How to Run a Beach Volley Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Beach volley is one of the most social sports going — two against two, on sand, usually with a barbecue or a beer somewhere in the picture. That sociability is your biggest asset, but the sport has one hard constraint no other club guide has to wrestle with: you need sand, and good sand courts are scarce. Sort the surface first; everything else is easy by comparison.

Court and venue

A beach volleyball court is 16m by 8m of sand — noticeably smaller than the 18m by 9m indoor court, which makes 2v2 brutally physical because two players cover the whole thing. The net sits at 2.43m for men and 2.24m for women, with at least 3m of clear run-off sand all the way round so nobody lands on a kerb chasing a dig. In the UK that means one of three things: a dedicated outdoor beach-volley facility (Bournemouth, Brighton, Cardiff and a handful of London sites have them), an indoor sand venue for the winter, or a portable court you rig on a public beach or a sand pit at a leisure ground. Whatever you choose, lock a recurring slot — a fixed "Wednesday 6–8pm at the courts" does more for retention than any flyer.

Ask the facility whether you can store posts, nets and a line set on-site, and whether they rake and top up the sand. Carting a net and four boundary lines down to the beach every week, then digging them back out of a damp kit bag, is the fastest way to resent your own club. If you're on a public beach, check whether you need permission from the council or landowner before you start charging people to play there.

Equipment

The kit list is short and that's the joy of it: a net and a pair of posts (telescopic sand posts if you're portable), a boundary line set with sand anchors so the court doesn't drift, two or three beach balls (they're softer and lighter than indoor balls, and a brightly coloured one is far easier to track against a pale sky), a pump, and a first aid kit with plenty of water and sun cream. Keep a few spare balls and a couple of loan kneepads for newcomers — the people who turn up "just to try it" are your future regulars, and you don't want them put off because the only ball on site is half-flat.

Open play vs structured format

Decide whether you're running open play (turn up, get paired, rotate through games — low commitment, very social) or structured sessions (fixed pairs, a ladder, a doubles league with set rounds). Most beach-volley clubs lean heavily on open play because the sport is so pair-dependent: if you force people into fixed partners too early, a beginner stuck with another beginner just loses every game and leaves. Start social, mix the pairs every game, and layer competitive structure on top once you know who the regulars are.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Beach volley has a smaller pool than the racket sports, but the people in it are loyal and they recruit hard — nobody can resist dragging a mate down to the sand on a sunny evening. Your real job is to be findable and to make the first visit feel effortless.

Where to recruit

• Local Facebook groups and "beach volley [city]" pages — most beach-volley scenes already cluster in a regional group. A photo of a sunny session, a clear "next session Wednesday 6pm, £7, beginners welcome and we mix the pairs", and you'll get replies the same evening.
• Indoor volleyball clubs — your warmest audience by far. Indoor players crave somewhere to play through the summer, and the 6v6 court teaches transferable skills. A post in their group or a flyer at their venue converts well.
• Universities and student sport — beach volley skews young and student volleyball clubs are always looking for off-season play. A link to your join page in their society chat goes a long way.
• The beach itself — a sign on the net post with a QR code, on a busy weekend, is genuinely one of your best recruiting tools. People walking past will scan it.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested newcomer is to make them email you, wait for a reply, and fill in a form on a clipboard that's blowing across the sand. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the roster, shows the next session, and lets them pay if they want to commit. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): players scan it on the spot, enter their name, and they're in — no email chain, no soggy paper form, no spreadsheet for you to update later.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

There are three models worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-session

Players pay £6–£10 each time. Beach venues tend to cost more per hour than a sports hall, so this often sits a little higher than racket-sport rates. Pros: fair for irregular attendees, easy for one-off guests trying the sport, no awkward standing around. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing money on the sand — where nobody has a wallet and everyone's "got you next week" — is the most thankless job in club running.

Monthly membership

A fixed monthly fee covering unlimited sessions. Pros: smooth, predictable income and far less per-session admin. Cons: beach volley is weather-dependent and seasonal, so a flat monthly fee feels unfair to players who can't come when it's lashing rain. Consider a summer-season pass rather than a rolling subscription.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted membership or season pass for regulars, plus a guest rate for one-off players. Best of both worlds — and given how many people want to "just come down once when it's sunny", a guest rate is essential. The only complication is tracking who's on which plan, which is where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from your court hire. Divide the cost by a realistic attendance number (not your aspirational one), add a little for balls and incidentals, and round to a number people can pay quickly. Charging £7 instead of £6.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a beach-volley club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a beach-volley club either grows by word of mouth or quietly stalls. In a 2v2 sport, fairness is everything: players forgive sand in their shoes and a slightly pricey night, but they do not forgive being stuck on the bad court while the same elite pair wins every game on the good one.

The queue

With limited courts and a sport that's two-a-side, who plays next matters enormously. The old way — shout "winners stay on, next two challenge" — works but quietly rewards whoever is loudest and punishes the newcomer who doesn't know the etiquette. A digital queue fixes that: players tap to join from their phone, see their position, and get called when a court frees up. Nobody can skip the line. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee.

