Thirteen. It was thirteen people that broke it.

Six of us was lovely. Eight was fine. Ten was fine-ish. Twelve I was coping.

Thirteen people turned up on a Thursday in March and I had a clipboard, a biro that didn't work, and absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I keep coming back to this because I think it's the thing nobody tells you. When there's six of you it's a LIST. You know who's coming, there's one court, you played with Sarah last week so you play with Tom this week, done. When there's twelve or thirteen it's suddenly a system, and nobody asked me if I wanted to run a system. I wanted to run a tennis night.

What actually went wrong, in the order it went wrong:

The replies. They come in over four days in no order. In, out, maybe, maybe-now-no, "can I bring my brother-in-law" (Raj, I'm looking at you). I'm holding all of that in my head. I'm holding it in my head at work.

Then the courts. If I don't actively stop it, the same four end up on court one every week, the ones who reply first. New people end up together because I don't know who else they'd suit. A month of that and the whole group's set like concrete and none of us meant it to.

Then I can't remember who played who. Did Tom and Sarah play together last week? Three weeks ago? The only record is my head, so the answer is "probably" and probably isn't good enough when Sarah's asking.

All three of those are the same problem really, which is that all of it lives in ONE person. Me.

The thing that fixed it, honestly, was making the list public. That's the big one. The minute "who's coming?" is a private question in my DMs I've lost. Now there's one list, everyone can see it, people put themselves on and take themselves off, reserves are on the same list underneath, and when someone drops out the next one moves up. I don't decide. I don't phone anyone. It just moves.

We do it through the app Jake built (Rallio) and it also does the first go at the courts for me, which I can fiddle with. I didn't realise how much of my week was the blank page, just staring at thirteen names going "right, who goes where". Now it's "does this look ok" and nine times out of ten it does.

We're about thirty on a Thursday now. I'm still me. I've just stopped being the thing everything has to go through.

The list. Make the list public. That's my whole advice.

P.S. The biro still doesn't work. I keep it in the bag out of spite.