Maybe get smarter with kick off times?
3pm and 5pm excludes any weekend workers or sports people.
Definitely doesn't help. Early starts is the main reason I will ever be forced to miss a game. And for a coast based team in a summer league, competing directly against the ocean and beach lifestyle is very unwise.
Referrals are an issue for me now. I like many on here I'm sure, have already heeded the call many times before and have now exhausted my own little outreach program. I really do need some tools and a new pitch to be able to go back again. And 'they're better this year' isn't enough.
Winning is clearly the most helpful, but as the past has proven, it's not feasible or even reasonable to be the smallest resourced club and expect to keep winning. And this is a huge problem for the football product in Australia, where it's simply not a religion to most people.
If the product is not tribal identity/belonging, and it has little currency in day to day conversation with friends, family or the media. then all you're left with is the football match. And if the product is just the football match, and that product is largely only enjoyable when you're winning... it's a hell of a problem.
Who wants to buy a dinner twelve pack to a restaurant that will serve you a mix of great food sometimes, average food at other, painfully bad at still others, then occasionally not even edible... and then every now and then a serious little dose of food poisoning... Tough sell.
And most on here will know how deflating it is when you've raved about your "restaurant" forever and tried to get some referrals to games, and finally you do get your friends to go at last, and all they get in return is shit food and gastro.
Anyway... 2k more members hey. Really doesn't seem like that many. But the football obsessed among the community are already on board or have already been on board and gone. So what we're really trying to secure now is another 2k people who likely are not actually that passionate about football which means it's really all on the game day experience in its broadest sense.
The women's league hopefully represents an opportunity to help put a bit of a dent in this and maybe attract a few passionate football fans who were not previously interested, and as mentioned above double headers definitely enrich game day experience for me personally. But after that (besides winning consistently) it's doing everything possible to improve the game day experience...
For myself, the simplest and most important thing that should be able to be achieved, is if I could just finally say to people, the game may be great, or it may be shit, but you won't get a better *insert burger / beer / coffee combo anywhere on the coast and there's always some good laughs and great entertainment on offer.
Do that and I can't see why we can't get to 8k.