A club is not a group chat.

A year ago I had never held a tennis racket. My wife and I picked it up together, the way couples do — a thing to learn at the same speed, on the same evenings. She got injured after her first lesson. I kept going.

Six months in, before anyone had asked me, I was already volunteering. I had built a little registration app for the social tennis sessions, so the woman organising them could take sign-ups and run a waiting list without doing it from her own inbox at 11pm on a Wednesday. I built a ladder app a few months after that, and to my surprise the club used it. By the time I was invited onto the committee, around a year after I’d started playing, the software was already there. The committee role just gave it a name.

The club runs, and you can see how it runs. There is a WhatsApp group with one hundred and forty members. There is a website that someone set up four years ago, which one person can still log into. There is a spreadsheet of paid subs, kept by the treasurer on her home laptop. There is a printed ladder pinned to the noticeboard, which has been photographed and reshared in the WhatsApp so often that the photograph has a photograph of a photograph inside it.

A club cannot be just managed through WhatsApp groups.

I do not mean that WhatsApp is a bad tool. I use it every day. I mean that a club is not a group chat. A club is a piece of small, durable infrastructure — a roster, a fixture list, a ladder, a set of keys, a kettle, a noticeboard, a record of who has paid and who has been welcomed and who has not been seen in a while. Group chats are the opposite of durable. Messages scroll past before half the membership has opened them. The Monday social fills before the Thursday post is written. The fixture is rearranged in a thread that the away captain is not in. The work happens, but it happens by attrition — by someone, usually one person, holding the whole thing in their head and replying to everything.

The thing I have learned, sitting on a committee and listening to volunteers at other clubs, is that the labour is not distributed by who has the most time, or even by who has volunteered for what. It is distributed by tooling. When the tools are scattered — a WhatsApp here, a spreadsheet there, a printed sheet on a wall — the work of holding them together gets quietly handed to whoever can hold the most things in their head at once. That is one person. They are not complaining. But they cannot take a holiday.

And here is the part that took me longest to see: those people are volunteers. They have day jobs. They have kids. They came to the club because they love tennis. The cruel irony of a small club is that the people who love it most end up playing the least, because they are running it. The captain who would rather be on court is on the phone. The secretary who used to play three times a week is now at her laptop on a Sunday evening, fixing the fixtures. Running the club has cost them the thing they came for.

The club we are trying to build software for is not a startup, and it is not a chain. It is a 50-to-300-member club with a committee that turns over every two years, a treasurer who knows the bank password by heart, and three socials a week to fill. It has rituals — the AGM, the opening Saturday, the club championships — and those rituals are the point. The administration is the part you do so the rituals can happen.

The software for the administration is laceup. It is a place to keep the membership roll, the fixture list, the ladder, the courts, and the announcements, in one place that the next committee can inherit without a handover document written in a panic in June.

The founder of a club platform should probably have run a club for ten years. I haven’t. I’ve been volunteering at one for six months and on the committee for a few. What I have, instead, is the experience of being on the inside of the handover — of watching the work pass from one volunteer to the next, and of seeing where it leaks. We are building laceup against those leaks.

The Saturday morning I want to give you back is the one where the lights are on, the kettle is warm, the ladder is up to date because it has been up to date all week, and you are not the only one who knows how it works. The one where the captain plays a set.