Why New Zealand's Sports Volunteers Are Walking Away

I had a conversation with a football club president last winter that stuck with me. She'd been running a suburban club in Auckland for six years - managing registrations, coordinating grounds, sorting Friday night canteen rosters. She told me she was done. Not angry. Not dramatic. Just tired.

"I've been asking for help for three years," she said. "People say yes in February and disappear by May."

She's not unusual. If you run a community sports club in New Zealand, you've probably had that conversation yourself. Or you've been the person disappearing by May.

The numbers nobody wants to talk about

New Zealand has roughly 7,500 community sport clubs. Between them, they deliver something in the order of $1 billion in unpaid volunteer value every single year. The average club relies on volunteer contributions worth around $125,000 annually - labour that simply does not get replaced if those people walk away.

And they are walking away. The National Sport Club Survey found that the average number of volunteers per club dropped from 31 to 18 between 2019 and 2024. That is a 45% decline. Not a dip. A structural collapse.

Across the broader community sector, Volunteering New Zealand reports that formal volunteer numbers fell from 1.23 million in 2013 to just over 1 million by 2018 - and anecdotal evidence from the sector suggests the pandemic accelerated that decline significantly. Culture, sport, and recreation organisations make up 44.8% of all community organisations in the country. When volunteer numbers fall, sport feels it first and hardest.

A framework that actually helps

Steven Dillon, who has spent years working in New Zealand football development - including five years at New Zealand Football - wrote a piece on Medium recently that crystallised something I'd been circling around for a while. He described four pillars of club management: Sport, Business, Community, and People.

Most clubs pour their energy into the first three. They worry about competition structures, finances, and community engagement. Fair enough - those things matter. But Dillon's argument is that the People pillar is the most immediate. Get the people management wrong and nothing else holds together. The best competition draw in the country means nothing if there is nobody left to set up the nets on Saturday morning.

He is right. And the data backs him up.

Why they actually leave

There is a comfortable myth that volunteers leave because they get busy. Life happens. Kids change sports. People move house. And sure, some of that is true. But it is not the main story.

When you talk to people who have stepped back from club roles - actually sit down and ask them - the reasons are more uncomfortable:

Nobody told them what the job really involved. They put their hand up to "help with events" and found themselves doing procurement, venue liaison, council compliance paperwork, and food safety documentation. The gap between what was advertised and what was expected broke the trust before the relationship even got started.

The workload crept up without acknowledgement. Compliance requirements for community sport organisations have increased significantly over the past decade. Health and safety obligations. Safeguarding policies. Financial reporting standards. Privacy law. Every one of those requirements landed on the desk of someone who is not getting paid. Most clubs never explicitly acknowledged that the ask had grown.

Recognition was absent or performative. A Facebook post at the end of the season saying "thanks to our amazing volunteers" does not cut it. People want to be seen - specifically, personally, and during the season when the work is happening. Not in retrospect.

There was no pathway out of the role. They signed up for one season and found themselves still doing it four years later because nobody else volunteered and the guilt of leaving would kill them. The lack of succession planning traps people.

Sport New Zealand's volunteer resources and the Aktive volunteer management toolkit both emphasise the same themes: understanding motivations, providing support, creating clear expectations. The research has been available for years. The adoption has been patchy at best.

What retention actually looks like in practice

Dillon's piece emphasises three things that I want to expand on, because they sound simple but are genuinely hard to execute consistently.

Clarify the role before someone starts. Write it down. How many hours per week, realistically? What specific tasks? Who do they report to? What support do they get? If you cannot describe the role clearly, you are not ready to recruit for it. This is where clubs lose people before they have even begun - the gap between expectation and reality is a betrayal, even if it is an accidental one.

Make the first month count. The drop-off pattern in volunteer retention mirrors what we see in member retention: if someone does not feel connected and competent in the first four weeks, you have probably lost them. Assign a buddy. Check in after the first shift. Ask what went well and what was confusing. This costs nothing except attention.

Build recognition into the operating rhythm, not the calendar. Do not wait for National Volunteer Week - which falls in June, for those keeping track - to say thank you. A two-line text after a Saturday morning shift. A name mentioned at the committee meeting. A coffee card left on the canteen counter. Small, frequent, specific. That is what people remember.

And here is the one that does not get talked about enough: let people leave without guilt. If someone has done two years as treasurer and wants to step back, thank them, help them hand over properly, and let them go. The clubs that burn through volunteers fastest are the ones that make leaving feel like a moral failure. Healthy clubs have turnover. They plan for it.

The registration deadline nobody is ready for

There is a practical urgency here that goes beyond culture. Under New Zealand's Incorporated Societies Act 2022, volunteer-run sports clubs have until April 2026 to re-register under the new legislation or face involuntary dissolution. That means committees - the same committees that are already understaffed and overstretched - need to review their constitutions, update their governance structures, and file paperwork they may never have dealt with before.

If your volunteer base has already halved, that compliance work falls on fewer shoulders. The timing could not be worse. Sport New Zealand's club management resources have guidance on this, but guidance only helps if there is someone available to read it and act on it.

A different kind of infrastructure

Dillon described community sport clubs as requiring year-round investment in people, not seasonal awareness efforts. I would go further. Volunteer management is not a nice-to-have programme that sits alongside the real work of running a club. It is the infrastructure. Without it, the fields do not get marked, the registrations do not get processed, and the kids do not play.

89.2% of non-profit organisations in New Zealand operate with zero paid staff. The sector runs on goodwill. That is not a feel-good story about community spirit. That is a structural vulnerability, and it is one that 7,500 sports clubs need to take seriously - before there is nobody left to worry about it.

If you are running a club and reading this, the work starts with one honest question: do you know why your last volunteer left?

If you do not, that is where to begin.

References

• Sport New Zealand. Volunteers - Sport NZ. Resources and research on volunteer management in NZ community sport.
• Volunteering New Zealand. Volunteering Statistics. National data on volunteer participation, economic value and trends.
• Sport New Zealand. Volunteer Management Toolkit. Templates and guides for recruiting and managing volunteers.
• Sport New Zealand. Club Management. Sector guidance on club governance and operations.
• Dillon, S. "Volunteer Management in Club Sport". Medium, 2025.
• New Zealand Government. Incorporated Societies Act 2022. Re-registration requirements for sport clubs.
• ISCA & Transparency International Germany. Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport (PDF). Copenhagen, 2013.