Wuppertal Trip

Over the weekend I had the great pleasure of taking a quick trip down to Wuppertal to visit Jens Larsen (you might know who that is), Mads and Peter. I got to see Wuppertal play a match against a local rival from Essen and to see the team train a bit as well. I wrote a little something about the match that is posted but for now I just wanted to say a few things that really struck me while I was there.

First of all, I want to say that Wuppertal is training at a very high level. Yes, they have had a nice early season schedule. They’ve avoided what figures to be the other top three teams in the Bundesliga so far and that is part of the reason that they are undefeated. The matches they have won however have been absolutely earned. Nine practices a week, weight training, physical therapy, etc… It all adds up to success. And I know for a fact that Wuppertal doesn’t have the most talent in the entire league. They are developing their players and getting quite a bit out of them. This was most obvious for me with Peter and Mads who have clearly developed quite a bit from even last year. In the match I saw, they were two of the best players on the court. They looked comfortable and they looked strong. And it was exciting to see former teammates having so much success. Jens also deserves a lot of credit for the driving the team they way he does.

Seeing a match was also an eye-opening experience for me. It wasn’t just the number of fans that they had it was their enthusiasm for the game. People were making noise, cheering and generally having a good time. I wish there was bigger fan culture in Danish volleyball because it was clear that the more noise/intensity/energy that came from the stands the more fun that everyone had. Energy from the crowd not only creates more energy in the crowd but it also creates more energy on the court. And in the end it makes everything more of an experience for everyone involved. Anyways, it was a great experience and if anyone else has a chance to see a match down there I highly recommend it.

Wuppertal is also a very interesting club in the way things are organized and set up. Bayer has been giving them money for quite a long time. The club then decides how to distribute that money. They have something like 20 different sports that this money should support so Bayer is giving a significant amount each year. After they receive the money, the board gets together and divides it up. Nice, eh?

The thing that is interesting is that Bayer also has the goal of making the sport club independent. That means that they give money and finance projects in order to make the club able to run on their own, make their own money and finance themselves.

Bayer has financed, for example, a large center next to the main gym that contains an exercise room, small gym, kids pool area, cafeteria, and weight room. They were then able to refinance that center and pay for it with the revenue that comes from memberships to the center. That means that soon, when the building is paid off, there will be a steady stream of income that the club will have coming in every year. They have recently built another center just next to these other two where they will do the same thing with certain social health programs. Kids doing sports, people with certain diseases like asthma, osteoporosis, cancer, etc… will be able to use the facility and the German social program will pay Wuppertal for each person enrolled. They’ll refinance that center with that money and eventually there will be more money steadily coming in. If they continue to expand and keep things functioning efficiently they will have a significant amount of their income coming from these programs.

The idea is absolutely genius. Of course it requires a company with the capital of a Bayer to get things started but it is this kind of forward thinking that makes so much sense for a sports franchise and Danish volleyball could certainly learn a few things from it.

Anyways, I just wanted to offer a few things from the trip. The kids down there are for real, Mads and Peter look like they have a great future and I’m excited for them. Jens is talking about Champions League sometime in the near future, let’s all hope that it happens as soon as possible…