Matchmaking and the King of the Court format

Fair matchmaking is the single biggest factor in retention. The pair-dependence of beach volley makes this trickier than in racket sports — two strong players together steamroll everyone, so the trick is to keep breaking up the dominant pairs. That's exactly what the King of the Court format does, and it's the recommended format for beach volley in ClubLono: the winners stay on the court but split up — each one partners with a fresh challenger coming off the queue. A new pair forms every single game, strong players get spread across the session, and beginners regularly find themselves paired with a good player who can carry the rally and teach them something. It's the most sociable rotation there is, and it solves the "elite-pair dominance" problem automatically.

Scoring and rotation

Beach volley is scored on rally points (every rally wins a point, whoever served it) — ClubLono uses the points scoring mode for it. Full beach sets are first to 21, win by 2, but for a busy social session that's too long to keep the queue moving, so cap games shorter: first to 15, or even first to 11 win-by-2 on a packed night, then rotate. With King of the Court the winning pair splits and re-forms after each game, so set the target before you start — a single grinding 24–22 game leaves four people waiting on the sand for twenty minutes. ClubLono handles the scoring and standings so you can play instead of refereeing a clipboard.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: three touches per side (and you can't hit it twice in a row), no open-handed tipping (poke or roll instead, it's part of the beach game), and the "no lift" rule on the set — a clean contact, not a thrown ball. Don't drown them in the full rulebook. Three rules, a forgiving partner via King of the Court, and a bit of sun is enough to get someone hooked.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and beach volley has a seasonality problem most sports don't, so keeping people warm through the off-season is where the real work is.

Communicate in one place

If session reminders live in a WhatsApp group, the rain cancellation goes out on a Facebook event, and the after-session pub plan is in someone's camera-roll chat, members will miss things — and on a weather-dependent sport, a missed cancellation means people turning up to a soaked, empty court. Pick one channel for everything. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions — every player on the roster is automatically in it, and booked players get a thread for their specific session, so a last-minute "rained off tonight" reaches exactly the right people, not all 80 members at once.

Schedule sessions ahead

"Same time every week through the summer" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks, with capacity limits so a popular sunny evening doesn't have forty people fighting over two courts. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with caps, and members get a push notification when something new opens — no separate Facebook event needed. Over winter, an indoor session or two keeps the group alive until the sand warms up again.

Add a competitive layer

Once you have regulars, a doubles ladder or a monthly King of the Court tournament gives people something to climb. It's the difference between "a thing I do when it's sunny" and "my club". Keep open play as the welcoming front door, and let the competition sit alongside it for those who want it.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — and worth a moment, because outdoor sand brings hazards a sports hall doesn't.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running sessions on a hired or public site, and many facilities require it as a condition of booking. There is no separate national governing body for beach volleyball as a stand-alone sport in the UK — the discipline sits under Volleyball England (and the equivalents in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), which is the body to affiliate to. Affiliation typically includes a basic club policy; read what's actually covered, because affiliation cover is usually a floor rather than full protection. If you play on a public beach you may also need the landowner's or council's permission and your own cover — don't assume the beach itself is insured.

Safeguarding

If you run sessions for under-18s you need a safeguarding lead, DBS-checked coaches and a written policy. Use Volleyball England's templates rather than writing one from scratch.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store members' names, emails or phone numbers you're a data controller. In practice: have a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, and let members delete their account on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account from in-app settings.

Money handling

If you take more than a trivial amount of money, open a separate bank account for the club. Mixing club fees with your personal current account is the fastest route to a difficult committee meeting two years from now. Watch out, too, for sun and heat: keep water and shade on hand, and don't be shy about calling a session early if a player's struggling — sand reflects heat back up at everyone playing on it.

7. Grow without burning out

Most volunteer-run clubs don't collapse from a lack of members — they collapse because the one person who owns the sand-court key, the net and the spreadsheet gets tired and quits. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputy hosts who can rig the net, set out the boundary lines, run the queue and pack everything down when you're away. The "who's bringing the net" question shouldn't have a single answer.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment chasing, session reminders, the queue, rain refunds on cancellation — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in your head, it falls over the moment you're on holiday.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — facility contact, where the net and lines are stored, the gate code, the payment login — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small beach-volley club on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a shout of "winners stay on". Plenty do. It works at 15 members, creaks at 40, and becomes a part-time unpaid job by the time a sunny season has packed your sessions out.

Dedicated club software collapses four tools into one and stops you being the bottleneck:

• The roster stops being a spreadsheet and becomes self-serve via a QR code on the net post.
• Fees stop being chased across the sand and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• The queue stops being a shout and becomes a phone-based list nobody can skip.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook and live in one members-only chat — so a rain cancellation actually reaches everyone.
• Sessions become a published calendar with capacity limits and automatic refunds when a session is rained off.

ClubLono is free for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, King of the Court matching, 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 for a courtside tablet, 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. There is no per-player fee. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing — and there's no point at which Premium costs more than free. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a group of beach-volley players who'd rather be diving in the sand than buried in admin.