How to run a tennis club without a spreadsheet

The spreadsheet is not the problem

The spreadsheet is not the problem. That is worth saying first, because most advice about club admin begins by blaming the tool, and the tool is usually fine. A Google Sheet is portable, free and forgiving of formulas that are just-about-right. Clubs do not, in fact, run on a spreadsheet. They run on the one person who keeps it.

There is a tab in a Google Sheet, somewhere in Ireland right now, that is doing the work of a club. The membership list is on the first sheet, the ladder on the second, and a pivot table on the third that nobody understands but nobody dares delete, because the formula in column F refers back to it. It is owned by a Gmail account belonging to a former secretary who stepped down in 2023. One person has edit access, because last year somebody overwrote the ladder by mistake and it took three evenings to rebuild from a screenshot.

That sheet works. It works by collapsing the club into one person's working memory — and that is the cost nobody put a price on.

What does the sheet actually cost?

A spreadsheet and a shared club system look like they do the same job. They do not. The sheet does the job by storing it in one person; a system does it by storing it where the committee can see it. Set them side by side and the difference stops being abstract.

The left column is not a worse club. It is the same club, kept in one head. A sheet has no concept of roles, no audit trail, no idea a payment has cleared, no shared place for the next committee to find what the last one knew. Everything it does well, it does at that price.

How do you know it is a problem for your club?

One question sorts every club in Ireland. If your secretary went on holiday for two weeks with no Wi-Fi, would the club notice? If the ladder still updates, the subs reminder still goes out and a member can still find when the next social is, then you are running on a system, even if it happens to be built in a spreadsheet. If the answer is yes — and for most volunteer clubs it is yes — then the club is not in the sheet. It is in the person who opens the sheet. That is worth knowing before the next AGM, because it is fixable, and it is cheaper to fix than it looks.

How do you move a club off a spreadsheet without losing anything?

Do it in the order that removes the most single-person dependency first, and leave the historical record alone until last.

1. Move the membership roll first. It is the spine everything else hangs off, and the thing a new committee most needs to inherit cleanly. Import the current list, set the roles, and give the committee shared access.
2. Move the live competition next. A ladder or box league that updates in one shared place, with a history of who played whom, ends the screenshot-and-rebuild cycle immediately.
3. Move announcements off the scroll. Post club news where every member can find it on Tuesday evening, not where it disappears between two unrelated threads at 9:17pm on Monday.
4. Point the public page at the real data. Once the roll, the competition and the news are in one place, the club's public page can show the current club instead of the 2024 one.
5. Leave the old sheet read-only as an archive. Do not delete it. Keep it as the historical record until you are sure nothing was lost, then stop opening it.

Two things this list deliberately does not include, because laceup does not do them yet: collecting the subs, and booking the courts. The record shows the treasurer who has paid; it does not take the payment, and it does not run the court diary. Be wary of anyone who promises both today.

And to be plain: none of this removes the work. The work of running a club is the work of running a club, and no software makes a Saturday social fill itself. What it removes is the requirement that one person hold it all together. The committee that used to hand over by panic can hand over by login — the next committee inherits a login, not your Gmail.