Nineteen meetings and it still can't tell me who wants a game

Nineteen. I have sat through nineteen committee meetings about club software. My wife keeps count. I have spent less time at my own children's weddings.

And after nineteen meetings, the system we chose still cannot tell me who wants a game.

It can do the till. It can do the membership direct debits. It can do the floodlights, mostly. It does court bookings, it does the accounts, it does something with payroll that only the general manager understands. We paid somebody a frankly upsetting sum, years ago, to make it "integrate" with something else, and now nobody dares touch it in case the lights go off on court four.

It cannot tell me who wants a game.

Last month a new member came up to me in the bar. Nice chap. Three months in. He said "I've paid for a year and I've played twice". Twice! And everything in that building was working perfectly. He'd paid, he'd booked, the gate had let him in. Every box on the committee's list ticked. He just couldn't find anyone to play with, and nothing we'd bought had the faintest interest in helping him.

That is the whole problem. Every system we've ever looked at puts the admin first, then the payments, then getting in the door, and the actual PLAYING is somewhere at the bottom with a note saying "see WhatsApp". Levels, finding a game, socials, ladders: all left to goodwill, which in practice means Bev.

People don't stay members because the invoicing is tidy. They stay because they found people to play with. I've been saying this for eleven years. I'm saying it again.

So here's what I said at meeting number nineteen, and I'll say it at twenty. Leave the business system alone. It's taken years to bed in and I'm not living through another changeover. Put something next to it, with the club's name on it, that just looks after the playing.

Jake, who built the app our socials and ladders already use, has started offering a version of it, Rallio, that a club can put its own name, logo and colours on, on its own web address. They call it "white label", which I had to look up. The bit that made the committee unfold their arms was that it plugs into what we've already got: booking a court from inside a ladder challenge, only current members able to sign up, logging in with the login people already have. No replacing anything. Our own level groups. One leaderboard across the whole club (the squash section immediately asked whether we could beat the tennis section on it; we can).

We haven't decided. We're a committee. We don't decide things, we minute them. But meeting nineteen was the first one where we spent forty minutes on getting members playing and only five on the till.

Still can't tell me who wants a game though. Yet.

P.S. If your club has got out the other side of this, please find me by the squash courts. I'm the one in the knee support.