Hey Cheetah, you could try what we have done here in Columbus for the Ohio State University Parkour club, and it seems to be working pretty well.. We have centralized all of our activities on Facebook (alternatively you could use Yahoo Groups or any other similar thing). This allows us to collect all of the traceurs in our region together in one spot online, where they can post messages back and forth, upload pics, vids, and useful articles, and generally be involved with the group. This keeps them entertained and interactive, but more importantly, it gives you a way to message everyone simultaneously about group training sessions. You could do this with an email list, but it helps to use a service like Facebook or some other similar social networking site that supports both the creation of groups, and allows for participation in the form of interactive multimedia.
Once you have gotten all of your traceurs involved in the online group, you can set up scheduled training sessions. Yahoo Groups is nice, because it has a calendar built in, which you can schedule your sessions into. All the members of the group can check the calendar and know what's coming up. You can also program the calendar to send out automatic bulletins notifying everyone in the group when a training session is going to take place. This helps to keep everyone on the same page. You can do something similar with Facebook Groups. We have found it's good to pick some days that everyone agrees on for the regular sessions, meeting at the same place, same time, every week. That way people will know what to expect. The automatic bulletins serve to remind them, even though it's the same every week. Interspersed between the regularly scheduled sessions, we have spontaneous training sessions, which we also post on the main board and send out bulletins for.
As long as you have one or two people to manage the group who are dedicated enough to ALWAYS show up for training, it should run pretty smooth. What's nice is to request from the traceurs in your group to respond back to whether they will make it or not to the training. Push for confirmation of whether they will come or not, and expect an excuse for absence. Keep them active and involved at all times. It takes some leadership skills to keep a group together, but it's not difficult if you are motivated to make it happen. It seems many people are happy to follow the direction of the leader/organizer, so that all they have to do is show up and have fun. If you have one, or preferably two persons who are motivated to make the plans, maintain the bulletins, and show up for all the training sessions, you're all set. If you have two people, its good because if one of you can't make the training session, the other one can fill in for you. It's very important to have someone dedicated to show up and lead the training, even if no one else comes and he ends up training by himself on that particular day. People come to rely on the consistency, which is great for keeping a group together.
To see what I am talking about, check out the OSUPK Facebook Group or our Yahoo Group. Here are the links:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2446352640http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osu_parkour/
