Think Big
The scale and scope of the Multnomah Athletic Club (MAC) is impressive. There are more than 21,000 members belonging to this Portland, Ore., institution located in the historic Goose Hollow neighborhood. Many more would join, but the club is currently at capacity and the much-desired memberships that do become available are dispensed every few years via a lottery.
The athletic and recreational programs similarly span a great range of activities, literally running the gamut from A (aquatics) to Z (Zumba). The eight-story clubhouse provides more than 600,000 square feet and overlooks an outdoor stadium, Providence Park, now owned by the City of Portland, but originally built by the MAC. Even the club’s publication, The Winged M, has a pleasing heft, running up to 80 pages and including more than 60 advertisers in each monthly issue.
Traditions of Excellence
The club’s storied past reaches back to 1891 and includes the golden age of amateur athletics in which city athletic clubs like Multnomah (originally named the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club), the Los Angeles Athletic Club and San Francisco’s Olympic Club provided the sustaining impetus for all manner of athletic endeavors, offering activities such as wrestling, gymnastics and physical conditioning and soon expanding to track and field, football and other team sports.
It was athletic clubs like these that became the training ground for Olympic athletes. The interest and passion for sport and club teams fostered by these institutions often became the object of intense media coverage, as well as local and regional loyalties. No less an icon of robust physicality than President Theodore Roosevelt presided over ceremonies when the Multnomah building was dedicated in 1911.
Modern Multnomah
Athletics are still very much at the center of Multnomah’s identity and mission. Using a benchmark of $244 as a family’s average monthly dues, we find that athletics at Multnomah lay claim to $102.59 or 42 percent of this due’s income. Food and beverage, by way of comparison, garners $8.49 (itself a subsidy for the very large and successful dining operations at the club). At the same time, the club has a very excellent dining program and recently added to its kitchen staff, but as General Manager Norm Rich points out, athletics is the club’s middle name. This means that the dining serves to enhance the overall club experience, to provide great value and not to lose too much money.
The club has an extensive committee system—several hundred of the members serve on these committees—that supports its broad array of activities and programs. A partial listing gives an indication of just how much is going on at this club: basketball, cycling, dance/group exercise, decathlon, exercise and conditioning, handball, karate, Pilates, racquetball, skiing, squash, swimming, triathlon and running, volleyball, walking and hiking and yoga.
Clearly Multnomah is an exceptional club, but there is much for other clubs to learn from the MAC’s long experience (this club, too, has had its cycles of success and struggle), its understanding of athletic programming, and how it serves to satisfy diverse needs and a variety of purposes. Recreation and athletics cover a daunting array of pursuits—some very strenuous, others less so; some team sports, others solitary activities; some competitive, others collaborative or cooperative. It all requires a deft managerial touch, continual assessment, careful calibration and an integrated planning perspective. In other words, it requires a balanced approach in which multiple needs are satisfied at different times with the right portfolio of choices.
How do they do it?
Here’s our point-of-view on how Multnomah has succeeded in striking the right balance between certain purposes and objectives that can, if not managed properly, slide into conflict or disarray.
Cultivation balanced with competition
Multnomah celebrates athletic competition, and many of their members are passionate about their chosen sport and “in it to win it.” Each month, The Winged M celebrates members who place highly—first, second or third—in state, regional or international competitions. And each month the Club Scoreboard is crowded with the competitive achievements of its members across the age spectrum and across many sports. For example, the MAC has a dramatic indoor rock climbing facility, and its youth are typically top performers in regional bouldering contests. The club itself is often host to regional and national tournaments in various sports.
But competition hardly crowds out participation. Classes, clinics, programs, coaches and trainers all combine to introduce and reconnect members with sports, athletic endeavors, as well as exercise, conditioning and fitness regimens. Young families gravitate to the club in part to allow their children to sample a broad range of recreational and sports activities as well as to get excellent instruction and training.
A natural extension of this focus on personal development finds expression in a diverse set of opportunities that extend into travel, education and entertainment. Athletics may get first mention in the MAC’s mission statement, but it’s never brawn at the expense of brain.
Change balanced with continuity
The MAC honors its traditions but has, throughout its history, remained open to contemporary interests and emphases. It has shed facilities and programs when circumstances dictated and, in an area of the country known for its progressive thinking, has integrated innovations and trends that characterize our modern lifestyles.
One of Multnomah’s more interesting and distinctive traditions is the Decathlon, which has been a mainstay in the club’s offering for more than 40 years. (Multnomah just concluded its 41st Decathlon in May). Members who participate choose ten events from a menu of eighteen, allotted across three categories: conditioning (e.g., mile run and 200-yard swim), strength (e.g., bench press and pull-ups) and speed/skill (e.g., 100-meter dash and basketball free throws). Participants from the first Decathlon in 1974 are still members of the club and recall when pocket billiards and golf were included in the event.
It is fair to say that over the sweep of its history, Multnomah has witnessed several sports wax and wane—boxing, bowling and billiards were once mainstays, but no longer. Team sports don’t define the club like they once did; and the role of women and families—once negligible—has become essential to the club’s popularity and success. In fact, Darcy Henderson is the current club president, the fourth women to serve in that role.
A brief history of the club explains “the most significant change has been a steady shift in emphasis from MAC-sponsored teams, as in the early decades, to a strong emphasis on physical conditioning for the entire family and a diverse menu of activities … and steadily expanded athletic and social facilities, including excellent restaurants and meeting space.”
Community interests balanced with club pursuits
Multnomah contributes much to the community and the quality of life in the Portland area. Athletics often integrate seamlessly with recreation, education and active lifestyle pursuits. These, in turn, pay dividends to the community in attracting families and employers to the area and even an appreciable boost to the region’s health and well-being.
Multnomah has an established record of good citizenship. The MAC works cooperatively and transparently with others in the city and region, working on zoning and parking questions (never enough of this for a club in an urban area!) while also providing a range of resources for community improvement.
The club’s MACorps Volunteers lend their support to a variety of community service projects like neighborhood cleanups. The independent nonprofit Multnomah Athletic Foundation (MAF) represents an institutional legacy of the MAC and provides a number of community grants and programs. Through the auspices of the MAF, area high school scholar-athletes are recognized annually. These high school sophomores receive a two-year membership to the MAC and a $1,500 scholarship.
Classic traditions balanced with contemporary trends
Multnomah succeeds for many reasons, but at its core are people—members, staff, managers and leaders—knit together in their enjoyment of the tried-and-true and the new-and-upcoming.
The club offers more than a backdrop for this community’s participation in sport and recreation. It sorts through a maze of interests and needs and then works to dedicate the necessary resources and ingenuity to enhance these human possibilities.
This is what the best clubs do. They take our basic human instinct for play, for competition and for companionship and add to those the appropriate context and support. The results are impressive and the “Winged M” is indeed soaring.
Club Trends Summer 2014