Club registration without the spreadsheet
Every grassroots club has the spreadsheet. It started life three seasons ago as a tidy list of names. It now has nineteen columns, four tabs, two people who understand it and one person who is allowed to touch it. If that person goes on holiday in July, registration stops.
None of this is anyone's fault. Clubs run on volunteers, and a spreadsheet is the tool you already have open at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night. It is worth knowing what it costs you, though.
Where the spreadsheet goes wrong
- It is always out of date. A parent tells the coach at training. The coach tells the secretary on Thursday. The spreadsheet gets updated at the weekend, or it doesn't.
- The medical notes live somewhere else. Medical notes and emergency contacts end up in a second document, a paper form in a folder, or a WhatsApp message from March. When you need them you need them straight away, and that is exactly when nobody can find them.
- Payments are invisible. The spreadsheet says who registered. The bank statement says who paid. Matching one to the other is somebody's whole evening, every month.
- It doesn't survive a handover. When the volunteer who built it steps down, the club is more or less starting from scratch.
The four things a better setup needs
You don't need enterprise software. You need four things, in one place.
- One form that parents fill in themselves, once, so nobody at the club ever has to type it up again.
- Emergency contacts and medical notes attached to the player, where the people running things on a Saturday can see them.
- Payment recorded against the registration, so finding out who has paid takes a glance.
- All of it belonging to the club, on the club's own system, with no copy living on one volunteer's laptop.
If what you have now does all four, keep it. Three out of four and you are doing better than most clubs. If it is the nineteen-column spreadsheet, it is probably time.
Three things to sort before next season
Whatever you end up using, these three are worth doing now.
- Find out where the medical notes and emergency contacts are today. If the answer is a folder, somebody's phone and half a spreadsheet, that is the first job.
- Give registration an owner and a deputy. One person runs it and the other can pick it up when they are away for a fortnight in July. Say both names out loud at a committee meeting, so it is agreed and written down.
- Decide when registration opens and when it closes, and tell parents both dates. Leave it open all year and you will still be adding columns to that spreadsheet in November.
Registration is on every plan of The Full Squad, including the cheapest, because it is the job that gets a club off the spreadsheet in the first place. See what registration looks like in full, or if that sounds useful, put your name down.
Worth a read next: the seven questions to put to any club platform before you commit to one, what the whole thing does, and what it costs, which is per club with no charge per player.