Article · Field notes
A Club Before Adults Ruin It
11 Jun 2026 3 min read
The club happened by accident, which is the only reason it has a chance.
There was a board. Then there were versions of a logo. The kids voted, changed their minds, defended bad options, killed some good ones, and helped push the duck toward its final shape. Then there were stickers. The stickers had to go somewhere, and the obvious place was on the boards of the kids who had helped choose them.
That’s enough. Kids don’t need bylaws before they’re allowed to belong to something.
Who’s in it
Noah is the person who drew the first duck, which gives him more authority than any adult title would. The other kids helped choose what that duck became, which matters just as much for a club. I’m the one who carries things and takes too many photos. Daniel Kux, who taught him through the build, is obviously in. Bron, Mark, Theila, and Robyn helped around the project and got pulled in too.
Then there are the kids at the break who wanted a sticker and got one. They didn’t earn it and there’s no initiation. The whole membership requirement is that you surf there and think the duck is funny.
That’s the right bar for a club of eight-year-olds.
What it’s for
Nothing, officially. That’s the part I want to protect.
There are no fees, no schedule, no parent committee, no WhatsApp group slowly becoming a logistics swamp. Just a name, a sticker, and the loose understanding that if you have one on your board, you’re part of the thing.
Names do something to children. A kid who is “just surfing” and a kid who’s in a tiny invented surf club are the same kid, except one of them has something to live up to. Sometimes that’s enough to make him paddle a little harder.
Where it goes
I don’t want to overbuild this. The fastest way to kill a kids’ club is for adults to notice it’s working and improve it into something unbearable.
So the plan is to do almost nothing on purpose. Print more stickers when we run out. Show up. Run the small contest again if the kids still care. Let Noah decide what it’s for as long as he wants to.
If it fades by next year, fine. A sticker gave a few kids at Tamarin the feeling of being a crew for one season. That’s already more than it needed to do.