Every club celebrates its best players. The club championships, the county team, the junior who just made the county squad – these are the moments committees talk about, the photos that go on the noticeboard, the names that get mentioned at the AGM.
There's nothing wrong with any of that. But James Godber has been a tennis coach for 25 years, and he's watched enough clubs to know what it costs.
"The best players are going to look after themselves anyway," he says. "They'll find a way to play. They'll find the level they need. What we wanted to do was look after everybody else."
At Woburn Sands, everybody else meant a lot of different people. Older members who'd been coming for years and just wanted somewhere comfortable to spend a Tuesday morning. Beginners who'd never walked into a social session before and didn't know where to stand. Working parents who had forty minutes free on a Thursday and no idea how to turn that into a game. People who loved tennis but hadn't quite found their place at the club yet.
Kevin Rand puts it simply:
"The 20% of your best players are your headline. The 80% are your story."
Most committees don't run it that way. They orient around the top end – the players who want more competitive fixtures, better courts at prime times, stronger team selection. It's not that they're wrong to think about these things. It's that it quietly tells the other 80% that the club isn't really for them.
James noticed this across a lot of the clubs he'd worked at. "You'd see the same six people using the courts most of the time. And if new members came in, they didn't integrate with the existing ones. They'd drift."
There's a particular group he worries about: the 30 to 50 year olds. "They're your future 60 and 70 year olds," he says. "If you're not getting them now, you're going to feel it in ten years." The problem is that this group is time-poor, hard to pin down, and unlikely to stick around if the only offering is a fixed social on a Wednesday evening that runs for two and a half hours.
At Woburn Sands they built for them specifically. Power hour sessions – structured, short, no commitment beyond the hour. Beginner groups where everyone was starting from the same place, so nobody felt exposed. A welcome culture where existing members would stop their game to show a new face around.
That last one wasn't a policy. It emerged. "We used to have two ambassadors," Kevin says. "That grew to ten, then fifty." Members started doing it naturally because they were proud of where they played. That kind of pride doesn't come from having a great first team. It comes from feeling like the club is genuinely yours.
The paradox of focusing on the 80% is that it benefits everyone, including the top players. A club with a genuine community around it is a better place to compete from, a better place to coach, a better place to spend time. You don't have to choose between quality and inclusivity. You just have to be honest about which one actually keeps the lights on.
The best players will find a way to play. The question is whether everyone else will too.
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