How to Grow a Tennis Club

1. Where to find tennis players

Tennis has the opposite problem to most sports: not a shortage of interested people, but a perception that the door is shut. Everyone played at school, half the country tunes in for Wimbledon fortnight, and park courts sit empty on weeknights. Your growth job is to be visibly open and easy, and then to be where these people already are.

• Local Facebook groups — town pages and "things to do in [town]" groups are where casual players lurk. A photo of a busy, friendly court plus "Wednesday social, £7, rackets and balls provided, all standards including total beginners" cuts straight through the stuffy-club worry.
• The LTA's club and court finder — registering your club or venue with the Lawn Tennis Association lists you on the LTA site and the ClubSpark/Rally apps, catching everyone searching "tennis near me" or booking a local park court.
• The park courts themselves — a weatherproof sign on the court fence reaches exactly the people walking past with a racket wondering if anything's on.
• Cross-over racket sports — the padel and pickleball booms have created a huge pool of people who've rediscovered they love hitting a ball with a racket. Squash and badminton players cross over too. A flyer at a padel centre or leisure-centre noticeboard is a warm audience.
• Lapsed players — the single biggest reservoir in British tennis is adults who played as teenagers and stopped. "No standard required, we'll lend you a racket, no annual membership to commit to" is written for them.
• Schools, universities and workplaces — most have a sports noticeboard or a Slack channel. Students and new-to-town professionals are exactly the people looking for a casual sporting fixture.

2. Make joining frictionless

You've done the hard part — someone's interested. Now do not lose them to admin. Tennis is the sport where the old joining process actively works against you: email the secretary, wait for a committee to consider you, pay an annual fee up front, turn up to fill in a paper form. Every one of those steps confirms the newcomer's fear that this club isn't for them.

The fix is a single link or QR code that does everything in one go: adds them to the roster, shows the next session, and lets them pay the guest rate if they want to commit there and then. Put the QR code on your court-fence sign, in your Facebook posts, and on the flyer — someone reads it, scans it on their phone, and they're in before the interest cools.

In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club). Players scan, enter their name, and they're on the roster — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you, no committee bottleneck unless you deliberately choose to approve members. Aim for "five seconds from interested to on the roster", and you'll convert the curious before they talk themselves out of it.

3. Nail the first session

A newcomer decides whether they're coming back within the first twenty minutes, usually before they've played a single competitive point. Tennis makes this harder than most sports because the scoring is baffling and a bad first match — getting bagelled 6–0, or standing on the side while regulars finish a three-setter — confirms every fear they arrived with. Get the first session right and you've a regular; get it wrong and you've a one-off who quietly tells their friends it wasn't very welcoming.

• Have someone greet them. Not the whole committee — one friendly regular who says hello, learns their name, lends them a racket and explains how the night runs. This one thing matters more than anything else.
• Keep the scoring brief. Don't explain deuce and tie-breaks at the gate. Three things: the funny scoring (15, 30, 40, game), you get two serves, and the serve goes diagonally into the box. The rest they'll pick up by playing.
• Get them playing fast. A short rotating game — a short set or a few rounds of doubles — beats a long match. Make sure their first opponents are a sensible match, not the club's strongest player.
• Lend the kit. A racket and balls at the gate removes the "I don't have the gear" excuse entirely. Most first-timers don't own a decent racket and won't buy one before they know they like it.
• Say goodbye and point at the next session. "Same time next Wednesday — hope to see you" plus a working calendar they can actually find turns a nice evening into a habit.

4. Keep your regulars (one channel, one schedule)

Recruitment gets the headlines, but retention is where clubs are actually built — and for an outdoor, weather-dependent sport, a single washed-out month can quietly break a casual player's habit for good. Two unglamorous things move the needle most: one communication channel and a published schedule.

One communication channel

Tennis clubs leak members through scattered messaging. If session reminders are in a WhatsApp group, the weather call is in a Facebook event, and the social plans are in someone's camera-roll chat, people miss things — and "is it on tonight?" with rain forecast is the single most-asked question in tennis. Pick one channel. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat where everyone on the roster is automatically included, and booked players get a thread for their specific session, so a last-minute "courts flooded, we're off" reaches exactly the right people rather than all 80 members or, worse, nobody.

A published schedule

"Same time every week" is the floor. Better is a calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks, including the weeks you're not on because the courts are booked or the light's gone. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with capacity limits, and members get a push notification when something opens. For a seasonal sport, publishing the winter floodlit schedule early tells the casual players the club doesn't hibernate — which is exactly when you lose the ones who assumed it did.

5. Build a community people invite friends to

The clubs that grow fastest barely market at all — they grow because members bring friends. That only happens when a club is somewhere people actually want to be, not just a court they hire by the hour. Community is what turns "a thing I sometimes do" into "my club", and it's the cheapest, most durable growth engine there is.

• Give the club an identity. A name, a colour, a group photo, a bit of in-club banter. People invite friends to something with a personality, not to "tennis on Wednesdays".
• Run socials beyond the tennis. A finals-day barbecue, a winter pub night, an end-of-season mixed-doubles knockabout where the standard doesn't matter. The friendships made off court are what keep people coming back on it.
• Share the moments. Photos from finals day, a shout-out when someone wins their first box-league match, the running ladder standings. Post them in the club chat — ClubLono's chat takes photos and reactions, and it's members-only, so it feels like a club rather than a billboard.
• Make newcomers feel like insiders fast. Learn names, fold them into the doubles rotation, mention them in the chat. A newcomer who feels they belong by week two is a newcomer who brings a friend by week four.

6. Add a ladder or league once you have regulars

Don't lead with competition — a hardcore ladder on day one scares off the casual players you're trying to attract. But once you've a settled core of regulars, a structured competition gives the season a spine and a reason to keep turning up when motivation dips in February. It's the upgrade from "social club" to "proper club".

Start with whatever fits your numbers. A box league — small groups of similar standard, everyone plays everyone over a month, top promoted and bottom relegated — is the most popular format in British club tennis because it guarantees competitive games against your own level. A ladder is even lighter to run: a ranked list where players challenge those just above them, arranging matches themselves. Either gives people a number to chase without anyone being knocked out after one bad set, and a knockout club championship makes a natural season finale on top.

Crucially, keep the open social night as the welcoming front door and let the competition sit alongside it. The newcomer who came for a casual hit shouldn't feel shut out, and the keen regular gets the structure they crave. In ClubLono, leagues — box leagues, ladders, knockouts and round-robin divisions with automatic standings and fixtures — are a Premium feature, so you can grow on the free tier and add the competitive layer the moment your regulars are ready for it.

7. Fund growth with fees and membership

Growth costs a little money — more loan rackets, more balls, extra floodlit court hours as numbers climb, maybe a coach for a beginners' block. The trick is to let the club fund its own growth rather than the founder quietly subsidising it out of pocket, which is the slow road to resentment and burnout. Fees and membership, collected without friction, are what make that work.

Collect money automatically so it isn't a chore or a barrier. A guest rate lets newcomers try a session without committing to an annual sub — vital for an outwardly stuffy sport — and a discounted membership rewards the regulars who'll fund the steady costs. Reinvest the surplus visibly: announce "we've bought four new loan rackets" in the chat and members see their fees doing something, which makes them happier to pay.

ClubLono is free for a single club with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, scoring, sessions, chat, capacity and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode, cross-club stats and DUPR export. ClubLono never holds members' funds — money goes straight to the host's bank account via Stripe, and cancelled paid sessions auto-refund every booked player, which for a rain-prone outdoor sport you'll lean on often. There is no per-player fee. The point: collecting fees should fund your growth, not stand in its way.