Kevin Rand tells this story as if he still can't quite believe it.
A club with 6,000 members. Courts available. Players wanting to play. And members were paying day-pass fees to bring in guests from outside just to make up a four. Not because the club was full. Because they couldn't find three other people inside it.
"Six thousand members," Kevin says again, in case you missed it. "And they can't make up a fourth."
He's talking about David Lloyd. He's not singling them out unfairly – the same thing happens at clubs of every size. Four people come on court, four people go off, and in between those two groups is nothing. No connection, no coordination, no way to know who else in the club wants a game on Thursday morning. You might have been a member for five years and have no idea that three other members at your level are sitting at home with a free afternoon, wondering if they can get a game.
Tennis is a peculiar sport in this regard. Unlike football or cricket, where you turn up to training and find your teammates, tennis is organised around court bookings. You secure your hour and then separately you find the people to fill it. If your regular three are unavailable, you cancel, or you pull someone in from outside, or you just don't play.
James and Kevin saw this at Woburn Sands before they had a solution for it. They'd grown the club to 200 members – which, for a two-court club, took some explaining at the committee meeting when Kevin first proposed it – and courts were still being cancelled. Not because there was no demand. Because members couldn't reach each other.
They tried a board first. A T-card system pinned up in the clubhouse where members could leave their name, their level, and when they were free. It worked. People used it. But it had two obvious problems: you had to physically come to the clubhouse to use it, and pinning your name and number to a public board is, as James notes with some understatement, "maybe not the best from a GDPR point of view."
Kevin is a software engineer. He looked at the board, looked at what it was trying to do, and saw the digital version of it clearly. Not an app for booking courts – there are plenty of those. Something narrower and more specific: a way for members of the same club to find each other, signal availability, and arrange a game without any friction in between.
That's Clubmatch. It didn't come from a product roadmap or a gap in the market analysis. It came from a board on a wall in a clubhouse and the recognition that if a two-court club with 200 members still had this problem, every club did.
The 6,000-member club isn't an anomaly. It's an illustration of something true at any scale: membership numbers tell you how many people signed up. They don't tell you how connected those people are to each other. A club can be full on paper and empty in practice. Members who can't find each other aren't really members of the same community. They're just people who paid the same annual fee.
What Kevin and James built at Woburn Sands was a community first. Clubmatch came out of the realisation that even with a community, there was still a problem technology could solve – and that nobody had solved it yet.
One line from Kevin has stayed with me since I first heard it. "The courts were only 55% utilised, even with 200 members. It had nothing to do with tennis."
It had nothing to do with tennis. Which is exactly why they could fix it.
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