Every committee wants the same three things: more members, happier members, and members who feel they're getting good value for their subs. Wanting all three isn't the problem. The problem is trying to win at all three at once, with the same budget, the same handful of volunteers, and the same season. Clubs that actually win, pick one as their main game and let the other two back it up.
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Ask most committees and you'll get a goal, not a plan: "we want to grow." But growth is a scoreboard, not a strategy. It tells you whether you won. It doesn't tell you how.
The strategy world has a name for this. In Playing to Win, Roger Martin and former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley boil strategy down to five questions, and the first one is deceptively simple: what is your winning aspiration? Not "what number do we want to hit" but "who are we trying to win with, and what changes for them?"
For a club, "we want to grow 20 per cent" doesn't answer that. "We want to be the club new families in this town join first, because signing up takes five minutes and their kid is playing within a week" does. One is a number. The other tells everyone on the committee what to do on Monday.
The third of Martin and Lafley's five questions is "how will we win?" and their answer is blunt. There are only two ways: be cheaper than the alternatives, or be genuinely different from them. Most clubs never make that choice on purpose. They drift somewhere in the middle, a bit cheaper than the club across town and a bit friendlier, and wonder why neither is pulling people in.
For most clubs, competing on price is a dead end. Subs are already lean, volunteers already work for free, and there's always a rival club or a council programme that can undercut you. That leaves being different. In our experience, clubs stand out in one of three ways: they're the easiest to join, they're the hardest to leave, or they give members the most for what they pay.
Each one is a real way to win. None of them is free.
This is the growth play, and it's the most common one for good reason. More players usually means more subs, a healthier junior pipeline, and more word of mouth for next season. Clubs that win this way put their energy into the front door: school partnerships, come-and-try days, flexible options for casual players, and a sign-up process that doesn't lose people at the first form.
That last one matters more than most committees realise. A family who has to email the secretary, wait for a PDF, print it, and drop cash off at training is a family who might just pick the club that let them register on their phone from the car park. On this path, online registration through your club management software isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole pitch.
The catch is that a rush of new players puts pressure on everything behind the front door. Coaches, courts, pitches, and committee time don't grow as fast as sign-ups do. A club that wins on numbers without protecting the experience for the members it already has often finds this year's growth becomes next year's churn.
Clubs on this path accept they may never be the biggest club in the region and decide that's fine, because the members they do have will barely think about leaving. The work is less visible than a recruitment campaign: clear communication so every player knows where they sit in the season, coaches who are genuinely good at what they do, renewals that happen without a chase, and a committee that notices when someone stops turning up.
This path pays off in renewal rates and referrals rather than a single big sign-up spike. It's also the path most easily undone by clunky admin. A club can run brilliant training sessions and still lose members over a confusing payment system or a Facebook group that's the only place fixtures ever get posted. When member records, payments, and messaging live in the same club management software, the small stuff stops leaking members.
The third path competes on what a membership actually includes, rather than on price or headcount. Clubs winning this way bundle in things members would otherwise pay for elsewhere: strength and conditioning sessions, video analysis, social events, family packages, or discounts through local sponsors. The pitch isn't "we're cheaper" or "we're bigger." It's "you get more for what you already pay."
Done well, this builds loyalty a cheaper rival club can't poach. Done badly, it becomes a long list of add-ons nobody asked for, funded by volunteer hours that were already stretched. The clubs that pull it off tend to be the ones with a clear record of who has registered for what, so they can see which extras members actually use and quietly drop the ones they don't.
Roger Martin has a useful test for whether you've actually made a strategic choice: if the opposite of your plan sounds silly, you haven't chosen anything. "We want more members, a better experience, and more value" fails instantly, because no committee would ever stand up and say "we want fewer members, a worse experience, and less value." That's not a strategy. It's a wish list.
A real choice sounds more like: "This season we're prioritising retention, even if that means saying no to a schools programme that would bring in a wave of new juniors we're not set up to look after properly." Someone on the committee could reasonably argue for the opposite. That's how you know it's a genuine choice.
The table below shows what each path asks of a club, so a committee can see the trade-off honestly instead of trying to fund all three from the same handful of volunteers.
A short exercise for the next committee meeting. Ask which of the three paths your club is already best placed to win, not which one sounds most appealing. A club with a waitlist and stretched courts is in no position to chase numbers. A club that's been quietly losing members for two seasons has a retention problem worth fixing before it spends a cent on recruitment.
Then ask what you're deliberately choosing not to do this season. If nothing gets ruled out, the choice hasn't really been made. Write the answer down in a sentence a new committee member could read and understand in ten seconds. That sentence is closer to a real strategy than any goal with a percentage in it.
Whichever path you choose, notice what all three have in common. The easy-to-join club needs online registration that works on a phone. The hard-to-leave club needs renewals, payments, and communication that don't depend on one overworked secretary. The more-for-your-subs club needs to know exactly who has signed up for what. None of that is strategy. All of it is the admin the strategy stands on.
That's what club management software like Friendly Manager and Hello Club is for. Both handle registrations, payments, and member communication in one place, so your committee can spend its meetings on the choice above rather than chasing forms and spreadsheets. If you'd like to see how either would work for your club, you can book a free, no-obligation demo.
Not entirely. Every club needs a baseline of all three. The question is which one gets the extra budget, the extra volunteer hours, and the deciding vote when priorities clash. That's the one you're actually winning on.
Look at where committee time went last season. Hours spent on recruitment point to a numbers strategy already in motion, whether anyone called it that or not. Hours spent fielding complaints about communication or admin point to a retention problem.
No, but it only works if the club can give new players a good experience once they arrive. Growth without the capacity behind it tends to show up as churn the following season.
At least once a season, and whenever something big changes: a coach leaves, a facility becomes more or less available, or a nearby club changes what it offers. Treat it as an ongoing conversation, not a plan you set once and file away.
It's a way of thinking about strategy from Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. It asks five questions: What is your winning aspiration? Where will you play? How will you win? What capabilities do you need? What management systems will keep it on track? This article focuses mainly on the first and third, because those are the two most clubs skip. The fourth and fifth are where the admin comes in: the capabilities a club needs, such as online registration and reliable member communication, and the systems that keep the season running, are exactly what club management software is there to provide.