---
title: "How to Build a Risk Register for Your Australian Sports Club"
url: https://tidyhq.com/blog/risk-register-guide-australian-sports-clubs
date: 2025-02-03
updated: 2026-04-21
author: "Isaak Dury"
categories: ["Governance", "Comparisons"]
excerpt: "A risk register sounds like something a corporation needs. It's actually just a list of things that could go wrong and what you'll do about them. Here's how."
---

# How to Build a Risk Register for Your Australian Sports Club

> A risk register sounds like something a corporation needs. It's actually just a list of things that could go wrong and what you'll do about them. Here's how.

![Hesitate by Bridget Riley, illustrating How to Build a Risk Register for Your Australian Sports Club](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/bp0k7h82/production/708e3aa9153f0e31b5ef25a8f32f701df4b7ddc4-512x487.jpg?w=1200&fm=webp)

## Key takeaways

- A risk register is just a structured list of things that could go wrong at your club and what you plan to do about each one - it doesn't need to be complicated
- The five risk categories for sports clubs: financial, safety, legal/compliance, reputational, and operational - most clubs only think about the first two
- Scoring each risk by likelihood and impact helps your committee focus on the risks that actually matter instead of worrying about everything equally
- Your insurance provider and state sporting body will both look more favourably on a club that can show it has identified and is managing its risks
- Review the register twice a year - once before the season starts and once halfway through

Karen is the president of a suburban netball club with 220 members\. Last Tuesday, council sent her a letter saying the club's lease renewal requires a "current risk management plan" as a condition of the new agreement\. She's been president for three years\. Nobody has ever asked for this before\.

She Googled "risk register template" and found a 50\-page ISO 31000 document written for mining companies\. There was a section on "organisational context" and another on "risk appetite frameworks\." She closed the tab\.

That's not what she needs\. What she needs is something she can build with her committee in a single meeting, print on two pages, and hand to council with a straight face\. That's what this guide is for\.

## What a risk register actually is

Strip the jargon away and a risk register is a list\. Things that could go wrong\. How likely each one is\. How bad it would be if it happened\. What you're doing about it\. Who's responsible\.

That's it\. Five columns and some honest thinking\.

But why should your club bother? A few reasons \- and they're more practical than philosophical\.

**Insurance\.** Most insurers now ask whether your club has a risk management process\. Some offer better premiums to clubs that can demonstrate one\. If you ever make a claim, showing you'd already identified and managed that risk puts you in a far stronger position\.

**Council and venue leases\.** Local governments across Australia are increasingly requiring risk management as a lease condition\. Karen's experience isn't unusual\. It's becoming the norm\.

**Grants\.** State and federal grant applications \- from the Australian Sports Commission's Move2Play grants to state department community funding \- routinely ask about your governance framework\. A risk register is one of the first things they look for\.

**Personal liability\.** Committee members of incorporated associations carry a duty of care\. If something goes wrong and nobody ever considered the possibility, that's a problem for the people whose names are on the incorporation certificate\. A risk register is evidence of due diligence\. It doesn't guarantee anything\. But it shows you thought about it\.

Geoff Wilson covers this well in his chapter on governance \- if you want a deeper read on the broader committee responsibilities, [our review of his book](/blog/leading-grassroots-sports-club-geoff-wilson-book-review) is worth the time\.

## The five risk categories

Most clubs, if they think about risk at all, think about money and injuries\. Those matter\. But they're not the whole picture\. Here are the five categories that cover what actually goes wrong at Australian sports clubs\.

### Financial

Money in, money out, and what happens when the numbers don't match\.

- **Membership fee shortfall\.** You budget for 200 financial members and get 160\. That's a $6,000\-$10,000 hole depending on your fee structure\.
- **Canteen or bar theft\.** Cash handling with informal controls and nobody counting stock properly\. More common than clubs admit\.
- **Loss of major sponsor\.** If 30% of your revenue comes from one sponsor and they don't renew, you've got a crisis\. That's concentration risk\.
- **Grant acquittal failure\.** You received a $15,000 facility grant and didn't acquit it properly\. Now you can't apply for the next round \- and you might have to give it back\.

### Safety

The category with the most serious consequences\. Also the one where good process makes the biggest difference\.

- **Player injury \- especially concussion\.** Concussion protocols are now mandatory in most Australian sports\. If your club doesn't have a documented return\-to\-play process, you're exposed\.
- **Spectator injury at the ground\.** A broken step near the grandstand\. An unfenced retaining wall\. These aren't hypotheticals \- they're insurance claim data\.
- **Extreme heat\.** Does your club know the trigger temperature? Does the canteen know to provide free water? In most of Australia, this isn't a rare event\. It's a regular Saturday\.
- **Allergic reaction at the canteen\.** Homemade cakes at the sausage sizzle with undisclosed nuts\. Preventable with a basic labelling process \- devastating without one\.

