Committee guide
How to hand over a tennis club committee
The short answer
To hand over a tennis club committee, transfer four things in order: the accounts and logins, the live records (membership roll, fixtures, ladder and subs), the physical assets (keys, equipment, supplier contacts), and the institutional knowledge that is not written down anywhere. The single most common failure is handing over the documents but not the access — the new secretary inherits a spreadsheet she cannot edit and a website nobody can log into.
Three weeks after the AGM, the new secretary opens the fixtures spreadsheet and finds she cannot edit it. The file is owned by a Gmail account belonging to someone who left two committees ago. The bank needs two signatories to change the mandate. Nobody knows the WiFi password for the clubhouse. The folder was handed over. The access was not — and that gap, not carelessness, is the ordinary shape of a handover gone wrong.
So before the checklist, one correction: the handover is not the documents. The folder is the easy half. The club you have been running does not live in it — it lives in the logins, the edit rights, the bank mandate, the keys and the codes. Those are the parts that get left behind.
When should a committee handover happen?
Before the AGM, not after. The roles change at the AGM but the work does not pause for the paperwork, so the handover should start a fortnight ahead, with an overlap where the outgoing and incoming holder of each role are both still reachable. The trap is treating it as a single evening — a folder passed across a table, a few logins read aloud, a promise to send the rest on. The rest is never sent on.
What goes on a club committee handover checklist?
Four things fail in four different ways. Here they are side by side, because the middle column is the one committees skip.
| What you are transferring | What 'done' looks like | The usual failure |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts and access | Logins, software admin, website, social and cloud drive all working for the new holder | Ownership tied to a personal Gmail; two-factor codes going to a phone that is leaving the committee |
| The live records | Edit access to the roll, fixtures, ladder and subs — not just a copy | A spreadsheet only one person can edit; a list months out of date |
| Treasury and subs | Bank mandate changed, the record of who has paid, outstanding invoices, the AGM accounts | Mandates need two signatories and bank lead time — start this first; never share online-banking passwords |
| Physical assets and contacts | Keys, gate codes, alarm code, WiFi, equipment and service dates, supplier and insurance contacts | The one set of keys 'someone has'; an insurance renewal nobody owns |
| Governing-body links | Tennis Ireland or LTA affiliation, club registration, grant or funding correspondence | Affiliation renewal deadlines; grant reporting obligations |
| The undocumented knowledge | An hour's recorded conversation per role, walked through the club's year | The part no folder holds — lost every two years |
Read the table down the middle column. That is the whole guide. For every row, the test is not 'do we have this?' but 'can the new holder use it without ringing the old holder?' A folder passes the first test and fails the second.
This test cuts two ways. If you are standing down, your job is to make yourself unnecessary — for every item, check the next person can use it without you. If you have just been elected, your job is to confirm access, not accept files: when someone hands you a spreadsheet, do not say thank you, open it and check you can edit it.
How do you hand over the bank account safely?
Start it first, because it is slowest. A mandate change needs the existing signatories and the new ones, and it takes bank lead time — if it lapses, the club cannot pay its suppliers. Never share online-banking passwords; change the mandate through the bank's proper process. This is the one row that has a deadline outside your control, so it cannot wait for the rest of the evening.
How do you hand over the things that are not written down?
The checklist covers what a club owns. It does not cover what a committee knows — and that is the part that leaks every two years.
Some of it is institutional: which member quietly opens the clubhouse on a Saturday, which supplier to ring rather than email, that the floodlights trip if you turn both banks on at once, that the AGM is poorly attended unless you send the reminder twice. Some of it is pastoral: who has not been seen in a while, who is recovering from an illness, who organises the social and is close to burning out.
You cannot transfer this in a spreadsheet, but you can transfer it in a conversation if you make time for one. Sit the outgoing and incoming holder of each role together for an hour. Walk the year — opening Saturday, the summer league, club championships, the AGM — and at each point ask 'what do you do, and what goes wrong if nobody does it?' Write the answers down. That document, written calmly in advance rather than in a panic in June, is the real handover.
How do you make the next handover easier than this one?
The reason handovers are hard is rarely that committees are careless. It is that the club's records live in places tied to people: a sheet on a personal drive, a website with one login, a ladder on a noticeboard. When the person leaves, the access leaves with them, and the next committee starts by reconstructing what the last one knew.
The fix is structural. If the membership roll, the fixtures, the ladder and the subs record live in a shared system with roles — where access is granted to a position, not a person — then a handover becomes a change of who holds which role, not a frantic transfer of files. The outgoing secretary's access ends; the incoming secretary's begins; the records never move, because they were never on anyone's laptop. That is the difference between handing over by panic and handing over by login.
Common questions
- When should we start the handover before the AGM?
- At least two to three weeks ahead, and earlier for anything involving the bank. Mandate changes need two signatories and bank lead time, so the treasury handover should begin before the rest.
- What is the most commonly forgotten item?
- Access, not documents. Committees hand over the membership spreadsheet but not edit rights to it, or the website content but not the admin login. The test for every checklist row is whether the new holder can use it without ringing the old one.
- How do we hand over the bank account safely?
- Never share online-banking passwords. Change the bank mandate through the bank's proper process — usually requiring the existing signatories and the new ones. Start this first, because it is the slowest item and the one that blocks paying suppliers if it lapses.
- What about the things only one person knows?
- Set aside an hour for a conversation per role, walk through the club's year, and write down what each person does and what breaks if nobody does it. Institutional and pastoral knowledge does not transfer in a folder; it transfers in a recorded conversation made before the outgoing committee disperses.
- Do we need software to hand over well?
- No — a careful checklist and an overlap fortnight will do it. But if your records live in shared software with role-based access, the handover stops being a transfer of files and becomes a change of who holds which role. The records never move, because they were never on anyone's personal drive.