The 14-Hour Volunteer

Fourteen hours a week.

That's the number that came out of the research we presented at a community sport conference. The average committee member of a grassroots sports club spends 14 hours per week on club administration. During pre-season, that number climbs above 40.

Fourteen hours a week. On top of a full-time job. On top of a family. On top of actually participating in the sport.

That's not volunteering. That's a second job. An unpaid one.

What those hours look like

I've sat with enough club secretaries and treasurers to know where the time goes. It's not glamorous. It's not even interesting. It's this:

Chasing payments — 3 hours/week. Checking who's paid, who hasn't. Sending reminders. Following up the reminders. Having awkward conversations. Updating the spreadsheet. Reconciling against the bank statement.

Emails and messages — 2.5 hours/week. Answering questions from members. Forwarding information from the state body. Coordinating with the council. Replying to prospective members. Responding in the three different group chats.

Spreadsheets — 2 hours/week. Updating the membership register. Tracking attendance. Recording financial transactions. Maintaining the volunteer roster. Some clubs run their entire operation from a single Excel file with 14 tabs.

Meetings — 2 hours/week. Committee meetings that run too long because nobody prepared an agenda, so everything gets discussed from scratch every time.

Compliance and paperwork — 1.5 hours/week. Insurance documentation. Annual returns. Working with children checks. Coach accreditations. State body requirements.

General problem-solving — 3 hours/week. The equipment shed lock is broken. A parent complained about a coach. The canteen fridge stopped working. Two teams want the same training slot. A sponsor's banner blew down. Someone's child was hurt at training and the first aid kit was empty.

These are real examples from real clubs. None of them are the reason anyone volunteered.

Why nobody complains

There's a culture in community sport — especially in Australia — of just getting on with it. You don't complain about volunteer hours because everyone else is busy too. You don't ask for help because it feels like admitting you can't cope. You don't step back because you know nobody will step forward.

So people absorb it. They answer the emails at 10pm. They update the spreadsheet during their lunch break. They take phone calls from members on Sunday morning. They do this for a season. Then two. Then five. Then they burn out and leave, and a fresh volunteer starts the cycle again.

The average tenure of a committee member in community sport in Australia is 2.1 years. And it's declining. A decade ago it was closer to 3.5 years.

That's not people losing interest. That's people running out of capacity.

The turnover cost

When a committee member leaves, the cost is not just the loss of a warm body. It's the loss of everything they knew.

The new treasurer doesn't know the club's financial history. They don't know which grants are in progress, which sponsors have outstanding obligations, which members have payment plans. They don't know the bank's process for changing signatories, or that the BAS is due quarterly, or that the gaming machine revenue needs to be reported separately.

They spend the first three months figuring out what they're supposed to be doing. By month six, they're up to speed. By month eighteen, they're burning out. By month twenty-four, they're looking for the exit.

Multiply this across a five-person committee where three positions turn over every year. The club is perpetually relearning how to operate. It's organisational Alzheimer's — the knowledge comes in, then walks out the door.

The real numbers

50% of committee positions in grassroots sports clubs turn over every 12 months. That's not a statistic about volunteers being flaky. That's a statistic about a system that chews people up.

The clubs that retain committee members for 4+ years have two things in common: the workload is manageable (under 5 hours/week per person) and the work is meaningful (decisions and relationships, not data entry and chasing).

The clubs that burn through committee members every year have the inverse: the workload is unsustainable and the work is mostly administrative grind.

The systemic problem

Here is the uncomfortable truth that the community sport sector does not want to hear: we treat volunteer time as free and infinite. It is neither.

When a state sporting body asks clubs to submit a compliance report using a PDF form that has to be emailed back, they are spending volunteer time. When they require separate registrations on three different platforms, they are spending volunteer time. When they change the requirements mid-season with two weeks' notice, they are spending volunteer time.

When a club decides to track everything in spreadsheets because "it's what we've always done," that's a choice to spend 2+ hours a week on manual data entry. When they manage communications through personal email because "it works for now," that's a choice to make the next committee start from scratch.

Every time someone says "the volunteers will sort it out," they're writing a cheque against someone's evenings and weekends.

What needs to change

I am not going to pretend this is a simple problem. It's not. The funding models, governance structures, and cultural norms of community sport all contribute. But at the club level, there are things that can be done right now.

Audit the hours. Actually track how many hours each committee member spends per week, and on what. Most committees have never done this. The result is usually a shock — and a catalyst for change.

Automate the grind. Payment reminders, membership renewals, receipt generation, event RSVPs — these are tasks that software handles in seconds and humans handle in hours. Every hour freed from admin is an hour available for the work that actually requires a human: making decisions, building relationships, supporting members.

Distribute the load. If one person is doing 14 hours and another is doing 2, the problem isn't the person doing 14. It's the distribution. Make the workload visible. Assign tasks explicitly. Check in monthly.

Set boundaries. It is acceptable for the club secretary to not answer emails after 9pm. It is acceptable for the treasurer to batch payment queries to twice a week. It is acceptable for committee members to say "I can give 5 hours a week and no more." In fact, it's more than acceptable. It's necessary.

Make the next person's job easier. Document everything. Use systems that survive committee changes. Write handover notes. The best thing any committee member can do for their club is leave it in a state where their replacement can hit the ground running.

The point

Fourteen hours a week. For free. On top of everything else.

The people doing this work are holding community sport together. They're not getting awards for it. Most of their members don't know how much they do. When they step down, people say "thanks for your contribution" and move on.

We can do better. Not with gratitude — volunteers don't want gratitude. They want the work to be manageable so they can keep doing it without sacrificing their health, their relationships, and their weekends.

That's not a big ask. It just requires us to stop pretending that volunteer time is free.