### Legal and compliance

The boring category\. Also the one that catches clubs off guard \- consequences arrive months later, by letter, from a government department\.

- **Lapsed Working with Children Checks\.** Your junior coordinator's WWCC expired six months ago and nobody noticed\. That's a compliance breach in every state and territory, and you need a system to track it\.
- **Breached constitution\.** You changed your fee structure without the special resolution your rules require\. Seems minor until someone disputes a decision and the first thing a mediator checks is whether you followed your own rules\.
- **Missed AGM\.** Miss the timeframe and your incorporation status can be affected\. In some states, committee members lose their personal liability protections\.
- **Member data breach\.** A spreadsheet with 400 members' names, dates of birth, medical conditions, and payment details sitting in someone's personal Dropbox\. That's a privacy risk under the Australian Privacy Principles\.

### Reputational

Harder to quantify, harder to recover from than you'd think\. A financial loss can be replenished\. Trust, once broken, takes years\.

- **Social media incident\.** A parent films a referee confrontation and posts it to the local community Facebook group\. By Monday morning, your club's in the comments on 7NEWS Adelaide's page\. This happens every weekend somewhere in Australian sport\.
- **Abuse allegations\.** A parent raises a concern about a coach's behaviour\. Whether it has merit or not, how you respond in the first 48 hours defines whether it becomes a managed incident or a front\-page story\.
- **Public committee disputes\.** Two committee members fall out and take it to Facebook\. Members take sides\. Sponsors ask questions\. It sounds petty\. It's one of the most common reasons clubs lose members\.

### Operational

The unglamorous risks\. The ones that don't make the news but can bring a season to a halt\.

- **Key volunteer resignation\.** Your registrar's been doing the job for nine years and resigns in March\. Nobody else knows how to run a registration\. This is the most overlooked risk in community sport \- we'll come back to it in the FAQs\.
- **Loss of venue access\.** Council decides to redevelop the oval\. Or a flooding event makes the ground unplayable for six weeks\. What's your fallback?
- **Equipment failure\.** Goal posts condemned\. Defibrillator battery dead\. Replacement lead times measured in weeks, not days\.
- **Inadequate insurance cover\.** You added a social dodgeball night without checking whether your policy covers it\. Someone gets injured\. You find out when the claim is rejected\.

## How to score risks

Not all risks are equal\. You need a way to sort them, and the simplest method is a likelihood\-times\-impact matrix\.

**Likelihood scale:**

| Score | Label | What it means | |\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-| | 1 | Rare | Could happen, but probably won't in the next 5 years | | 2 | Unlikely | Might happen once in 3\-5 years | | 3 | Possible | Could happen once a season | | 4 | Likely | Will probably happen this season | | 5 | Almost certain | Happens regularly, expect it |

**Impact scale:**

| Score | Label | What it means | |\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-| | 1 | Negligible | Minor inconvenience, no lasting effect | | 2 | Minor | Small financial loss or brief disruption | | 3 | Moderate | Significant cost, temporary loss of capability | | 4 | Major | Serious injury, large financial loss, regulatory action | | 5 | Catastrophic | Life\-threatening injury, club viability at risk, criminal liability |

Multiply likelihood by impact\. That gives you a score between 1 and 25\.

- **1\-6 \(Low\):** Monitor it\. Check at your regular review\. No immediate action needed\.
- **7\-12 \(Medium\):** Have a plan\. Assign an owner\. Put mitigations in place\.
- **13\-20 \(High\):** Act now\. This needs committee attention this month\.
- **21\-25 \(Critical\):** Stop and fix\. Don't run the next event until this is resolved\.

The point isn't precision \- it's prioritisation\. It stops your committee spending an hour debating whether to padlock the storeroom while ignoring the fact that nobody's checked the WWCC register in two years\.

## Building your register: step by step

Set aside 90 minutes at a committee meeting\. Bring a laptop or a whiteboard\. And bring the groundskeeper \- they know which floodlight pole is rusted at the base and that the hot water system makes a noise it didn't used to make\.

**Step 1: Gather the right people\.** Committee members, your safety officer if you have one, a couple of experienced volunteers who work the canteen or manage teams\. You want people who see day\-to\-day operations, not just the people who attend monthly meetings\.

**Step 2: Brainstorm risks using the five categories\.** Go through each category one at a time\. Write everything down\. Don't filter yet \- you'll trim later\. Most clubs come up with 15\-25 risks in a first pass\.

**Step 3: Score each risk\.** Use the matrix above\. Don't agonise over the difference between a 3 and a 4\. If there's genuine disagreement, go with the higher score\. You're building a living document, not carving stone\.

