Running registration without the spreadsheet meltdown
Every grassroots club has the spreadsheet. You know the one. It started life three seasons ago as a tidy list of names, and now it has nineteen columns, four tabs, two people who understand it and one person who's 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've already got open at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night. But it's worth being honest about what it costs you.
Where the spreadsheet goes wrong
- It's always out of date. A parent tells the coach at training, the coach tells the secretary on Thursday, and the spreadsheet gets updated at the weekend. Or it doesn't.
- The medical stuff lives 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's 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.
What a sane setup looks like
You don't need enterprise software. You need four things, and you need them in one place.
- One form that parents fill in themselves, once, and that nobody at the club ever has to type up again.
- Emergency contacts and medical notes attached to the player, where the people running things on a Saturday can actually see them.
- Payment recorded against the registration, so who has paid is a glance rather than an investigation.
- All of it belonging to the club, not sitting on one volunteer's laptop.
If what you've got now does all four, honestly, keep it. Three out of four and you're doing better than most clubs. If it's the nineteen-column spreadsheet, it's 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 actually are. Not where they should be, where they are. If the honest answer is a folder, somebody's phone and half a spreadsheet, that's the first job.
- Give registration an owner and a deputy. One person runs it, the other can pick it up when they're away for a fortnight in July. Say both names out loud at a committee meeting, so it's agreed rather than assumed.
- Decide when registration opens and when it closes, and tell parents both dates. Leave it open all year and you'll still be adding columns to that spreadsheet in November.
We're building The Full Squad because we've lived all of the above. Registration is on every plan, including the cheapest one, because it's the thing that gets a club off the spreadsheet in the first place. If that sounds useful, put your name down and you'll see it as it takes shape.
Worth a read next: the seven questions to put to any club platform before you commit to one, what the whole thing actually does, and what it costs, which is per club and never per player.