HUMBOLDT — The City of Humboldt has no plans to host a fall club registration night this year, after the event suffered low attendance in previous years.
The event, typically hosted on the first Thursday after school begins in September, served as a place where local clubs could host tables, hand out information and hold registrations.
At its height, Michael Ulriksen, Humboldt’s director of community and leisure services, said they would get as many as 2,000 to 3,000 residents in attendance, but pre-COVID the numbers dropped.
Ulriksen attributed the decrease largely to online registration shifts as well as the date of the event, as hosting it too early risks families being on vacation, but too late means clubs may have already closed their registrations.
“We found the last couple we did were so hit and miss with groups,” he said. “Minor hockey already had their registration done a while ago, a lot of the bigger groups because they were going to online registration people weren’t physically showing up to the building to register anyway.”
As a result of the larger groups not attending, Ulriksen said the smaller groups that did attend didn’t gain the registration numbers they were hoping for.
“That’s part of the reason, and then COVID hit and we haven’t had a big push from those groups to reestablish it.”
Should the community express interest in a registration night in the future, Ulriksen said leisure services remains open to the idea of hosting it once again.
Without the registration night, he said the department is working to find alternative ways to assist informing people about what the community has to offer.
“Some of it is just going to be word of mouth and going on Facebook and checking it out,” Ulriksen said. “We do have our leisure guide that was published in the past, and if someone inquired at the Uniplex we would be able to share some of the contacts on that list.”
Residents can contact leisure services at the Uniplex through 306-682-2597.
Other than those options, Ulriksen said the schools may be able to assist students in finding age appropriate groups.
Penny Lee, Humboldt’s communications manager, said the difficulty for the city with keeping a current guide is that club contacts frequently change with their boards and leadership.
“I’ve thought about building something on our website but it’s really too difficult to maintain and keep up when people are phoning saying, ‘It’s wrong,’” Lee said. “It falls back to our old community guide we used to have, when it was printed it would already change.”
