"How hard can it be?" (Sunday sessions, a cautionary tale)

March committee meeting. Any Other Business. Sue announces she is moving to Norfolk and somebody will need to take on Sunday mornings.

Long silence. Somebody coughs. The treasurer studies the biscuits with great intensity.

And I hear my own voice say: "Well. How hard can it be?"

I would like to formally withdraw that remark.

I had assumed running Sunday mornings meant unlocking the ball cupboard and saying good morning. What it actually means is: telling everyone it's on, finding out who's coming, finding out who's ACTUALLY coming as opposed to who said they were, fitting them onto the courts, making up the pairings, keeping a reserve list, ringing round when someone drops out at ten past eight, and writing the results down somewhere people can see them. Every week. Including the weeks I'm not well, and the weeks I'm at a christening.

The christening. Let me tell you about the christening. My granddaughter's, in May. Sunday morning. I had handed Sundays to nobody, because there was nobody, and the whole thing lived in a spreadsheet only I understood and a WhatsApp group only I read. It very nearly didn't happen. I was in a pew texting reserves.

That is the problem in one sentence: it was all in my head. One person. If I'm not there, it doesn't happen. That is no way to run anything.

The club has a booking system, naturally. It cost a great deal of money and it can take my £12 for the floodlights in about four seconds. It cannot tell me who wants a game. Not its job, apparently. Nobody's job, apparently, except mine.

So after the christening I spent several evenings looking at apps, and I will save the next poor volunteer the trouble. Most of them are booking and payments for the people who run the business. You want one that's for the people running the play. Something that takes sign-ups and keeps a reserve list ON ITS OWN and moves the next person up when someone drops out, without me. Something that does the pairings so they're fair. Something that works for squash and tennis and the rest (the table tennis section will want in, trust me). And above all something people can join WITHOUT a password, because half my Sunday regulars would sooner give up squash than create a password.

Bev pointed me at the one Jake built for our club, Rallio. It does all of that. It took me fifteen minutes to set up, though I was also making toast.

The first Sunday a reserve moved up on its own I was, as it happens, in church again. I have never been so moved in church.

So. How hard can it be? Very. Unless you stop it all living in one person's head.

P.S. Sue, if you're reading this in Norfolk: we're fine. Absolutely fine. Do visit.