For years, James Godber saw something at a large health and racquets club that never quite made sense to him.
There were thousands of members, including a substantial tennis membership. Plenty of courts. Plenty of people who wanted to play.
And yet tennis members would sometimes pay a guest fee to bring somebody in from outside the club just to make up a four.
Not because there weren't enough tennis players inside the club.
They simply didn't always know how to find them.
James spent many years coaching in that environment, and the experience stayed with him. In a tennis membership that large, there could easily be three other people of a similar level, available at exactly the same time and looking for exactly the same game.
The difficult part was knowing who they were.
It's one of the peculiarities of tennis.
In many team sports, the people you're going to play with are already part of the arrangement. Tennis can be different. You can book a court, but you still need somebody to share it with.
Most regular players naturally build their own network over time. They find partners, join groups and get to know people of a similar level.
But routines change. People go away. Work gets busy. Someone drops out of Thursday's doubles. A new member joins without knowing anybody.
And suddenly the size of the membership doesn't necessarily help.
Years later, James encountered a version of the same problem at Woburn Sands Tennis Club.
This time the setting couldn't have been more different.
Instead of a large health and racquets club with a substantial tennis membership, Woburn Sands had two courts and, as the club grew, around 200 members.
Yet even there, members who wanted to play didn't always know who else might be available.
One of the first things tried at Woburn Sands was remarkably simple: a physical Buddy Board in the clubhouse.
Members could show when they were available and the sort of tennis they were looking for. Other members could find them and arrange a game.
It worked.
But you had to be at the clubhouse to see it, and displaying personal contact details publicly was hardly an ideal long-term solution.
Kevin Rand, with his background in technology and product development, saw how that simple idea could work digitally.
The Buddy Board eventually became part of the thinking behind Clubmatch: helping members show when they're available, find other players at a similar level and create opportunities to play.
Because one of the lessons James had seen in two very different tennis environments was surprisingly similar.
The number of members isn't necessarily the problem.
Sometimes the right people are already there.
They just need an easier way to find each other.
.jpg)
