So, you want to start a high school club? As someone who once wondered how to go about this and eventually created a club, my hope is to provide you with practical guidance, personal insight, and proven strategies for anyone curious about launching and leading a club of their own—from finding your purpose to navigating the logistics and inspiring others to join.
Why run a club?
• Perhaps you want to add a little something extra to the menu of extracurricular activities at your school.
• Maybe you’re looking to create a special, passionate environment with your friends (you also want to boost your college application).
• Maybe you just want to challenge yourself to make something amazing happen.
Regardless of the reason, the process will certainly help you grow as a person and is worth the challenge.
Obstacles
Many questions and issues may arise with such an undertaking. High school is an environment that can be especially challenging for startups – whether that be sports teams, clubs, or events. With most people already having an overwhelming amount of extracurricular commitments, gaining members proves very difficult. How do you find a passionate coach or advisor? How do you keep everyone motivated to maintain high attendance at every meeting? How many times do you need to meet each week? Who becomes the leader? How do you make a club…good? I will cover club initiation, leadership, and recruitment strategies, as these topics presented the biggest struggles for the club I helped found. I am sure that these issues are also relatable to other high school students.
Personal Story: Starting Science Olympiad
Now, more on my personal story with clubs. During my sophomore year, my best friend and I set out to start a Science Olympiad team. We envisioned a vastly inclusive STEM club that could rise quickly to the level of seasoned teams. From the very beginning, I knew that even if all else failed, the experience of working with other people and trying to overcome the challenges that arise with starting a high school club would prove invaluable to me. As an aspiring future scientist and surgeon, I know that taking on such a challenge would be meaningful, allowing me to develop people skills early on to help me become a better communicator to other scientists and patients. Through two years and a summer, we built a team of twenty students at Concord-Carlisle High School, competing in regional tournaments, national invites, and the state tournament. We joined the WSSL League, ranking fifth out of eighteen teams with many top-5 event finishes. The team competed at the Harvard Invitational, placing fourteenth out of almost seventy teams, securing our position among well-seasoned teams across the nation. In addition, the team placed first out of fifteen at the Dartmouth Invitational. Seeing my friends and teammates laugh while testing their builds, pull all-nighters perfecting designs, and come together in the morning to board the bus for nationals to compete has been the highlight of my high school career and an unforgettable experience. I can certainly attest that it has helped me grow as someone open to interacting with people of varying personalities and science interests, and I am sure that it has jump-started my growth in communication skills. It has also taught me that leadership isn’t just about having ideas; it’s about building momentum, creating systems that inspire action, and fostering a STEM-passionate environment among competitive high school students. From my experience, I will share a few strategies that help prospective high school club founders. I hope that using this advice and taking risks of your own will make this challenge of club initiation and growth into something that you look forward to every single day because it can be so life-changing for you and your peers.
Club initiation: Brainstorming Stage
But first, the logistical steps of club initiation. What kind of club do you want to see at your school? What will your club do on a weekly basis? If you start a club to do something that you and your peers love (as opposed to making it “look good” for other people’s eyes), I am certain that these questions will be easier to answer. For myself, I’ve been a biology fanatic and nerd since the sixth grade. I knew I wanted to start a science club of some sort, maybe just a biology-specific club. My love for science got me in the right direction, and my audience (my high school) led me to choose the Science Olympiad. Many STEM fields are covered in the Olympiad, thus including many more prospective students. Follow your original ideas because they stem from your passion. If you are passionate about something, you likely have an underlying talent for it—use that talent. The journey will prove more bearable and fun if you gather other people to do what you love, adding new dimensions to understanding whatever passionate activity you choose as the club’s focus. I knew that I also wanted to start a STEM-focused club so that it could help me develop new insights on what becoming a scientist looks like and what it is like to take new grand risks involving unfamiliar people, places, and competitions.
Logistics
Every high school has its own system for club initiation. At CCHS, it requires a faculty advisor, and the Student Senate and a Principal must approve it. In these steps, it is critical to prepare your pitch for why your club is unique to other clubs and why the impact it will make is significant and important to your school community. You need as much support as possible for your club to pass. Assuming that your club passes this step, the process is far from over. I dare say that getting a club approved is the easy part; the difficult part involves cultivating and turning that vision into a reality. Leadership isn’t just about having ideas; it’s about making things happen. Anyone can start a club, but the most successful clubs get down to the nitty-gritty work of feverish and dedicated self-improvement. The process matters. When Science Olympiad first started, we experienced a gradual decline in attendance throughout the winter, which made productivity very low. Sometimes, my coach and I saw an empty classroom when I showed up to our weekly meetings. Often, my friend and I would work with just one coach hours after school, doubting that the club would survive or see anything amazing come out of it. I left many meetings, walking down the quiet and dark hallways, thinking feverishly of how we could improve our leadership and recruitment. This process of thinking and trying new options is what I believe led to higher attendance and, eventually, our competitive success the next year. It doesn’t just take time; it takes persistent grit. Waiting around for time to do its magic yields nothing if the leaders don’t have a plan. Only through persistence will results show for your club and grow its leaders into better people.
The importance of total student leadership
Yes, finding an advisor or coach is important or even required, but it is rarely the adult who brings the team to success. In my experience in the debate team and in the Science Olympiad, the best teams are always student-run. Their leadership stems from incredibly talented, capable, and motivating high school captains. In my experience, I am forever indebted to the amazing six captains of the team who act as role models for me and who share a passion for learning and science that I cannot find elsewhere. We share one vision: to make the greatest and most competitive team we can. Our execution of this vision has led to our successes in the WSSL and at national invites. Student passion is an unquenchable fire.
