in the U.S. needs improvement. Badminton is viewed by many Americans as a sport played by grandmas in the backyard.
2. Most of the serious players are Asian, because it is more popular an Asia.
3. Still struggling to get corporate sponsorship. For badminton, it looks like Yonex is the main sponsor, and that's helped them a lot.
4. USAB membership is over 4,000. It's on the same order of magnitude as the AGA.
5. The U.S. is not typically successful in international events.
I don't know anything about competitive badminton. All I see is a lot of local buzz and some of the similarities listed above. Maybe something can be learned from what is being done to popularize badminton. Is anyone on L19 more familiar with what they do?
I can't say I know about badminton specifically.....but many sports in general have a benefit of requiring assorted levels of equipment (for badminton I would imagine it's a couple rackets, nets, shuttlecocks, uniforms, shoes, headbands, etc?). This means you have a lot of people indirectly dumping money into the sport, and more companies able to give back to the community through sponsorship. A growing sport I'm a little more familiar with is ultimate frisbee -- it is similar in that there is a low barrier to entry for the casual player (you need a few friends and $8 between you for a disc), but if you make the jump into more competitive levels there is suddenly a significant amount of money that could be involved: $50 for cleats, $50 for jerseys, $20 for extra discs, $50/year in tournament entry fees....multiplied by 15 people on a team this has become $2500...if your local summer league can field 10 teams, that's $25,000 being pumped back into the sport, just from your local area (and many of these things will need to be purchased every year). It's also worth nothing that is money more or less staying in the sport's "ecosystem" (not travel expenses, hotels, etc) so it is going to people with a vested interest in sponsoring more of these events.
For go, there aren't a whole lot of investment needs for the average player. If you just want to play it's free, but if you start getting involved in your local club, you now move up to a handful of ING sets ($250?) needed for the whole group and will last a decade or more. Perhaps if we made it so that everyone serious about go had to buy three books and a new go set every year we could build the right kind of sponsor base (=