DIVE LOCAL – A Dive Community Effort
Building a Local Diving Community
By Gene Muchanski, Executive Director,
Dive Industry Association, Inc.

Working with Dive Clubs

 DIVE LOCAL was designed as a marketing vehicle to deliver a unified marketing message to divers and prospective divers across the globe.  The message is:  Learn to Dive – Buy Your Gear – Go Diving – Stay Active.  There are four pillars of every Local Diving Community who work on a daily basis to bring that message to life.  If we want the recreational diving industry to grow, we need to collectively support these front-line ambassadors in order to get the job done.  Our duty as an industry is to identify and promote the Dive Industry Professionals and their businesses who create and grow the market of active divers.  A market that diving equipment manufacturers, training agencies, and travel companies benefit so much from.

The Four Pillars of a Local Diving Community are:

• Dive Stores
• Dive Boat Operators
• Dive Clubs
• Dive Instructors

What do we know about Dive Clubs?  Dive Clubs are a major stakeholder group in the Global Diving Community.  They are independent groups of divers scattered across the water planet.  In the United States, with a few exceptions, they are usually confined to a small geographical territory.  It is common to see more than one dive club in a county, depending on who the founders and sponsors of the dive clubs are.  Dive clubs can be independently owned and operated or affiliated with a local dive store or university.  Dive clubs can be informal groups of divers in a Local Diving Community or an established non-profit organization with a 501(c)(3) tax exempt status. Dive clubs have many different reasons for starting their clubs.  Some have started to promote local diving.  Some are centered around social events or a regional dive show.  Many are based on common diving activities like underwater photography, spearfishing, underwater hockey, mermaiding, wreck diving, or metal detecting.  Dive Clubs can be formed to take advent of equipment discounts for their members or dive travel concessions for their group dive trips.  Some post-activity membership organizations like the Fraternal Order U.S. Naval School Underwater Swimmers and the Fraternal Order of the UDT/SEAL have been created to support their membership with financial aid programs or educational scholarships.

Dive Club History:  The recreational diving industry had its beginnings in the early 1950’s.  SCUBA diving as we know it was just getting started.  The Post WWII youth were active skin divers and spearfishermen and diving became a popular social outdoor activity.  As skin diving became more popular, clubs sprung up around spearfishing contests and the sport grew.  The pages of SKIN DIVER Magazine featured articles about skin diving and skin diving clubs and then scuba diving and scuba diving clubs.  In a time when there were few diving instructors and only a handful of dive stores with an air compressor, dive clubs became the central focus of our sport.  Dive Clubs flourished in the 50’s and 60’s.  Skin Diving was still a popular, physical outdoor activity, but SCUBA Diving was something new and exciting, and growing.  Lloyd Bridges and Jacques Cousteau invited themselves into our living rooms with their iconic television programs of Sea Hunt and the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.  Interest in scuba diving spiked with the introduction of NAUI, PADI, and NASDS.  As more scuba instructors were qualified, more scuba divers took lessons and got certified, and more dive stores opened to service an expanding market.  If you look at the pages of SKIN DIVER Magazine during the 1970’s and ‘80’s you will see the prolific growth of dive stores and the increased attention and support they were receiving from the industry and the diving media in particular.  As support for the local dive stores grew, so did the services they were offering to the diving public.  Dive stores were teaching diving, selling equipment, taking people diving, and starting to offer dive travel vacations to their customers.  To keep their current customers actively diving, many dive stores started dive clubs of their own.  This I believe was the beginning of an industry-wide paradigm shift for the dive club stakeholder group.

To understand dive clubs, it’s important to focus on what they do for their members. In the past, dive clubs held meetings and social events with people who had similar interests.  They introduced their newfound activity with others, helped them get certified, and invited them on local dive trips.  Clubs often featured guest speakers who talked about diving equipment, dive training, local diving, and specialty interests such as photography, spearfishing, and wreck diving.  Dive clubs were the first groups to host local Film Festivals, which later became annual underwater photography competitions or Regional Dive Shows.  I kind of think of dive clubs of the past as industry support groups or industry social outlets.

It may seem like dive clubs have declined in recent years, but I believe that the club concept has merely changed in form and function.  There is a logical explanation as to why some clubs have experienced decline and lack of support in the past 30 years.  As the average age of club members has increased, many of the former members have given up diving or simply cut back to one or two dive trips per year.  If a club is not actively engaged in recruiting new and younger members, they will decline over time and cease to exist.  Another major reason for the decline of some clubs is that as members grow up, get married and have children, priorities change and unfortunately it is usually the hobby that gives way to new interests and responsibilities.  Logistically, if a club is not actively engaged with their members’ needs, they will not realize that the need to purchase, and the way we purchase equipment, training, and travel has changed dramatically over time.  A Dive Club succeeds if it meets the needs of its members.  It declines if it doesn’t.  The last major reason for the lack of growth in clubs is communication, or lack thereof.   Many clubs failed to promote their organization to the diving community.  When club officers rotate too often, the club lacks a consistent point of contact.  If the club does not have a permanent mailing address, a current website, and is not active in social media postings, they are extremely difficult to reach and become invisible to prospective members.

There is a silver lining in the future of Dive Clubs.  After going through a world-wide pandemic, I believe that many people have come to realize the importance of social interaction.   Scuba diving with others is fun.  In the 21^st century we can purchase equipment online and learn how to dive by enrolling in an e-commerce course of instruction.  If we want to know anything about a subject as it pertains to diving, tons of information is available for free on-line.  If we want to go on a dive trip by ourselves, we can just need to go online and book it ourselves.  But what fun is that?

I may be wrong, but I think that people are socially starving to death because of the lack of social interaction.  Scuba diving is a very social way of connecting with friends and family and sharing the adventures of life.  We need to do a better job at selling the fun, adventure, and companionship that comes from participating in activities with our fellow divers.  With the proper use of today’s modern marketing tools and technologies I believe that our industry can create a Dive Club revival.  As we redefine the social mission of the dive club, we can focus on the needs of modern-day divers, their families, and their friends.

For more information on building Local Diving Communities, contact Gene Muchanski, Executive Director, Dive Industry Association, Inc., 2294 Botanica Circle, West Melbourne, FL.  Phone 321-914-3778. Email: gene@diveindustry.net  web: www.diveindustry.net

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