Clubindustry

I just shipped out the giveaways we’ll be awarding some lucky Club Industry show attendees next week as part of the celebration of our 25th anniversary. We’re giving out one “gift” for each year that we’ve been publishing the magazine. Three boxes worth of prizes!

If you are coming to the show next week, make sure that you stop by our booth to see if you won a prize. We are in the Resource Center booth in the registration area. We’ll be announcing a new winner about every 20 minutes on Thursday and Friday, so listen for your name on the loudspeaker. Or just stop by our booth to check the sign that lists all the prizes, the sponsors and the winners.

Our grand prize giveaway is a fantasy camp, sponsored by SportsArt Fitness. To qualify for that prize, you have to go to SportsArt’s booth (No. 461) to register. A drawing for the winner of the fantasy camp will occur at the Resource Center booth at 5:15 p.m. on Friday.

To win one of the other giveaways, you don’t have to do anything. We’ll be “drawing” those names from the list of show attendees. What prizes can you win? We have a mix of everything from iPods to T-shirts to binoculars to laptop bags to books!

It’s just our way of kicking off our 25th anniversary and thanking you for being such loyal readers. Good luck!

The opening reception at the Club Industry show is always a high point for me. You get to catch up with those in the industry, meet new people in the industry, mingle, eat and listen to music. And, you can relax with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. Good company, tasty food and drinks? You had me at hello.

While each year I enjoy this event, this year’s opening reception is even better. It will be the official kickoff of Club Industry’s Fitness Business Pro’s 25th anniversary, and to celebrate, we’ll all be taking a trip down memory lane. The magazine’s staff has been digging up old photos of people in the industry as well as some of our first magazine covers. And, believe me, some of the photos are quite, ahem, dated. Leotards and big hair, anyone? During the reception, you can see these photos and covers for yourself in a digital slideshow that we’ve been putting together. Don’t miss it!

As the baseball season progressed and as our Club Industry show drew near, I was highly anticipating a Chicago filled with frenzied Cubs fans (and a few White Sox fans, too) energizing the Windy City to Sears Tower-like heights. One, maybe both of Chicago’s big-league teams were surely going to be playing post-season baseball by the time we arrived there in mid-October.

Instead, the Cubs were shockingly swept by the Dodgers, and the White Sox were eliminated almost as quietly by the Rays (they play in Tampa Bay). Chicago is definitely the City of Slumped Shoulders these days. You might even call the Cubs and White Sox “The Blues Brothers.”

At least the Bears are in first place.

Whether you’re at our Club Industry show or plan to follow along on our Web site, you simply must take time out from the billions of other options on the Internet and read our Behind the Scenes blog. You don’t know what you’re going to read or find out on our blog. Sometimes, we don’t know, either.

Check out the following posts from our blog at the Club Industry East show in New York, for example. Be sure to closely examine the last paragraph of Jennipher Shaver’s post, and then my post. Maybe we should have had a meeting or something before the show so that we wouldn’t have written about the same thing. I look at it as two great minds joined on the same wavelength.

We’ll have the usual posts about speakers, seminars and vendors. (I’ve already got my customary appointment lined up with our good friends at Checkfree.) We’ll also have some posts about stuff away from the show. This post is my all-time favorite since I started working here, and it’s not because I wrote it. (OK, that might be part of the reason.) I wonder if we’ll go back to that restaurant this year, and I wonder if “Danny Bonaduce” is still working there. He’s worth the return trip.

Perhaps my colleagues will post their favorite past posts here, too. That way, we can place as many links in one post as possible. The more links, the more hits we get, and somehow, some way, that means our company will make more money. And that, in the end, is why you should read our Club Industry 2008 blog.

Last week, the story of a “ghost” or a mysterious light making its way inside an Anytime Fitness club in our home base of Overland Park, KS, made national and international headlines. The light was caught on tape from a surveillance camera inside the club.

I was about to report on this story, too, until I read some reader comments that followed a published report. Many people make good claims that the ghost or orb or whatever was merely a mite or a bug that crawled across the camera lens. My favorite comment is as follows:

“The Ittsy-Bittsy Spider walked across the camera’s lens,

Down came the reporters and is featured on CNN,

Up came the conspiracy theriorist (sic) who thought they saw a ghost,

Now the Ittsy-Bittsy Spider has pulled off a national hoax.”