Continuing on the topic of leadership, another pitfall I wish to point out involves assigning leadership roles from the start. No one is the president, captain, or leader of the club by title unless they prove it with action and continued dedication. From my experience, the clubs that immediately develop a complex leadership structure are the ones that fall the fastest; they pretend to be a years-old developed club within days. The point is that leadership is only meaningful if the leader earned their title because they are dedicated to serving the club and making it better. And if everyone is a leader, no one is a leader. Focus on the hard work and the process of making a club robust first. In the first year of Science Olympiad, we had what we deemed “committees” where anyone on the team could help out with leadership tasks. Everyone who wanted to take on leadership could, and it had no major issues. Only when we grew into a large team did the go-getters become obvious; they were the ones who deserved the titles.
Gaining members
The most effective way to gain team members right from the start is to ask your friends. They are the ones closest to you and are most willing to help or join. My best friends all loved STEM, so we bonded quickly as a new club. Other popular strategies include using eye-catching posters in strategic spots around school or having a teacher send a school-wide email about the club. If you wish to do targeted recruitment, find the people in person to ask. If you wish to do broad-scale recruitment, you need to make as much of a splash as possible. In this process, your rhetoric of why one should join a club is just as important. It is critical to present the club as something that can benefit the person in their individual and specific endeavors (as Dale Carnegie says, arouse in the other person an eager want. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests). If it’s a science club, talk about how it helps their academic pursuits in biology. If it’s a volunteer club, paint a picture of how this can help people gain hours while doing something they love. No one will listen to pleading; after all, in high school, everyone has their own pursuits and interests. You must appeal to these pursuits and interests to succeed. The best you can do is to give it your all; you can’t control whether the people at school like what you like. I’ve seen the debate club spark into a national threat just because of my friends all in one grade — they made the debate team good. In Science Olympiad, it took a year for the club to gain a footing at school while friends recruited friends, and for us to rack up some accomplishments to make us more compelling. Trust the process because, as the author of Atomic Habits, James Clear says, “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits…You get what you repeat.” If you put in the hours and lead by example, your habits of leadership are there — the change just sometimes takes a little while to become apparent. Put trust not in immediate outcomes but in your dedication and hard work to get those outcomes — the process.
Good leadership
I can only share some of the things I have learned from running a club; I do not claim to know the “right” way to lead clubs, if such a standard even exists. First, the term “leadership” sounds like some grand idea that someone needs to learn exquisite pieces of memorized directions to master. It feels like someone needs to know what to do in every situation in order to be a good leader, but my experience has been the opposite. My perspective on starting out as a leader is that we should try our best and learn to do better from mistakes. Striving to improve every day will always lead you in the right direction for your purposes. That is the best thing we can do as young high schoolers. Regardless of how much we learn, developing leadership is important in high school because it provides a basic experience to boost social interaction skills later in life.
Generally speaking, however, club leaders should be approachable by all sorts of students of varying personalities and someone who exemplifies the image of the club through their grit and the quality of their work. Leading by example is not always as simple, though; it doesn’t mean doing everything. That is a serious pitfall because leadership is about bringing together people for a greater purpose, not overloading the leader. A good leader needs to be a good role model and learn to delegate tasks effectively. This is something to feel out for the individual. I learned to trust my fellow captains to follow through because anxiety leads nowhere. You need to trust in delegation and accept that there is too much to manage individually when a club gets bigger. Sometimes, the leaders do need to be present for every meeting and every event, but maybe your club has grown to a point where your delegation of tasks gives other students a chance to practice their skills or provides them with an opportunity to prove themselves and contribute to the team.
Good leadership of a team looks different for each club, and my experience cannot be applied to everyone. Regardless, any good leader is made from someone who simply puts in the hours and hard work to be a good leader and to create the greatest club they are capable of. A critical and dedicated eye is needed to strategize to garner success. For example, in the Science Olympiad, we knew that we had to keep everyone motivated throughout the entire school year to perform well at States. The most effective way to motivate our fellow teammates involves providing them with opportunities to compete; preparing for real competitions instead of something far off ensures that the team constantly prepares and works on build or study events. For example, in the WSSL regional league, our team attended each of the monthly competitions. Each tournament served as a wake-up call to prepare for events, and this is how we got engineering builds made far before any major national invites or state competitions. We thus had builds ready to go, and people had already studied for knowledge-based events and performed well at national invites like at Harvard and Dartmouth. Especially for competitive clubs, providing many opportunities to compete is necessary to keep the cycle of preparation going, and so team members can see immediate results from their hard work. It beats procrastination and maintains a systematic approach to preparation. After all, high schoolers will always want to win awards for their college applications; you will be appealing to their motives. Here, the point is that these successful ideas and this strategy only arise when the leaders of the club reflect and think together (for the Science Olympiad, this involved bi-weekly captain meetings) and truly put in the hard work and dedication. There is no such thing as being efficient and rising to the top from the get-go; everyone has to experience the days when no one shows up, when nobody responds to your emails, and when it seems like nobody cares. Only through these struggles does a high schooler better learn how to work with people.
Concluding remarks
Ultimately, a successful club requires a dedicated focus on constant improvement without laziness. Throughout this process, you will meet amazing people, develop invaluable life-long communication skills, and witness the growth of something that you helped start. Seeing this proves very rewarding and gives you tremendous self-confidence to pursue even greater things. Observing an idea that you formed in your head while eating lunch in the Learning Commons become a reality and a thriving, passionate community has been a life-changing experience for me. I am sure it will be for you too.
