What is a comprehensive community sports club?

A comprehensive community sports club aims to create an environment where anyone in the community can enjoy sports on an ongoing basis, regardless of gender, age, or whether they are good at them. Such an environment can bring about a system of cooperation that transcends the type of sport (multi-sport), human interaction that transcend generations (multi-generation), and diversity in the reasons for participating in sports (multi-oriented).

■ Features of a comprehensive community sports club

An important feature of a comprehensive community sports club is that it allows local residents to maintain their public spirit, or a sense of community, through multi-sport, multi-generation, and multi-oriented concepts.
However, it is not easy to set up a club that meets all the multi-sport, multi-generation, and multi-oriented concepts. Of course, the purpose of establishing a comprehensive community sports club is not merely to satisfy these concepts. We believe that the steps involved in setting up a community sports club that will embody the public mindedness of the local community, and as a result of running such a club will give shape to the multi-sport, multi-generation, and multi-oriented concepts. That’s why all those involved need to share awareness of why they are setting up a comprehensive community sports club in the first place.

Why “comprehensive”?

First of all, we should take into account societal changes brought on by a declining birthrate and aging population. Leading a healthy, safe, and cultured lifestyle will be an extremely important issue for all people. Today’s society demands that we enable healthy and cultured lifestyles for everyone but also build vibrant, lively local communities by leveraging the power of sports, which make up a big part of non-degree-oriented education and lifelong learning.
It is important to establish a system that allows all local residents—and not just those who are interested in sports—to enjoy sports (experience the value of sports) in a way that they would like. A comprehensive community sports club’s goal is to create such an environment.

To this end, we need to reexamine the current status of regional sports activities and create new systems and mechanisms. Today, such sports activities are divided by different aspects: people’s sphere of activity (school, local community, workplace), purpose (competition, friendship, health), age group, or type of sport. We need to revamp such a situation. Creating an environment where all local residents can freely enjoy sports is a step toward building a comprehensive community sports club that embodies the multi-sport, multi-generation, and multi-oriented concepts.

Club management outline

Running a community sports club is unlike managing a company, where employees hired by the company owner provides products and services to customers. Though there are some clubs that are operated like a company, a majority of the comprehensive community sports clubs has the local residents themselves participate in running the club and act as sports instructors. The club representative is chosen from among the people involved, and that representative is not given sole authority. The club expands its activities while adopting this residents-centric structure. (Fig.1)
However, running a community sports club with only the self-help efforts of its participating members is not an easy task, as there are still specific procedures and the like to be smoothed out. That is why such clubs need support from society. A chart outlining social support is given below. (Fig. 2)