Toastmasters is a club that meets on a Tuesday, and it is also a competitive structure with about a quarter of a million people in it. Most weeks you never notice the second part. Twice a year you do.
The ladder
A contest starts in the club and moves up in stages. Each stage is run by the level above it, and the winner of each stage goes on to the next:
- Club contest. The club’s own members compete. Held in place of a normal meeting, or on a weekend if the field is large.
- Area contest (小区赛). The winners of every club in the area. An area is a handful of clubs, typically four to six.
- Division contest (大区赛). The area winners.
- District contest. The division winners. A district covers a whole region; Shenzhen’s has been renumbered four times without the club ever moving, which is its own story.
Above the district the path narrows sharply and only some contests continue at all. Most members’ contest career happens in the first two rungs.
Where the club sat on it
The club’s own posts name the rung it was on at the time, and the names change because the district around it kept being redrawn:
The club posted an invitation to it. At this point what sat above the club was called a division.
Those are three different area labels in six years for the same room of people. The club changed nothing; the map above it did.
What the evenings looked like
The contests that were written up read differently from ordinary meetings. They run longer, they are held at weekends more often, and the write-ups spend more words on the result and fewer on the jokes.
All twenty are below, under the titles the club gave them at the time. Twelve came with photographs; the other eight survive only as the notice that went out beforehand. Fourteen of the twenty were held at a weekend, which no ordinary meeting ever is.
The districts this club has belonged to →D75 → D85 → D89 → D118, without the club ever moving.