Bury St. Edmunds Basketball Club are pleased to announce their latest fundraising efforts for next season, allowing people to support the programme as "boosters".
Boosters are commonly-found in American collegiate sports. Typically, they are locals, or alumni of the programme, who support their teams financially, or through a donation of their time in a professional capacity.
We spoke to Coach Arron MacDonald to ask why the club were seeking boosters at this time...
"I think it starts with the culture we have here" said Coach MacDonald. "When we look at the alumni of the club, we have a lot people who have made fantastic careers for themselves, and whenever we have the opportunity to speak, they always mention how much they took from the programme, how proud they are to see how it's grown, and how they believe in the culture and values that we teach, and in a lot of cases, they want to help.
We wanted to give those people another opportunity to give back.
We also didn't want to go down the 'ticket sales' route, we tried that for a couple of games, in response to other teams in our division doing the same - but it just didn't feel like 'us'. We have people who follow us home and away, and who attend games across multiple teams, and so the idea of charging money for a reserved spot on a wooden bench - it just didn't feel right.
Instead, we're ensuring that we have a limited number of "Booster Seats" which will be 'proper' fixed-back seating, and will allow people to reserve those when they make their donation. Again, we could have done this and simply called it a 'season ticket', but those same people turn up to every club event - and we wanted to recognise that - and also show them that they're contributing to the growth of our programme.
As such, we're looking to recruit boosters to the programme, offering them a reserved seat for every home NBL game - junior and senior - as well as complimentary tickets for all of our club's fundraising events. We're asking for a £30.00 donation to the club in exchange for this, and we'll trial it for a season to see how successful it is.
The booster programme, along with team, sideline and player sponsorship opportunities all goes towards the end goal of having our Men's National League team being financed to a point whereby they're not paying to play basketball. That frees-up their resources to give back to our club, and help develop the next generation, and gives our kids something to aspire to.
If you'd be interested in supporting the Bulldogs as a Booster or Sponsor, please contact Coach Arron MacDonald at bulldogsbasketball@hotmail.co.uk
Comments