What Grassroots Clubs Actually Do All Week

The view from outside a sports club is finals, training, kids in dirty jerseys, a sausage sizzle. The view from inside is mostly none of that. It's email. Spreadsheets. Council compliance forms. A WhatsApp group of seventeen parents and the one parent who replies "noted" to everything. The actual football is the smallest part of the week. People who haven't sat on a committee don't really believe that until they do.

In late 2024 Michael Connelly, who runs CPR Group, wrote a piece on LinkedIn arguing that the volunteer-only model of grassroots sport in Australia has hit its ceiling. The article is worth reading. The comment thread underneath it is more so. It's one of the rare LinkedIn threads where operators, council planners, peak-body CEOs and people on actual committees turn up and say roughly the same thing in slightly different language.

The line that stuck with me came from Jason Buchanan, who builds scheduling software for Australian sports leagues. Club committees, he said, are "essentially running complex small businesses, often without the specialised tools or longevity to make it sustainable." If you've ever volunteered for one, you nod at that sentence and feel a bit tired.

The week nobody sees

A normal week for a club secretary in season goes something like this. Saturday is canteen and game day. Sunday morning the secretary chases the six members who haven't paid their rego. Sunday evening it's the parent group chat, which has decided the uniforms aren't quite right and would like to discuss it for ninety minutes. Monday was meant to be a day off. It isn't. Monday evening the treasurer tries to reconcile Stripe payments against the bank statement using a spreadsheet a previous treasurer built in 2021, which nobody else fully understands. Tuesday is committee. Wednesday is email: council about field bookings, insurer about a damaged scoreboard, state body about an affiliation report nobody on the current committee can actually log in to retrieve. Thursday is team sheets. Friday is the canteen roster, which Jenny said she'd do but hasn't, so somebody else does it.

That's a normal week. The football is barely in it.

This isn't a story about a disorganised club. It's a story about what happens when an organisation that started life as twelve mates running a Saturday team turns into something with 180 members, three insurance policies, four bank signatories, a payment processor, a council facility licence, an affiliation with a state sporting body, two grant acquittals due in October, and a Facebook group that needs moderating. At some point along the way the club stopped being a club. It quietly became a small business with no employees, and most of the committee hasn't noticed.

The pipeline that broke

The traditional model relied on a rolling supply of parents and members who'd pick up admin work, year after year, in rotation, forever. John Bevitt, who runs Honeycomb Strategy, summed up what's gone wrong with that assumption in the same thread. "The structure assumes a steady supply of people willing to carry significant unpaid load year after year. That supply has dried up, and goodwill alone won't fix a model that generates this much duplication."

Carina Whittington, a community infrastructure planner, pushed the diagnosis harder. In any club, she pointed out, there are two camps. The first one thinks it's running a semi-elite programme and acts accordingly. The second is in for altruistic reasons and is quietly worn out. Both ends still end up doing the same admin because nobody else will, and the gap between the two widens every year.

Nick Thornton sits on a junior club committee on the Gold Coast. He named the failure mode in plain English. Operational tasks, he wrote, "can fall into committee hands with the wider drop in volunteering." Once that happens, the committee stops being a committee. It becomes the operations team. Strategy work disappears. New committee recruitment disappears. The Tuesday-night meeting turns into a status update on the canteen freezer.

What's a software problem and what isn't

Sit with a year of club admin and sort it honestly and you find three different kinds of work, none of which has the same kind of fix.

The first is admin a system can carry instead of a human. Renewals, payment processing, member communications, document storage, event registration, the handover of access when a committee turns over. None of this needs to live in someone's head. The only reason it does at most clubs is that the club is running on four free tools held together with a shared spreadsheet that one person updates and everyone else opens once a year. A purpose-built club platform makes most of that invisible, which is the bracket TidyHQ sits in. We hear the renewal-chasing story so often it could be the company's tagline.

The second is work that no software solves, because it isn't software work. Whether the club has a paid administrator. Whether several clubs in the same code share a back office. Whether finals are run by the club or the association. Whether the constitution is fit for purpose. These are governance calls. A platform makes them easier to act on once they're decided. It doesn't make the decision for you.

The third is cultural and it's the one that gets worst when the first two are ignored. Whether volunteers feel valued. Whether new committee members are inducted or thrown the keys at the AGM. Whether the club thinks of itself as a community or a service provider. This work doesn't show up on the agenda. It shows up in retention, and in how many parents come back next season.

Most committees treat all three as the same kind of problem. They aren't. The first one is solvable by next month if you decide it is. The second is a twelve-to-twenty-four month conversation with your state body. The third is who you are as a club, and it gets harder the longer you avoid it.

What to actually do this week

If you're on a committee right now, the most useful exercise is the boring one. Write down everything you've done in the past fortnight. Put each item into one of those three buckets, honestly. Anything in the first bucket is the bucket you fix in the next ninety days by picking a system that does the boring parts for you. Then book a strategy session about the second bucket. And start the cultural conversation in the third before another good volunteer quietly steps away at the AGM.

Connelly is right that grassroots sport has to evolve. The honest answer for most clubs is that the evolution starts somewhere unglamorous. Getting the admin off the kitchen table and into a system that runs on its own is the part that creates room to do anything else.