**Step 4: Assign an owner\.** Every risk needs a name next to it\. Not "the committee\." A person\. If nobody's willing to own a risk, that tells you something important about how seriously the club takes it\.

**Step 5: Write the mitigation\.** Two parts here: what you're already doing \(existing controls\) and what you should be doing \(additional actions\)\. "We already have an incident report form" is an existing control\. "We need to train all coaches on the concussion protocol by Round 3" is an additional action\.

**Step 6: Set a review date\.** Pre\-season and mid\-season\. Mark it in the committee calendar\. If the register doesn't get reviewed, it becomes a piece of paper in a drawer \- which is worse than not having one, because it creates a false sense of security\.

## Example risk register entries

Here's what a few entries might look like for a typical suburban club:

| Risk | Category | Likelihood | Impact | Score | Owner | Mitigation | |\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-|\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-| | Heatwave cancels junior round; no shade for waiting families | Safety | 4 | 3 | 12 | Junior Coordinator | Heat policy adopted from state body; portable shade purchased; free water at canteen on days above 32°C | | Canteen volunteer doesn't have food handling certificate | Legal/Compliance | 3 | 3 | 9 | Canteen Manager | Maintain register of certified volunteers; no uncertified volunteers to handle food unsupervised; fund two certifications per season | | Single registrar holds all system knowledge | Operational | 4 | 4 | 16 | President | Document all registration processes; train a second person; store login credentials in club password manager | | Sponsor responsible for 40% of revenue doesn't renew | Financial | 2 | 5 | 10 | Treasurer | Diversify sponsorship across at least 4 sponsors; maintain sponsor relationship calendar; begin renewal conversations 3 months before expiry | | Parent films altercation and posts to social media | Reputational | 3 | 4 | 12 | President | Adopt club social media policy; train team managers on incident de\-escalation; have a prepared media response template | | Junior coach's Working with Children Check expires mid\-season | Legal/Compliance | 3 | 5 | 15 | Secretary | Track all WWCC expiry dates centrally; send reminders 60 days before expiry; stand down any coach whose check lapses until renewed |

That's six entries\. A typical club register might have 15\-20\. It doesn't need to be longer than two pages\.

## How TidyHQ helps

You can build a risk register in a spreadsheet\. But tracking the compliance items underneath it \- WWCCs, first aid certifications, food handling certificates, coaching accreditations \- is where spreadsheets fall apart\. Someone has to manually check expiry dates and chase renewals\. When that someone is also running registrations and organising the presentation night, things slip\.

TidyHQ's [member profiles](/products/memberships) store compliance credentials against individual contacts, with expiry dates that trigger automated reminders before anything lapses\. Your risk register says "track all WWCC expiry dates centrally" \- that's not an aspiration, it's a feature\. You can also store the register itself in TidyHQ's document storage, attached to your committee workspace, so it doesn't live on one person's laptop\.

## FAQs

### How often should we update our risk register?

Twice a year minimum\. Once before the season starts \- that's when you catch things that changed over the off\-season, like new activities, new facilities, or committee turnover\. And once halfway through, when you've had a few months of reality to compare against your assumptions\. If something significant happens between reviews, update it then\. Don't wait\.

### Does our club need a risk register if we have insurance?

Yes\. They do different jobs\. Insurance covers you financially after something has already happened\. A risk register helps prevent it happening \- or reduces the impact when it does\. Most public liability policies have a clause expecting you to take "reasonable steps" to manage foreseeable risks\. A risk register is the evidence that you have\.

### What's the biggest risk most clubs overlook?

Key person dependency\. Every club has someone \- usually the secretary or registrar \- who knows how everything works\. The bank account process, the state body's portal, the membership database, where the spare keys are\. When that person leaves \(and they always eventually leave\), the club loses months of capability\. Almost nobody puts it in a register because it feels rude to plan for someone leaving\. It's not rude\. It's responsible\. Document what they know\. Train a second person\.

You don't need a risk management degree\. You need a spreadsheet, ninety minutes at a committee meeting, and honest answers\. That's a risk register\.

## References

- [Australian Sports Commission](https://www.ausport.gov.au/) \- Risk management resources and governance guidance for sporting organisations
- [Play by the Rules](https://www.playbytherules.net.au/) \- Risk assessment tools and safety resources for community sport
- [Sport Integrity Australia](https://www.sportintegrity.gov.au/) \- Integrity risk frameworks for Australian sport
- [Geoff Wilson](https://geoffwnjwilson.com/) \- Practical governance and risk management for grassroots sports clubs
- [Volunteering Australia](https://www.volunteeringaustralia.org/) \- Risk and safety guidance for volunteer\-run organisations

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Header image: *Hesitate* by Bridget Riley, via [WikiArt](https://www.wikiart.org/en/bridget-riley)

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