Seventeen years ago, James Godber was coaching at a two-court club that was quietly dying. The committee had been the same people for years. The membership was 30 – most of them regulars who'd been playing together since before James arrived. At the AGMs, members weren't asking how to grow the club. They were asking for their money back.
"It was about 18 months away from disappearing," James says. "People couldn't see how it would ever be built again."
The clubhouse was a white-washed room with a blue leather sofa and a dining table. That was it. People would play their game and go home. Nobody stayed. Nobody really knew each other. It wasn't a club. It was two courts and a coach.
Kevin Rand came in as chair not long after COVID. He'd come from judo, where the club culture was completely different – the kind where you knew everyone, showed up for each other, stayed after training. Walking into Woburn Sands, he didn't understand why it wasn't like that.
"It didn't seem like a club. People would turn up, play tennis, go home. There was no community feel."
That was the moment things started to change.
Kevin and James didn't begin with a strategy. They began with a question: what's actually good for the members – not the committee, not the regular players who'd been there for twenty years, but all of them?
"Most committees start to go, 'Well, what works for us?' We looked the other way."
The first thing they changed was the physical space. They bought tins of green paint and did it themselves. They asked members if anyone had old tennis memorabilia sitting in a loft – trophies, photographs, rackets, programmes – and offered to display it in the clubhouse with the member's name next to it. They got a coffee machine. They kept touching things up, replacing things that looked tired, adding small details that said someone cares about this place.
"A friend started coming in every couple of weeks and saying, there's always something new. There was a bit of excitement to it."
Then they started thinking about the 80% – the members who weren't the best players, who weren't on the teams, who could easily drift away. They built sessions for complete beginners, where everyone was in the same boat. Power hour sessions for people with busy lives who couldn't commit to a full social. They made sure that when a new face turned up, someone stopped their game to show them around.
"We used to have two ambassadors. That grew to ten, then fifty. People were just proud to be part of it."
The events they're most known for have nothing to do with tennis. The WSTC cap – branded, sold to members – turned into a running competition to photograph it in the most unusual place in the world. A map went up in the clubhouse with pins in it. Members started choosing their holidays based on where nobody else had been yet. The annual Quiz and Chips night runs a quiz with questions that make no sense and answers that are mostly wrong, a chip van pulls up halfway through, and everyone considers it the highlight of the year.
"The first year, six people came to the Christmas do. After we got going, 67 came."
The committee went from meeting every six months to every month. Kevin took on almost every action point himself at first. Slowly, others started putting their hands up. Now people are queuing to join the committee. They're making up roles to accommodate them.
From 30 to 200 members. 80 people on a waiting list. Courts at 55–60% utilisation – not because courts were unavailable, but because members weren't just coming to play tennis. They were coming to be somewhere.
One of the neighbours who'd overlooked the courts since before the club existed filed a complaint when the membership grew. Kevin went to listen. Not to defend. Just to listen. He held twice-yearly resident meetings, changed the floodlights, made adjustments where he could and explained honestly where he couldn't. The complaints stopped. The neighbour eventually joined the club and was voted member of the year.
A member who can no longer play – stopped by illness – still comes every week. She brings a cushion, sits by the side of the court, and watches the social tennis.
"I think if we took that away from her, she'd be lost. It's got nothing to do with tennis. It's what tennis and the environment makes people feel."
Even with 200 members, something kept happening that didn't make sense. Courts were being cancelled because players couldn't find anyone to play with. James and Kevin pinned up a board in the clubhouse – a T-card system where members could leave their name, number and preferred level. It worked. But you had to physically come to the club to use it, and from a data protection perspective, it wasn't ideal.
Kevin, who works in software, saw a better way. The problem wasn't unique to Woburn Sands. At David Lloyd – 6,000 members – people were paying day-pass fees to bring guests just to make up a four. Members of the same club couldn't find each other.
That's what Clubmatch was built to solve. Not in a meeting room. From inside a club, by the people running it.
This isn't a blueprint. What James and Kevin did at Woburn Sands was specific to their club, their community, their situation. Some of it will apply to yours. Some won't. But the thread running through all of it is simple: they stopped asking what was good for the committee and started asking what was good for the members. Then they acted on the answer.
.jpg)
