Starting a College Dive Club, need advice!

[Austin]

Hey everyone,
I'm starting a sport scuba dive club at William and Mary(in Va, about an hour from Va beach), and am looking for advice.

I've gotten a lot of enthusiasm for it, so far about 20 people really want it to happen. I've never started a club or anything like it. I'd like to plan trips to Va Beach, make farther ones to the carribean in the spring. Anyone have any advice on how to make this happen?

1) Some people haven't been diving in a while, should i make it a requirement for everyone to take a refresher course?

2) Should I hold weekly meetings where we talk about diving in addition to every few weeks planning dives?

3) Most of the divers have only been diving in carribean or tropical waters, I don't want them to be out of their comfort zone in the colder, less exciting va beach waters(i myself have never dived off va beach)

4) Our college offers 100 students a semester to take an intro scuba class where they do the closed water cert dives but not the open water, i'm excited because every semester there will be a bunch of students wanting/needing to do open water dives.

5) Any other advice, thanks in advance, i really appreciate it!!

Austin

 

[PePaw]

What is your level of certification ?
Be sure you cover yourself from a liability standpoint.
See if you can get sponsorship from a local LDS. Your gonna need skilled instructors and divemasters.
Should be easy since you would be constantly providing them with new potential customers.

Good-Luck, but proceed with caution.

 

[miketsp]

As the previous poster said, be careful.
Liability is a major issue.
First decide your mission statement. Do you intend to offer any type of lead dives, supervision or training? Or do you intend to form a loose association of already qualified divers of equal status that will simply plan outings as a group and all decisions will be based on group decisions.
Run a search for "liability" & "waivers" on SB. This subject has been discussed in various threads.

 

[anth]

I was an officer in my college's scuba club for the time that I was a student at the University of New England (in southern Maine), up until I graduated last spring. I was also a summer member of the University of Maine Scuba Club. It's definitely a worthy endeavor, but there might be some roadblocks!

1) If not in the form of an official refreshor course, a well-supervised day of diving is prudent. Shallow, easy dives where students are with more experienced divers and a DM/instructor...

2) Short weekly meetings keep everyone on the same page and allow for discussion of dive-related topics and planning your next dives. Make some fun events - a movie night for example, watch Into the Blue or something.

3) I haven't dove off VA Beach either, but a good number of our divers went from having dove only in warm water to joining the club. So it does take some adjustment - this is where it's great to have really experienced people around on dives.

4) There will always be students looking to join your club; however, many of them may not have the initial cash to buy a reg and bc... See if it's practical for the club to purchase and maintain a few sets of equipment. Note (from my experience) that non-divers at the university may perceive this as a liability nightmare.

5) If you're not already, try to work with your university's DSO (Diving Safety Officer) - I believe VIMS is an AAUS member. The DSOs I have worked with have been very supportive of recreational scuba clubs.

Cheers,

Anthony

 

[brutus_scuba]

If you ever wanna do a trp with the Ohio State University Dive Club, let me know.

We've had more success with trips to places like Ginnie springs, and some of those north flordia dive spots, simply because it has to be affordable on a college budget.

I realize VA Beach is definatly a big draw for you guys, and I actually wanna dive there too. My uncle is stationed at Norfolk and he dives. I want to get down there and dive with him sometime. (If I ever make it down that way I'll make sure I get in touch too), but some of the most fun I've had with the OSU dive club is actually the quarry diving that we do around here b/c you can go camping for the weekend and really just make it a very cheap fun getaway weekend. Camping trisp are a blast.

Lastly our club offers certification, we are able to offer an amazing rate through the instructors that we work with to the college students, a price I've yet to see matched anywhere. The class is tought on Tuesday nights, and we try to get the certified divers to come out and use the pool to stay fresh on their skills during this time, but are actually having problems since OSU built a new recreation building getting equipment to use they'll no longer let us use our own equipment and we must use the university's (they say they are afraid of us brining organisims from the quarries into the pools), but after the meetings on Tuesdsays we all go out to get somethign to eat and just talk about diving.

I agree with anth, about making sure you have sets of equipment for new divers. (Doing Scuba Discoveries or itriedscuba, or whatever you call them is a great way to expand the sport. ) Our club does not own gear but work with local instructors to make sure gear is available for OSU students, when we go diving the instructors usually go with us and bring about 30 sets of gear for the weekend, and students to use. But like he said it has become a liability nightmare. The University wants us only using their gear and their transportation etc. etc, but they wont' let us use their gear outside the pools, and to rent vans from OSU is in the order of 600 dollars a van for the weekend. If we took 20 kids diving for a weekened, it would cost us nearly 2500 dollars for a weekend if we did it the way they wanted us to and that's for local quarries. More then likely the people who oversee student organizatiosn won't understand diving, and they'll try way to hard to CYA.

