[ddek]

Honestly I don't see discovery as the issue, at least for us. The waiting list for tennis clubs in London is... another tennis club. (Seriously, we have 500 members and ~500 people waiting. It's the same people on all the other clubs lists.)

There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved:

Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them. You ask these people for contact details and they point you to the Yellow Pages. Most of these people are just social players, but some are in teams. You cannot win a technology argument with them, but your communication system needs to reliably reach them.

Even people who are comfortable with tech will have a 'yet another app' problem. I would. You need to give me a reason to install an app. I don't want your app because its another place I need to look to see messages, and it's yet more notifications that I might miss. Other people have different reasons. To get over my problem, and everyone elses, your offering needs to be rock solid.

All that said, I still think there's space if well executed and integrated with the rest of the club. For example, it should automatically create a channel for people in a box league. It should be integrated with the booking system, and lights (seriously, turning lights on from the phone would be killer). You should have an account balance, which is used for bookings, lights, and the bar.

If you can do all that, then you have something that doesn't yet exist. You've also achieved everything I could do in a few days with a discord bot and some python scripts.

[fidor]

In general the discovery is mostly for the people looking for a club, rather than the club themselves. I believe there's also huge space for creating new clubs. (e.g. 10 people in a town search for a Netball team but it doesn't exist. Perfect chance to self organise). From the research I've done, tennis tends to be an outlier because the physical clubs tend to be quite large, well known, and have something for everyone. As opposed to football or netball where you just play in a park in an evening and you have no idea of the ability level until you show up.

I completely agree communications is going to be tough. I really don't want to build yet another chat app. There just aren't any drop in solutions though. Especially not with group messaging. The question has to be what your messaging for. If it's just notification messages, that can be solved with e-mail/sms/whatsapp.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback!