The CGS club system receives big changes for the 25-26 school year, and beyond
By Maddie Snyder ‘26
Courtesy of Maddie Snyder ‘26.
This year, the Catlin Gabel School (CGS) club system got a major shake-up. Administration introduced the platform Club Hub, providing extensive club applications, stricter attendance tracking, and mandatory leadership training. All changes were made as a direct response to flaws in the club system from past years.
Upper School Dean of Students John Harnetiaux first recognized these flaws five years ago. “It's one of those things where I think the system has long been needing some attention.”
Harnetiaux, who is one of the people spearheading the new club structure, said that after the school dissolved the position of student activities coordinator, the administration’s ability to fix the problems stalled.
The student activities coordinator managed, among other things, the club system and senior projects, responsibilities that when the last person to hold the position left CGS five years ago, were distributed among other administration and teachers, including Harnetiaux.
Since then, he has only seen problems, mainly growth in unreliable club attendance. “Club attendance is all over the map,” he claimed.
Consistent club attendance is something that many struggled to achieve, especially last year. Although many would sign up for a club at the club fair, the actual turnout throughout the year would be much less.
Harnetiaux attributed this phenomenon to a student culture at CGS that places a high value on a busy schedule. “I think there's this desire to have as many things going as you possibly can,” he has observed, "that is sort of looked at like a badge of achievement: how many plates can you have spinning at once?”
Harnetiaux observes that the culture around clubs is greatly driven by anxiety and stress, especially around college applications. Some students stretch themselves thin because they believe more club leadership or participation will make for a more competitive application.
Although stress is a driving factor of club culture at CGS, Harnetiaux says affinity groups are typically a different case. Affinity groups, he's observed, are more about solidarity and finding safe places on campus, but that doesn’t mean they don’t face similar challenges as the clubs. The changes to the club system this year are also meant to address concerns brought to Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator Jewell Sparks.
Last year, Sparks raised a concern that affinity group leaders might need additional support with facilitation skills. Sparks said that a lack of such skills was leading to spotty attendance in some affinity spaces.
Sparks and the rest of the Equity & Inclusion (E&I) office held affinity group leader meetings to help students create mission statements, foster solidarity, design marketing strategies, and make meetings more fun.
In April, those meetings for affinity groups transformed into the now-mandatory club leader training. “The affinity group leaders were like, this would be great if we did this for all club leaders as well, and we were like, yeah, why don’t we do that?” Sparks explained.
The leadership training is one piece of the new changes this year, with the one most familiar to students being Club Hub. Harnetiaux said that since the Student Activities Coordinator position went away, they had been trying to figure out how to consolidate all the club documents to organize the system better. Club Hub came about as an answer, almost by chance.
A CGS IT colleague met someone from the Club Hub organization at a conference in the spring and thought it would be helpful to Catlin’s club situation. “Normally I kind of write stuff like that off,” Harnetiaux joked, “I'm like, that sounds like a lot of work to reach out and learn about the product.”
But when he did look into the software, he found that it had a lot of the features that he had been looking for to consolidate things.
That's when Harnetiaux brought in Sparks, as well as Tegan Morton from the E&I office, who were assisted by former CGSA president Tyler George to vet the software. Sparks said they also worked closely to come up with a solution using Club Hub that would accommodate all students.
In the spring administration advocated to Toad Hall, and over the summer, Club Hub funding got approved. This year, students have already been using it in their first month of clubs. Although Harnetiaux said that the feedback has been mainly positive, there are still some loose screws to tighten.
“Some features in Club Hub don't speak to some of the weird parts of Catlin,” he explained as one of those screws, “When I talked to the Club Hub folks, they were like explain CoCus to me again.” Admittedly, Catlin has a very unique schedule, which might be what's causing some of the difficulties with the software at the moment.
Many leaders dealt with the software first as a part of the club applications in September, which Harnetiaux said some had trouble navigating then. Although it allowed for some trouble shooting of Club Hub, their main purpose was to create accountability for club leaders. “Well, if you really want to run it, you gotta put in the time,” Harnetiaux said.
Despite the extra work and slight technical difficulties, it didn’t really deter people from starting or applying for clubs. Last year, CGS had around 95 club applications; this year Harnetiaux said they approved maybe 80, something he was admittedly surprised by.
“We thought that some students would be like that's a lot of hoops to jump through, I'm just not going to bother.” But not only did students jump through the hoops, many took it seriously. Harnetiaux observed that the leadership training and applications actually got a lot of positive feedback from leaders.
Although those more systemic changes aim to help students be more committed to clubs, Harnetiaux says that student culture is what requires the much larger shift. He says that achievement culture isn’t unique to CGS, though. “I think we can talk about them to a certain degree, but it's traced back to a much larger pressure”.
At the end of the day Club Hub is something the administration is hoping to use to help students, by tracking attendance and the amount of clubs a student is signed up for. “We’re using this as data to be able to inform us when we can best step in for support” Sparks explained, that support being targeted at both academics and social emotional well being. “This is a tool to help for efficiency but it also helps us look at student’s extracurriculars in a way that we haven’t been able to do before.”
Harnetiaux hopes to use Club Hub for as long as the school will fund it, and continue to set a higher bar as they gather more data from the platform. He can imagine a scenario next year where clubs face approval problems because they didn’t follow through on their meetings and goals this year, which the administration can now track.
At the end of the day, Club Hub is a tool to facilitate but it’s up to members to step up with engaged and consistent attendance, and leaders to plan good club meetings. The platform is as much a way to support students, as it is a way of pushing them to raise the bar.
Although Club Hub, the leadership training and club applications are new this year, the CGS club system will most likely continue to evolve. The club culture at Catlin isn’t a problem that will get solved in a year. Until a shift happens, though, the administration is going to try and hold students accountable to bring change forward.