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  Butterfly Leagues

Butterfly League Table Tennis is a concept developed by Butterfly North America to recruit and train League Directors and League Coordinators to organize and run leagues in cities throughout the United States. It was inspired by a league system developed, tested, and proven successful in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. Butterfly League Table Tennis has two main objectives: to provide regular, organized, and competitive play for players of all levels and, more importantly, to provide an easy and enjoyable way for recreational players to take part in organized table tennis. The leagues that you organize will be your leagues. The revenue that your leagues generate will go to you or the non-profit organization with which you are affiliated. We hope that by training people to organize community-based leagues we can help create an infrastructure that will allow our sport to move forward.

Table Tennis is hot right now! New York City’s literati, Hollywood’s glitterati, America’s sports heroes and rock stars are all enthralled with the little celluloid ball. And we know that table tennis is not just for the rich and the famous; it’s a game for all ages, both sexes, and every imaginable body type. We don’t often get a sense of how many players there are in the United States because they’re hunkered down in the basement playing balls off the wall, slugging it out over lunch hour, or fighting to establish dominance in gym class. Table tennis is being played at churches, bars, recreation centers, health clubs, golf clubs, cruise ships, schools, camps, corporate offices and company warehouses. Table Tennis is being played everywhere!

By all accounts, table tennis is one of the largest participation sports in the world. Recent sporting goods manufacturers’ surveys show that nearly twenty million Americans play table tennis each year. Three million of them consider table tennis to be their favorite activity (An average of 60,000 per state). And yet the national governing body for table tennis in the United States, USA Table Tennis, has less than eight thousand members. In a recent study done by Butterfly, we found that of all the active players who play in USATT affiliated clubs, less than twenty percent are current USATT members. The most common reason that players give for not being a member is that they believe the only reason to join USATT is to be able to play in sanctioned tournaments. If we focus our collective energy on creating leagues, we can begin to attract many of the players who, in the past, have not found their way into organized table tennis.

Just about every sport or activity you can think of uses leagues as their primary tool for organizing play. The United States Tennis Association has over 665,000 members and most of them do not play in tennis tournaments; they play in leagues. The United States Bowling Congress serves nearly 3,000,000 members and most of them do not compete in bowling tournaments; they bowl in leagues. Tournaments can be fun and exciting, but leagues address the needs of many more people.

As league organizers we will build a bridge for all of the recreational players who want to cross over into organized table tennis. We will partner with organizations that already have gyms, community halls, and large spaces to create more playing locations closer to where people live and work. We will welcome new players and make sure that their first experiences in organized table tennis are fun. We will create a business model to motivate our most skilled organizers to keep at it. And we will provide exciting programs for players of all levels.

We at Butterfly recognize that developing community-based leagues is hard work. Professional League Directors and skilled League Coordinators are essential for the Butterfly League concept to grow. We’ve hired Mitchell Seidenfeld as the National Director of Butterfly League Table Tennis and will use Butterfly’s professional staff of web developers, equipment experts, coaches, and players to ensure that Butterfly League Table Tennis is successful. We are making a long-term commitment to developing table tennis in the United States. We hope those of you who are the most motivated, most skilled, and most passionate will join us in our efforts to promote community-based leagues for players of all levels.

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