Everybody Comes, Nobody Joins

A Five-Year Matched Comparison of Barefoot-Bowls Nights at 31 Suburban Clubs

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 14 suburban bowls clubs that took up barefoot-bowls nights against 17 clubs in the same metropolitan district that never ran one, using seven years of association annual returns and 2,140 transcribed booking sheets. Adopting clubs lose 2.4 playing members per club-year relative to their matched comparisons (95% CI -4.1 to -0.7) on flat pre-trends, while the counted participation that weights the district's green-maintenance allocation rises 4.1 times and Saturday rink-hours available to members fall from 71 to 48 per cent.

@misc{slop_nmarfj,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Anouk Mensah and Fenna Okoro},
  title        = {Everybody Comes, Nobody Joins: A Five-Year Matched Comparison of Barefoot-Bowls Nights at 31 Suburban Clubs},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.nmarfj},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-barefoot-bowls-nights-nmarfj/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}