Nobody Puts Their Hand Up for the Admin

A note for anyone who runs a sport — a state association, a national body, a league office.

You’ll get the compliance done — you always do. But that was never the thing that decides your next decade. What decides it is whether the people who actually run your clubs are still there in five years, or whether they’ve quietly burnt out and gone. So before we talk about you, sit for a minute where they sit.

Sunday night, a bit past nine. The dishwasher’s going, the kids are down, and the secretary of a suburban netball club is on the couch with her laptop and a cup of tea she let go cold an hour ago. She’s working out who hasn’t paid.

She knows all of them. That’s the thing. Number seven’s mum lost her hours back in autumn. The Kavanaghs are in Bali, they always are this time of year. There’s one family she’ll have to message twice and still feel like a bailiff about it afterwards. Nobody tells you this when you put your hand up at the AGM — that “club secretary” mostly means asking people you like for money, on the one evening of the week that was meant to be yours.

For a long time, that was the job. The chasing, the spreadsheet with the colour-coded rows, the reminder texts, the reconciling of who paid what against a bank statement at midnight. Not the reason anyone volunteered. Just the toll you paid to be near the thing you actually cared about.

The interesting part is that a computer can now do nearly all of it.

Software is good at anything you can turn into a rule, and a startling amount of club administration is rules. Fees fall due on a date. A payment either matches an invoice or it doesn’t. Reminders can go out on a schedule far more reliably than a tired human remembers to send them. The grant acquittal, the registration numbers, the quarterly report to the association — all of it assembles from records that already exist. This isn’t the future. You can hand it over today, and plenty of clubs already have.

Which sounds like unambiguously good news, and mostly it is. But I want to sit with the part that isn’t, because it’s the part that matters most and the part everyone skips.

The chase was also the contact.

The reason she rang number seven’s mum in autumn was the unpaid fee. That was the excuse. And in the course of a slightly awkward conversation about a hundred and twenty dollars, she found out about the lost hours, and she quietly sorted a payment plan, and that family is still at the club. When the reminder sends itself, that phone call doesn’t happen. Nobody finds out. The family just drifts, the way families do, and the following season there’s one less name on the list and no one can say exactly why.

So here’s the thing the technology won’t tell you: taking away the chore takes away the reason. All those small, dull admin tasks were also the threads that kept people in touch with each other, whether they meant to be or not. Automate them thoughtlessly and a club can get more efficient and lonelier at the same time. The work now — the actual work — is to rebuild that contact on purpose, having lost the accident of it.

Which is really a question about what you do with the time you get back. And the honest answer is that most people, handed three free hours, will fill them with more admin, because that’s the muscle they’ve built. Don’t. The scarce thing was never the admin. Reports write themselves now, and the hours of chasing and reconciling that used to eat a volunteer’s week — that’s the part that just got cheap. Money was never easy for a community club and still isn’t. What’s rare is a person who knows every family by name, a committee that trusts one another, and a volunteer who’s still standing there next season instead of burnt to a crisp and gone for good. None of that scales and none of it automates. Spend the reclaimed Sunday on the phone call, not the inbox.

The same shift changes what “good at the job” even means. It used to mean clearing the queue — every email answered, every form processed, nothing left red on the spreadsheet. That skill is now worth very little, because the queue clears itself. What’s worth something is knowing which problem is the real one. Registrations are down fifteen percent on last winter. Is that your fees? Your coaching? Or did the council resurface the car park in April and half your families genuinely can’t work out where to park on a Saturday? The dashboard will show you the number. It won’t tell you which number is the one keeping people away. That reading of your own little world is the job now, and no software has it.

And then there’s the last ten percent, which is where a club is either loved or merely tolerated. Software will get you a competent season more or less automatically. It will not write the welcome message that sounds like a human wrote it. It won’t cut the orange quarters for halftime, or make sure finals day runs to the minute because somebody cared about the run sheet, or notice the new family standing at the edge of the clubroom not knowing anyone and go over. The affection people feel for a club lives entirely in that last ten percent — the bit you chose to do properly when nothing forced you to. That’s where the free hours should go.

Football has a stat called xG — expected goals. It scores every chance by how likely it was to go in, adds them up, and lets you separate two things: how many good chances a team made, and how well it actually finished them. A club runs on the same split. Getting people to your gate — findable, a sign-up that works on a phone, no broken payment link — is the chances, and software is good at that. The finishing is whether a “maybe” becomes a member who comes back, and that stays human: the tone of the reply, whether the coach shakes the kid’s hand at first training. Plenty of interest and no one who stays isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a warmth problem, and there’s no download for warmth.

I should be honest about where this line of thinking comes from, because it matters. Advice like this usually gets written by people in technology, for whom the goal is always more — bigger, faster, winner-takes-all. A grassroots club is not a startup and shouldn’t pretend to be one. Small is not a phase you pass through on the way to proper size. A club of a hundred and eighty people who all know each other is doing something a club of five thousand simply can’t, and the ambition worth having isn’t to grow out of that. It’s to become the most alive version of exactly what you already are.

If you run a state or national body, this is your fight more than anyone’s. Every one of those secretaries on the couch is a single point of failure for a club in your code — and when she burns out, you don’t lose a volunteer, you lose a club. Your version of her Sunday chase is demanding reports from clubs who are already underwater. Automate that badly and you’ll just extract more from them, faster, and then wonder why affiliations keep slipping away. Automate it well — let the data flow up without a volunteer re-keying it at midnight — and you hand her back the only work that keeps a club alive: the people. What you can’t automate is whether the secretary two hundred kilometres away trusts you enough to pick up the phone. That trust is the whole game, and it always was. The bodies that do well in the next decade won’t be the ones with the best reporting. They’ll be the ones whose clubs still have someone willing to run them.

It’s getting on for ten now. The reminders have gone out on their own. The payments that were going to land have landed. The spreadsheet is, for once, not her problem. She closes the laptop.

The tea’s still cold. But the evening’s hers, and there’s one call she’s been meaning to make — not about money, for once. Just to see how they’re getting on.

That was always the job. We just never had time to get to it.