When the secretary steps down

It happens at the AGM, usually. The secretary who has done the job for nine years says they are stepping down at the end of the season. Everyone claps, and someone says the club could never have run without them. That is true, and a month later the club finds out exactly how true.

The league writes to an email address nobody else can open. The registration spreadsheet is on a laptop in a house the club no longer has a reason to visit. The website login is in a notebook somewhere, and the WhatsApp groups have one admin.

Then there are the things that were never written down: which pitch floods, which referee to ring, what was agreed with the sponsor in 2021. They walk out of the door inside a person.

What leaves with them

It helps to be specific, because "the club's records" sounds like one thing and it is five.

• The members. Every player, every parent, every emergency contact and medical note. If this is a spreadsheet on a personal laptop, the club is borrowing it.
• The money. Who has paid, who owes, what the subs were and what they covered. It is often a second spreadsheet, on a second laptop.
• The accounts and logins. The email the FA uses, the website, the social media and the pitch booking portal. Each one is registered to a person.
• The history. Results, tables, photos, honours, who played for the club and when. Usually it is nowhere, or on a Facebook page.
• The knowledge. The things that were never written down because there was never time.

A good secretary hands most of this over on purpose. Even so, they are handing over a pile, and the new person starts by working out what they have been given.

Make the club the owner

A better handover helps. What helps more is having less to hand over, because the club owns its own things all along.

• One place for the members' records that belongs to the club, where secretary is a role someone holds. When they step down the role moves and the records stay.
• Club-owned accounts for everything official. The email the league writes to is the club's, and two people can open it.
• Access that moves with the job. The new secretary gets what the old one had, on the day, and the old one's access ends the same day. That is tidiness, and outgoing volunteers are usually relieved by it.
• An export the club can run. Whatever you use, the club should be able to take a full copy of everything it is obliged to keep, without asking permission or paying for the privilege.

A handover that fits on one page

Whatever state the club is in now, write the handover page this month, while the current secretary is still here to write it. Put down where every record lives, every account the club has and who can open it. Add the five things a new secretary would need to know that are written nowhere else. It will be the most useful document the club owns, and it takes an evening.

Then do the boring job and move the club's records into something the club owns, before the next AGM. The people who volunteer to run clubs deserve to hand over a working club. A box of files and a list of passwords is a long way short of that.