What We're Hearing: 'Everyone's Just Doing Their Best'

# What We're Hearing: 'Everyone's Just Doing Their Best'

We've spent the last few years in deep conversations with peak sporting bodies, local governments, and national federations across Australia.

Hockey Queensland. PFL. City of Salisbury. Baseball Victoria. SANFL. Dozens more.

They're managing different sports. Different regions. Different scales—some 30 clubs, some 300.

But they all arrive at the same insight eventually.

"The more I'm involved with community sporting clubs, the more I realise that everyone's just doing their best."

That's James Catterall from the City of Salisbury. But he could have been Mark Sanders from PFL. Or the team at Hockey Queensland. Or any of the dozens of administrators we've spoken with who've moved from frustration to understanding.

The Shift in Perspective

Early in their careers, most peak body administrators think the problem is volunteer capability.

Clubs don't comply because they're disorganised. They miss deadlines because they're not paying attention. They don't engage because they don't care enough.

Then they spend a few years in the role. They see the volunteer churn. They watch good-hearted people burn out. They realise the secretary who missed the licensing deadline was also working full-time, coaching junior teams, and dealing with a family emergency.

And the perspective shifts.

"There are no less good-hearted people in the world," as one administrator put it. "Volunteers just try to do the best they can with whatever tools they can find in the time that they have."

The problem isn't the people. It's the system.

What 'Doing Their Best' Actually Means

Let's talk about what volunteering at a community sports club actually looks like in 2026.

Average time commitment: 14 hours per week (up from 10 hours a decade ago) Average tenure: 2.1 years (down from 3.4 years) Percentage serving on multiple committees: Increasing year-over-year

These aren't casual volunteers showing up for working bees. These are people running complex organisations with compliance requirements, financial reporting, facility management, membership systems, event coordination, and stakeholder relationships.

They're doing it in their spare time. They're doing it with tools that weren't designed for the job. They're doing it while local governments, peak bodies, insurance providers, and regulators all demand more reporting, more compliance, more documentation.

And they're churning out after two years because it's unsustainable.

When we say "everyone's just doing their best," we're not making excuses. We're acknowledging reality.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here are three examples from recent conversations that illustrate what "doing their best" actually means:

Example 1: The PFL Task Avalanche

PFL sent 100+ tasks to their 128 clubs last season. Each one had a deadline. Each one was marked important.

Clubs didn't ignore them because they were lazy. They couldn't process them because the cognitive load was overwhelming.

"Some of the people don't realise tasks default to theirs," Mark explained. "They just said they want to look for their own role, but can't find a task."

The volunteer was trying. They logged in. They looked. They got overwhelmed by the volume and gave up.

The solution wasn't to send more reminders. It was to redesign the system so volunteers could actually process what mattered most.

Example 2: The City of Salisbury Spreadsheet

James manages 72 clubs with an Excel spreadsheet, Salesforce, and Outlook.

When a new committee takes over at a club, they have no visibility into historical decisions. No context for past conversations. No understanding of priorities.

"It is very, very difficult for us to record all the conversations and everything that's happened historically, happening now, and what our priorities are for each club in the future."

The volunteers aren't incompetent. The system doesn't support continuity. So every committee change starts from zero.

Example 3: Hockey Queensland's Communication Chaos

Hockey Queensland has similar challenges to PFL—lots of clubs, multiple departments, staff churn.

"There's a few people that have been there for a long time and just want to keep doing it the same way. There's new staff that are coming on. There's a bit of churn."

The volunteers receive communications from multiple people in the organisation. Different formats. Different channels. Different expectations.

They're not ignoring messages. They're drowning in them.

The Empowerment Mindset

Once you accept that everyone's doing their best, your entire approach changes.

You stop asking: "How do we get clubs to comply?"

You start asking: "How do we make compliance the path of least resistance?"

James at City of Salisbury put it perfectly:

"Forcing them to do something just doesn't end in a good result. I'd rather help build their capability and tell them why it's important and let them make the decision to do something themselves, because then it's sustainable."

That's the empowerment mindset: assume good intent, remove friction, enable success.

What 'Doing Their Best' Doesn't Mean

Let's be clear: this isn't about lowering standards.

Clubs still need to:

• Meet compliance requirements
• Submit financial reporting on time
• Maintain safeguarding standards
• Fulfil lease obligations
• Engage with peak body initiatives

Those expectations don't change.

What changes is how we enable clubs to meet them.

If a volunteer is "doing their best" and still failing to comply, the question isn't: How do we enforce harder?

It's: What barrier are we failing to remove?

The Systems That Work With Volunteers, Not Against Them

The peak bodies leading this shift are redesigning systems around how volunteers actually work:

1. Clarity over volume

• Distinguish "must do" from "should know"
• Reduce cognitive load by filtering noise
• Make the critical things impossible to miss

2. Role-based intelligence

• Route communications to the right person automatically
• Don't assume the president should see everything
• Build in fallback mechanisms when roles aren't perfectly set up

3. Context preservation

• Don't let knowledge walk out the door with each volunteer transition
• Build systems that hold institutional memory
• Enable new committees to hit the ground running

4. Proactive support

• Identify struggling clubs before they fail
• Reach out based on engagement patterns, not just deadline violations
• Treat clubs as partners, not subordinates

The Quote That Reframes Everything

"At the end of the day, their service to community is an extension of what we're trying to do in local government. So why not treat them like partners?"

That's James again, describing the shift in City of Salisbury's club development framework.

Partners, not subordinates. Extensions, not vendors. People doing their best with inadequate tools, not incompetent volunteers who need more enforcement.

When you see volunteers through that lens, the solutions become obvious.

Stop building systems that assume 40-hour-a-week administrators. Start building systems that respect 14-hour-a-week volunteers.

Stop sending 100 tasks and wondering why compliance is low. Start sending 30 clear, prioritised tasks with the right context to the right people.

Stop measuring success as "Did they comply?" Start measuring success as "Did we enable them to succeed?"

What This Means for the Sector

The organisations we're working with are all arriving at the same conclusion independently:

The volunteer capacity crisis isn't a people problem. It's a systems problem.

And systems can be redesigned.

The peak bodies that embrace that reality—that build tools for volunteers as they actually are, not as we wish they were—will retain administrators longer, achieve higher compliance, build stronger clubs, and deliver better community outcomes.

The ones that keep blaming volunteers for not keeping up? They'll keep churning through good-hearted people who eventually give up.

Everyone's just doing their best.

The question is: are your systems helping them succeed or guaranteeing they'll fail?

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Key Takeaway: The volunteer capacity crisis isn't about lazy committees or disengaged clubs. It's about good-hearted people drowning in systems that weren't designed for them. Redesign for reality, not aspiration, and compliance follows.