As we discussed in our post “Building Community Through Your Blog,” a blog is an essential tool for communicating with your members and cultivating an authentic, exciting community. A wonderful way to build community is to recognize various members. Way back in 2010, CFSBK started an Athlete of the Month series. These people certainly aren’t always the most badass athletes in our community, but they are the most coachable, the most helpful to other athletes, the most engaged in our overall community (attending events, etc.), and have the best attitudes about their training. Our coaches converse regularly about which athletes stand out to us for these reasons. Once a month, we pick someone, a coach interviews the person, and we post an edited transcript of their conversation on our blog.
This series is extremely popular, and the blog posts are valuable for our gym primarily because they celebrate and highlight an athlete for whom we’re grateful—and they make our gratitude evident for everyone to see. The posts help other members get to know an influential member of our community, for all the right reasons. Highlighting what we as coaches value about these particular people further reinforces the highest standards of excellence, kindness, and good attitudes that we want to characterize the ethos of our gym.
The Athlete of the Month series implicitly reinforces a value system for our membership, which makes a priceless difference in creating well-rounded athletes and an inclusive, kind, hard-working community that people love being involved with. Check out our most recent interviews here and here.
Try it out with your blogs, and let us know how it goes in the Comments! We promise you’ll be delighted by the results.