There's a member at Woburn Sands Tennis Club who brings a cushion.
She comes every week, finds a spot by the side of the court, and watches the social tennis. She doesn't play. She can't, for now – an illness has taken that away, and nobody knows when or whether it will come back. But she comes anyway. Every week. Cushion in hand.
Kevin Rand tells this story and you can hear what it means to him. "If we took that away from her, I think she'd be lost. Tennis within our little town – this is where she belongs."
It's a small detail. But it's the one that tells you everything about what James and Kevin actually built at Woburn Sands, and why it matters more than the membership numbers.
When they started, six people came to the Christmas party. The club had 30 members and they gathered at the end of the year and six of them showed up. The courts were there. The tennis was available. But there was no reason to stay, no reason to come in when you weren't playing, no pull towards the place beyond the sport itself.
That changes slowly and then all at once. You paint the walls. You get a coffee machine. You ask members to bring in old tennis memorabilia from their lofts and you put their name next to it on the shelf. You run a quiz night with wrong answers and a chip van, and somehow 67 people turn up. You take a group to Felixstowe for the tennis and sit at dinner looking down the table at people from completely different lives who are laughing together, and you think: where else would this happen?
What Kevin describes isn't a loyalty programme or a retention strategy. It's something simpler and harder to manufacture. A feeling that the club is somewhere you belong, not just somewhere you play.
James came from a big health and racket club before Woburn Sands became his base. He knows what a well-resourced facility looks like. And he'll tell you, without hesitation, that he'd rather be at a two-court club in a seaside town, in minus five degrees with six layers on, than back there.
"I would take this any day of the week."
The woman with the cushion didn't join the club to sit and watch. She joined to play tennis. But somewhere along the way the club became somewhere she needed to be regardless. That's what you're actually building when you build a club. Not a programme of activities. Not a schedule of fixtures. A place people don't want to leave, even when the thing that brought them there isn't available anymore.
Not every club will get there. It takes time, it takes a committee willing to show up, and it takes – if you listen to Kevin – a genuine belief that your job is to look after the members rather than look after yourselves.
But when it works, you know it. Someone brings a cushion and sits by the side of the court, and everyone around them thinks nothing of it, because of course she's here. Where else would she be?
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