What your club needs to succeed: The eight areas to master

Alcohol management

Have a bar at the clubhouse, or do your members and guests drink at games, activities and events? It’s important your club has best-practice alcohol management down pat. This includes things like minimising risk drinking behaviours for members and guests, educating about drink-driving and reinforcing responsible service of alcohol.

Smoking and vaping

Keeping on top of creating or maintaining a smoke-free and vape-free club (or designated areas in the club) is one of the ways to have a family-friendly, healthy club.  You’ll need to make sure you’re adhering to state and territory laws around smoking and vaping. Take it a step further and educate members or promote support services. 

Legal compliance

To make sure you’re on the right side of the law, your club should be sticking to relevant alcohol and liquor licencing regulations. This includes promoting responsible service and consumption, public safety and sharing alcohol-harm reduction info.

Governance

Strong clubs have strong governance. This means enhancing governance structures, including incident management, policy development and the club’s code of conduct.

Community leadership

A great club isn’t just good at the game. It has an impact on the wider community’s health and wellbeing. Your club can demonstrate leadership by fostering a positive and inclusive culture and upholding strong club values. 

Mental health

Community sporting clubs can support members’ mental health alongside physical health. Your club can provide education opportunities and make sure that your members know how and where to seek help if they need it.

Illicit drugs

Even if your club has never had an issue come up, it’s good to be a step ahead. Protect your members’ health and safety by educating about illicit drug harms, establishing clear behavioural expectations, and planning your response to drug-related incidents.

Juniors

If you’ve got junior members, it’s important to reduce young people’s exposure to alcohol. Your club can achieve this through positive role modelling, providing alcohol-free environments, and limiting alcohol promotion.

What next?

You might have read through this list and identified some areas your club can improve on. 

If you don’t know where to start, log in to the Good Sports portal and check out your dashboard.

Here’s what to do:

1. Keep working through your questionnaire. If there are any areas you’re not fully across yet, you’ll generate action items as you go to help you address them.
2. Each action item on the portal has helpful resources linked. If you get stuck, you can contact your Good Sports team member for support.
3. Tick your action items off and they’ll automatically be added to your policy. 
4. By the end, you’ll have mastered all eight areas. Get the policy signed off by your committee to make it official. 
5. Print out that Gold Good Sports Club accreditation certificate and hang it with pride! You’ve done the work to make your club the safest, most welcoming place it can be.