Five years ago, I packed up shop in Australia and moved to the Netherlands, leaving behind warm weather, topographical diversity, and everyone I’d ever known and loved. It meant starting my social life anew: going on friend dates arranged through tenuous connections, willing myself to become a ‘yes’ person, and building friendships from the ground up. Just as I realised how much I loved mountains after moving to a relentlessly flat country, I found myself longing for group hangouts now that I was no longer part of one.
As a lifelong fan of one-on-one interactions and small social clusters, this revelation came as a surprise. School friendship group aside, my social life was best described as bitsy — a hodgepodge of disparate connections I’d made over the years. I’d find joy in occasionally cross-pollinating, but was mostly content to compartmentalise my friendships, and I hovered on the peripheries of enough circles that I could tap into one when I needed a fix. But in this new city, where dipping in and out of groups was no longer an option, the absence of socialising en masse was an unexpected blow.
In group settings, dynamics shift, offering those of us who lean towards introversion a chance to step back and go non-verbal for a bit. The more people there are, the more varied and meandering the conversations become, and the less pressure there is to constantly contribute. As someone who can go deep quickly, hanging out in a group feels effortless and jovial, a perfect backdrop for my favourite kind of humour: silly, layered, and self-referential. Group interactions are also a welcome reprieve from a social calendar jammed with individual catch-ups, where I can find myself repeating the same life updates over and over again in increasingly monotonous tones.
Entering your late twenties and early thirties is marked by Big Life Changes, regardless of how you navigate them. Relationships solidify, careers change, people move out of the city, parents need looking after, babies begin to populate Instagram feeds. Socialising, once spontaneous, becomes scheduled, and it no longer seems unusual to go weeks or months without seeing close friends. The realisation sets in that you and your friends’ lives, which had been more or less plodding along a similar path since school, are about to splinter. My solution? Club-ifying my social life to keep it alive.
It all began with Wine Club, founded and presided over by a school friend, as a way to structure our booze-centric socialising and expand our wine knowledge beyond just ordering the lightest rosè or second-cheapest bottle at dinner. While we’ve often found ourselves in violation of the founding ‘don’t get shitfaced on shit wine’ rule, we’ve compensated by exploring the entire gamut of grape varietals — from Chablis to Savvy B — and kept the club afloat for 8 years, despite members living interstate and overseas, even momentarily pivoting to Zoom during the pandemic. We’ve taken it on the road, opened our doors to new members, and hosted an edition with our mums. Despite our scattered geographical locations and diverging life paths, it’s a comfort to know we’ll always have WC to return to.
Shred Club emerged in the early days of my Amsterdam life, partly to keep myself accountable to workout classes and mostly as an excuse to get coffee with new friends afterwards. This was followed by Book Club, which quickly broadened to encompass all media under the umbrella of Content Club, where we connection-hungry expats met in parks to snack and discuss everything we’d been obsessively consuming that month. I’ve had Walking Clubs, Supper Clubs, Early Morning Swim Clubs, and Potluck Clubs, while friends have found connection in everything from Mum Clubs and Knitting Clubs to the good old-fashioned Nightclub. Anything to assemble a group over a shared purpose, a concept Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, describes as creating gatherings with intentionality and meaning. Parker highlights that by designing gatherings with a clear purpose, like a club, we create spaces where people can authentically connect and feel like they belong.
While I tend to lean towards the hedonistic and leisurely, 2024 is undoubtedly the Year of the Run Club. Dubbed "the new dating app" by the New York Times, this trend has gained momentum thanks to swathes of TikTok videos featuring sun-kissed, hyper-fit content creators who’ve turned running into a social phenomenon. Run clubs are springing up in cities worldwide — it’s hard to go for a walk through the park on a Saturday morning without spotting gaggles of cheerful, Hoka-clad runners in full stride.
One such club is Amsterdam-based Bambas Sports Club, founded by friends Mateo de la Vega, Matthew Childs, and Mathieu Estival over WhatsApp in 2022. After de la Vega’s close-knit group of friends, which he met while working at Nike, all left Amsterdam post-Covid, he found himself running alone too often. “At some point, I was like, This fucking sucks,” he says. “I've played rugby all my life, and for me, the social element was always the best part outside of the sport itself. I wanted to replicate that mix of working out and meeting new people.”
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After travelling to Berlin for the 2022 Marathon, de la Vega and his friends were inspired by the sprawling community-centric running culture there and returned home hoping to join something similar. But they found the clubs in Amsterdam were either too exclusionary or too performance-oriented, so they decided to start their own. “We were very lucky in that we were literally six months ahead of the whole run club movement, and we engaged a ton of people by literally doing nothing,” he says. “It was just word of mouth: people talking to people, friends bringing their friends, and so on. I don't really believe in coincidence, but this felt like pure coincidence, for sure.”
The club has an average of 200 runners weekly, 400+ WhatsApp group members, and over 4000 followers on Instagram. They run on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings, and the group is composed mostly of expats — spanning England, France, Portugal, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand — though locals are also involved. The age range is 27-35, skews slightly more female, and there are three different pace groups to keep the club as accessible to everyone as possible. Over the last two years, Bambas has exploded beyond its initial bi-weekly format, encompassing everything from yoga sessions and dinners to cultural events, parties, and a forthcoming magazine. “People are here to socialise, and we’ve created an inclusive space that allows everyone to just come and be themselves,” de la Vega says.
Rejecting the dating app narrative often attached to run clubs (though acknowledging some members have found love), de la Vega views Bambas as more of a community-driven cultural movement. He emphasises that while he and his friends initiated the club, its true success belongs to its members. They’ve played a crucial role in building it — from the branding and website design to modelling and photographing merchandise, and even organising events and DJing at parties. No part of the club has been externalised. “The result is a strong culture of belonging. It’s almost like a cult,” he laughs.
Like most organically grown communities, the club is largely unstructured, driven by de la Vega’s “obsession” with what the space and community give back to its members. “It sounds crazy and very dramatic, but the club is literally changing lives,” he says. “People have met through the club and are getting married. People have met business partners, and we’ve connected people with roommates and flats. People have found friends, which seems very simple, but when you get to a big city, you often don't know where to find friends or how to meet like-minded people.”
There’s no understating how crucial building and maintaining community is, especially in cities that can feel alienating to outsiders, and where the safe cocoon of long-standing support networks is no longer available. We all want to connect, and clubs are the perfect conduit: one 5km run, book recommendation, or glass of wine at a time.
Image: IMDb