(I told you our class was cheap, get this. If you take the class through the University's physical education dept. the class is free if your'e a full time student. But check out dives aren't included, and they charge for checkout dives. Through the club we offer the wole class, gear rentals, and check out dives cheaper then the University PhysEd Dept. offers checkout dives. )

 

[fishb0y]

What is your level of certification ?
Be sure you cover yourself from a liability standpoint.
See if you can get sponsorship from a local LDS. Your gonna need skilled instructors and divemasters.
Should be easy since you would be constantly providing them with new potential customers.

Good-Luck, but proceed with caution.

You are starting a dive club, not a dive shop. While liability is a issue, it isn't the largest that you would need to tackle.

Setting up a club is easy, maintaining a club is pretty time intensive.

Checkout www.sealancers.org. As a military dive club we run into some of the same obstacles that you may have. We have been around for 50 years (longest running military dive club), someone has been doing something right. The club constitution and by-laws should help out a lot.

While help from a dive shop may vary, they would only be in it for the money. Your best bet is to find one that would be willing to offer group rates for your club. Don't worry about getting people certified. Since your school already has an instructor that they work with, it should be easy enough to get the same instructor to perform the open water dives.

Plan movie nights, club dives, guest speakers and other such activities... there is plenty of potential, you just need to be willing to do the work.

 

[lifeisfullofgooddives]

Well I ran a college club for a year, and had many great experiences and lots of bad ones two.

1. make sure you have the time for this...it requires alot of time to plan and organize dive trips. not to mention if your club gets bigger the stress rises as well.

2. get some competent folks together to form a dive planning committee, make them responable for turning ideas into dive trips. this will (a)get people involved (b)take some load off your work.

3. find out who in your school has say over what you can do and talk to them. More than half my time was spent dealing with folks who didn't have a clue about diving...and where always quick to put up road blocks for our club.

4. This relates with #4 but if you can try and stay independent, that way you can operate outside the university with less hassel.

5. Make friends with dive shops, I had a pretty good relationship with the shops we dealt with. our club members got discounts on gear, instruction, trips...it is worth while. Not to mention we were able to have instructors come to our campus to have classes, due to the number of folks in the club.

6. Don't due spaer fishing trips! My club never did, something about having alot of college students together goofing around with spear guns worried me..
(PLEASE READ: I have nothing against spear fishing, it is safe to do so, I just didn't allow it, do to the maturity in my members. I always said if someone wanted to organize a trip independent of the club they could do so)

7. delegate as much as possible. get as many people involved as possible it makes it fun that way.

8. we did bar night, movie night, bowling night....anything you can think of.

9. Try and caravan down to the keys once a year. we made multiple trips but you are further away! But once your down there it is a blast plus you can get some nice discounts if your group is big enough.

10. always have a DM for the folks in your group who are not experienced...

11. at the meetings you can talk about a different dive topic each week, we even got some guest speakers to come in from time to time


well that's a start, just hope you realize what your getting into...

it's worth it!

 

[brutus_scuba]

You are starting a dive club, not a dive shop. While liability is a issue, it isn't the largest that you would need to tackle.

Tell that to the University. The problem is that colleges have to sign off on everything from your travel to how you spend your money, and they don't understand the sport. Having a university oversee anything is a recipie for disaster. An example I used in an earlier post is that my school tries to regulate our transportation to and from dive spots. It's not like a normal dive club where you just say "Hey everyone meet in the mall parkinglot and we'll caravan to the dive spot."

Think about school field trip for kids in high school. If someone gets in a wrekc on the way to the dive site can they sue the school for not providing transportation? If someone gets drunk when spending the night somewhere and gets arrested or assulted then people are asking why the school let it happen. It's different with a group that's bigger than diving.

 

[Drewski]

Hi Austin:

Good idea for the W&M crowd (I'm ODU '93 and '95).

Are you planning on making this a college sponsored club or a private organization? If it's college sponsored, you need to go through the application and detailing process along with setting up rules, etc. The advantage of this is that if the college sponsors the club, it falls under the "protection" of state law. BUT, active members in the club generally need to be current students. A good model of this type club is the University of Washington and Lee "Outing Club." Check them out and the way they do stuff.

As far as diving in Virginia Beach goes, there are two dive shops with boats that do most of the commercial operations. Lynnhaven Dive Center and Dive Quarters are both large operations with shops, instructors, pools and boats. I'd also highly recommend the Outerbanks Dive Center. Bill McDermott, the owner, is a great instructor and previously taught the diving courses at ODU. Information concerning diving in the Virginia Beach and Outerbanks areas can be found here and here. BTW, beach diving the Outerbanks on spring and fall weekends is great and also CHEAP. It will also give you good wreck diving experience and hone your skills.

Hope this helps and please feel free to contact me if you need more assistance.

 

[archman]

You can follow our sweet model, Austin.
http://scubaclub.tamu.edu/