501 Changes

Hi everyone,
We had terrific results in our first Clan Wars. 501XX, 501RV and 501ST all did well finishing in the top 10 on the Beta map, and 501DV surprised everyone by finishing in 3rd place on the top Alpha map, above some of the best clans in the game. Congratulations to all that participated.
We learned some lessons from this CW experience and are making some adjustments within the 501 family. At the same time, we want to be clear about what is also not changing. In terms of CW efforts, we learned that we need to create a better depth chart of available tankers both for participating in the actual battles, as well as being available for training scrimmages. There were many battles where we were scrambling to have 7 tankers in a lineup, and where we didn't have enough people on to prepare/practice properly ahead of time.
With those lessons learned we are going to shift to having two main clans for CW participation moving forward: 501ST and 501DV. We will be shifting our active members who are not able to or do not want to participate in CW to 501XX.
We will also create a revamped effort into 501RV, where we will bring in members to the 501 family who have the interest and the energy, but maybe still lacking in experience and/or stats. We are going to take a more proactive approach to increase activity within RV, and help give each tanker who is looking for help some short term and long term goals, as well as some assistance to get there.
We will be rolling out our 501 Mentorship Program to all members, and we will be asking members to volunteer for being mentors and mentees. This is aimed to help you work on whatever you need: situational awareness, sidescraping, how to play TDs, how to play British mediums, etc. We have some very talented members who want to share and help our community, so expect more details to follow there. 34 will also be setting up nightly Training Room sessions at 9pm EST, so please be on the lookout for that and jump into those for some more battle training.
We have learned over the past 9 months that 501DV has been successful based on the emphasis toward activity and community, with requirements built around slack, website and Teamspeak activity. It builds a better sense of community and as a result there were very few members who left the group. We want to continue to extend that effort across the entire 501 family so we can continue to build a great community of fun people who all love the game. We are not trying to become a totally stat focused clan. We have added some great people to our group, and we've accumulated a lot of talent as well. So we want to make sure we give our top talent the opportunities to shine while also not losing sight of who were are as a community. As evidenced by 501DV, we may not have had the most talented group of individual players but we were one of the best teams, showing what we are capable of when working collaboratively.
Over the next few weeks we will be shifting some of our less active players out of the two main clans. We have also made changes within leadership to help bolster our main clans in order to help spread the workload:
-Shawk has joined 501ST as a Deputy Commander
-Crazychimp has joined 501DV
-Ikener and 219thlegion will become Co-Commanders of 501RV
-The 501XX Commander position will become open for applications, more info will follow on that.
Again, our goal is to create and maintain the feel of one big 501 Family, and I think we've made great strides in creating a better sense of community over the past several months. While we are making these changes to try to better align for CW activity, it does not take away from the other 2 groups and our expectation of continued involvement and growth within our community. We are very proud of where we stand today as a clan family and we look forward to making it a great experience for all involved in the years to come.
o7
Joel and Mike