I think we can say at Foyer that we more or less know how you arrive at the creation of a sports club in the social field. You do this by finding suitable people, a supporting force. But he/she is not alone… Around that, you have to be able to create a leading, carrying team, and then you have to find your first loyal members. Loyal members are those who come to training sessions every week. For football, this is not a problem. That is so popular that you can easily find 20 members in a week. In athletics, it is already more difficult… And then you build further: it has to come to involvement of members in managing the club, getting some to grow in your own club from some to become assistant coaches, increasing parental involvement, and so on. Thus, it comes to identification with the club and commitment to the club. And at such a time, the club can become corporatised, live its own autonomous life. This is how Atlemo got there and this is how Rebels Molenbeek basketball club for girls got there.

Why am I describing this? I hope my text may inspire some people and that people learn to respect this kind of commitment.

I think we can say at Foyer that we more or less know how you arrive at the creation of a sports club in the social field. You do this by finding suitable people, a coach, and a supporting force. But he/she is not alone… Around that, you have to be able to create a leading, carrying team, and then you have to find your first loyal members. Loyal members are those who come to training sessions every week. For football, this is not a problem. That is so popular that you can easily find 20 members in a week. In athletics, it is already more difficult… And then you build further: it has to come to involvement of members in managing the club, getting some to grow in your own club from some to become assistant coaches, increasing parental involvement, and so on. Thus, it comes to identification with the club and commitment to the club. And at such a time, the club can become corporatised, live its own autonomous life. This is how Atlemo got there and this is how Rebels Molenbeek basketball club for girls got there.

Why am I describing this? I hope my text may inspire some people and that people learn to respect this kind of commitment.

“The psyche of the masses and the psyche of a child show very similar reactions. You really cannot imagine the ideas that feed the masses and set them in motion as childish enough. Real ideas, in order to become historical forces that set the masses in motion, generally have to be simplified first to the level of a child’s capacity to understand. And a silly delusion, shaped in the heads of children during ten years and hammered into them for four years, may very well make its way into politics twenty years later as a deadly serious ‘world view’.” (pp. 23-24).

I take the above quote from Sebastian Haffner’s book, The Story of a German 1914-1933. (2000, going back to an original, then unpublished manuscript from 1939).

We must ask ourselves whether again these are not processes that have been going on for several years and that help to explain the success, close to us, of movements such as ‘Schild en Vriend’ and the like, and that are now also at play in Russia, for example, to make many people there so uncritical of what is going on in Ukraine.