My only reason for being a member is to be able to join USBA tournaments. Other than that, I cannot see much else in the way of "benifits" to sell to a perspective player, in order to entice them to join. I have another membership that costs about the same amount, and they provide a very nice quarterly full color magazine. That's at least something tangible. Even if you never have a chance to participate in any events.
Jamie and everyone else,
We have worked hard over the last 3-4 years to give our members some actual benefits. Here is what we came up with:
1) Choice Hotels Discounts: Members (including myself) save 15% whenever we rent one of their hotel rooms. If you spend $1000 per year on hotels, you just saved $150, 3times the cost of membership. Of course if you spend nothing on hotels, it doesn't benefit you.
2) Free Accu-Stats DVD for new members and buy one-get one free for renewing members. Your free DVD nets you about $25-$30. Afterwards, if you like to buy DVD's, you save even more.
3) Old Pool School Instruction: this is in Florida, of course, but if you want to save money on instruction for pool or from Bill Smith for 3-cushion, you get a discount for being a USBA member.
4) Car Rental Discounts: if you rent cars from Enterprise, Alamo, Budget or Fox, you save up to 10%.
5) TrafficControlCaroms.com: save 10% on carom cues.
6) CustomCueLathes.com: if you want a cue lathe, USBA members receive 10-15% off.
7) Dieckman Cues: USBA Members save 50%.
8) Kilby Cues: USBA Members save 10%.
9) Billiard Warehouse: save 5% off Schuler Cues.
10) CaromBilliards.com; save 5% off total order.
11) PC Billiards: save 5% off all billiard products.
12) Earn Commissions: $15 commission for signing up a new member.
13) Free annual membership for becoming a USBA Room Representative.
14) Online Member Directory: contact information for any past or present USBA Member, unless they have opted out.
15) Tips From the Pro's: monthly tips from top players (this, I admit, needs to be brought up-to-date. Sorry about that.)
16) Discounted Table Time from participating Rooms.
17) Discounted Lessons from participating instructors.
18) Discounts on Simonis cloth.
19) Discounts on Aramith carom balls.
I realize that there will always be some people who will not be able to take advantage of all the benefits, but what else can we do?
If the benefits I have listed are not enough, then I suppose that the only thing I can say is this: the USBA wants to promote the game of 3-cushion billiards in any way that we can. We have tried to give the members more and make membership more valuable. If we have not succeeded, then I would hope that you wish to support the organization anyway. We need you. And we are trying like heck to have as many tournaments as possible around the country and we want to add more prize money to the tournaments, we have started to have more "B" and "C" player tournaments, we would like to start having a Nationalized handicap system with handicapped tournaments, etc, etc, etc.
We are trying. It isn't easy. Especially if there are only a handful of people around the country who are actually working together towards a common goal. If there are 100 people around the country who are doing individual things for the game, that is good. But it would be much better if they were all working together and on the same page with the same goals.
