But as time passes by, modelers would find themselves caught in a newly found friendship bonded by this same interest in the hobby. And so such groups would form their own club formally or informally and create their own ways of booosting the interest of their own troop with some hopes that their newly found society will later grow.
Today, there are several IPMS and non-IPMS clubs in the Philippines. Some have been established by former members of IPMS Philippines or of other scale modeling clubs. With the formation of such organizations, modelers now have a wider choice of which organization to join. Some would choose to join the bigger clubs and compete with the experts, some would want to join a smaller one and get closer and more intimate attention from the members in helping improve their skills. Some simply gets pulled into by their friends. But no matter what reason they join or not join a scale modeling club, it is great to know that the formation of clubs will certainly benefit current and propective modelers in terms of serving their personal interest, their geographic location and other factors that affect the time, money and effort they put in the hobby.
With the growth of more clubs comes competition. Competition brings about change in every organization and boost the energy of those who manager and steer the club. With competition, clubs today cannot be complacent. They are moved to take good care of their members. Clubs have to think of better ways to boost the enthusiasm of their members with the end goal of maintaining their membership and pushing their respective organizations to grow. In IPMS USA, they grade their respective clubs on a regional basis. Points are earned for every accomplishment that each club undertakes. In the end of the year, each region has a champion club which would represent that region for the National trophy. In this way, the other clubs would learn from the best practices of winning organizations and many would be encourage to follow their footsteps. In effect, the movers of the respective IPMS clubs would even come up with unique ideas that will help bolster the interest and energy of their members and the hobby as a whole.
For the Philippines and for many countries as well, Scale Modeling and Scale Modeling Clubs are still in their growth stage. These organizations has so much to learn from clubs abroad and so much space to grow. In their own effort to grow, change and hurdle change, there will certainly be many challenges that should be tackled. Some clubs will grow slowly, some will grow faster than the others. But in the end of the day, we can at least see that this great hobby called Plastic Scale Modeling will not fade and has a better future for the next generation of modelers.
