In 2023 Monmouth Rugby will celebrate our 50 year history as a family and community with a unique and innovative approach to the traditional anniversary celebration.
For most clubs, an anniversary celebration is centered around a three or four day weekend, where people might arrive in town on a Thursday, perhaps a round of golf and a cocktail party on Friday, a game between the active club and veterans on Saturday followed by a banquet Saturday evening, and closing with a farewell brunch on Sunday morning before the trip home.
We see two problems with this approach. First, it’s an all-or-nothing proposition, where people who have a conflict with the chosen weekend are shut out altogether. Second, the compression of events into a weekend format can take its toll, as the beers on the golf outing can run into the cocktail party, and so on, stretching the tolerance of even the most socially active among us. The pace of events can be daunting, and the ability of members of different generations to interact may be limited by the focus on reminiscing with peers.
As an alternative, we plan to celebrate our 50 years of rugby camaraderie throughout the entire year of 2023, with a full calendar of diverse but related events around a central theme – the enjoyment of each other’s company that underlies our common bond to the club.
We hope that by scheduling a number of events throughout the year we will afford more people the opportunity to interact in a more diverse set of environments, creating new friendships and memories along the way.
Some events, such as the Shamrock Shuffle 5K, Monmouth Day, and Summer 7’s, might be part of our regular social event calendar. Other events we’ve done occasionally in the past, like A Day at the Races (Monmouth Park), a Rugby NY game, or a boat trip to a Mets or Yankee game. Some might be one-off ideas just because, like a ski weekend at the Monmouth Ski Club chalet in Vermont or a fishing charter. The idea is that different events will attract different subsets of our family, according to interests and availability. We are in the initial stages of planning a tour, and we will cap the calendar with a Grand 50th Banquet late in the year. We’re even planning to document the first fifty and the year’s celebratory events with a Yearbook, so that the group that plans Monmouth Rugby’s Hundredth Anniversary celebration can see how we rolled during the first fifty!! We will publish a preliminary Calendar of Events in Newsletter #3, probably in April, with instructions on how to subscribe to events or suggest and schedule an event of your own!
There’s the big picture. We’ll provide more detail and a preliminary calendar in the series of newsletters to follow, but for now we’ll ask only two things:
- First, if you’re reading this somewhere other than email, please register for the celebration and all related communication by completing a short survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NPJNZL8.
- Second, please share this link with others who have not registered. Our goal is to make contact with 1,000 of our teammates, friends and family by the end of 2022.
Next: Newsletter #2: Shaping the Tour