How to Run a Spikeball Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Roundnet's whole pitch is that four people, one net and a ball turn any patch of flat ground into a game in under a minute. That low barrier is a gift for a new club — but it also means people will turn up having only seen it on a phone screen, so the setup has to be welcoming and the first serve has to land quickly.

Net and venue

The kit is a circular trampoline-style net roughly a metre across that sits flat on the ground at around shin height on short fold-out legs, with the four players standing around it. Each game needs only about a 5-metre clear circle, which means a single sports hall, a corner of a park, a beach or a fenced 3G pitch can hold several nets at once. Indoor halls give you reliable, all-weather sessions and a forgiving floor for dives; grass and sand are kinder on knees but at the mercy of British weather. Whatever you pick, lock in a recurring slot first — a fixed "Wednesday 7pm" does more for retention than any amount of marketing, and a half-dozen nets in a sports hall is a cheap booking to split.

If you're indoors, confirm the venue is happy with diving and lateral movement — roundnet is a contact-with-the-floor sport in a way badminton isn't. Ask whether you can store nets on-site; lugging a bag of trampolines and pegs in and out of the boot every week gets old fast.

Equipment

You need: one regulation net per four players (the official tournament set has a tighter, more consistent bounce than the cheap garden versions — worth it once you're past the kitchen-table phase), a stack of spare balls because they split and get lost, a pump, spare pegs or sandbag weights for outdoor anchoring, and a first aid kit (grazed elbows and the odd rolled ankle are the house injuries). Keep a couple of loan nets going at once so newcomers never stand around waiting — in a sport this cheap to get into, your future regulars are the people who came to try it on a whim.

Open play vs structured format

Decide whether you're running open play (turn up, get drawn into teams, rotate through short games — low commitment, very social) or structured sessions (fixed pairs, ladders, a round-robin night with a tracked winner). Most thriving roundnet clubs lean heavily on open play to ride the curiosity wave, then layer competitive structure on top once they know who's coming back. The two-on-two format makes mixing partners trivial, so don't overthink it early on.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Roundnet recruits differently from racket sports. It's young, it spreads by spectacle — people stop to watch a rally — and it's almost never something a player has done in a formal club before. So your job is less "convince racket veterans to switch" and more "catch the curious before the novelty fades".

Where to recruit

• Universities and sixth-form colleges — roundnet has a strong student following and societies are always hunting for cheap, social sports. A campus society or freshers'-fair stall is the single richest seam for most UK clubs.
• Local Facebook and community groups — town pages and "things to do in [town]" groups convert well. A short clip of a good rally, a clear "next session Wednesday 7pm, £4, all gear provided", and you'll get replies the same day.
• Parks and beaches — set a net up in a busy park on a sunny afternoon and you'll recruit by sheer curiosity. Keep a QR code on a laminated card to hand to anyone who asks what you're playing.
• Volleyball, ultimate frisbee and futsal players — the crossover is heavy. These are athletic, social, low-equipment sports with overlapping crowds; a flyer in their group chats is a warm audience.

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 arrival. 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, enter their name, and they're in — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you to update on the train home.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Roundnet is one of the cheapest team sports to run, which keeps fees low and means you'll be collecting lots of small amounts from a young, casual crowd — exactly the situation where chasing cash on the night is most painful. There are three models worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-session

Players pay £3–£5 each time. Pros: fair for irregular attendees, friction-free for the one-off who saw a clip and wants a go, and honest given how cheap the venue usually is. Cons: jagged cash flow, and a young crowd is the crowd most likely to be "£2 short, get you next week".

Monthly membership

A fixed monthly fee covering unlimited sessions. Pros: smooth, predictable income and less per-session admin. Cons: it doesn't suit students home for the holidays or sporadic players, who'll feel they're overpaying — and with low session costs the saving has to be obvious to be worth it.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted monthly membership for regulars, plus a guest rate for one-off players. Best of both worlds — and given how many roundnet newcomers just want to "try it once", a low 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 venue hire. Divide the hire cost by a realistic attendance number (not your aspirational one), add a little for replacement balls and the odd new net, and round to a number people can pay quickly. Charging £4 instead of £3.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a roundnet club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a roundnet club either grows by word of mouth or quietly stalls. Because games are short and intense, the difference between a great night and a flat one is almost entirely about rotation: nobody minds losing a quick game, but everybody minds standing on the sideline watching three other nets while their legs go cold.

The queue

With more pairs than nets you need a rotation that's visibly fair. The pickup-game default — "winners stay on, losers fetch the ball" — works but quietly punishes newcomers, who lose, sit, and drift home. A digital queue fixes that: players (or pairs) tap to join from their phone, see their position, and get called when a net frees up. Nobody can hover their way to the front. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee.

Matching players and scoring

Roundnet uses simple points scoring: rally-style, a point is won on every serve, games are commonly played to 21 and you must win by 2 (some social nights drop to 11 to keep the rotation brisk). A point ends when a team can't return the ball cleanly onto the net within three touches, or hits the rim, the ground or a "pocket". Set the target and the win-by rule out loud before you start — without one, a tight 24–22 game leaves three pairs watching for ten minutes. In ClubLono the spikeball default is points to 21, win by 2, and the app keeps score and standings so you can play instead of refereeing.

Format and rotation

For a normal club night the sane default is a round robin: every pair plays every other pair a short game, points-for and points-against are tallied, and you have a clear table at the end. It guarantees everyone the same amount of court time regardless of form, which is exactly what a mixed-ability social night needs — and it's the format ClubLono recommends and runs for spikeball. If you've drawn fresh pairs that night, re-draw partners between rounds so the strong players are spread around and nobody's stuck carrying or being carried.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: you get three touches to put the ball back onto the net (most pairs use two), there are no fixed sides so you can move anywhere around the net, and after the serve the rally is a free-for-all of angles and dives. Don't drown them in the rulebook on hindrances and pocket calls — three rules and a patient partner is enough to get someone hooked on the first good rally.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and with roundnet's churn of curious one-timers and term-time students, it's where the real work is.

Communicate in one place

If session reminders live in a WhatsApp group, cancellations in a Facebook event and the social plans in someone's camera-roll chat, members will miss things. 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 "rained off, moving indoors" message reaches the right people, not all 60 members at once.

Schedule sessions ahead

"Same time every week" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks, including the weeks you're not running because the hall's booked or it's reading week. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with capacity limits, and members get a push notification when something new opens — no separate Facebook event needed. For an outdoor club, a quick way to flip a session indoors when the forecast turns is worth its weight in gold.

Lean into the social side

Roundnet's culture is loud, friendly and a bit silly — that's the retention engine, so feed it. A post-session drink, a daft team name, photos of the best diving save in the chat: this is what turns "a thing I tried once" into "my club". Add a light competitive layer for the regulars who want it (a monthly ladder, a club champion), but keep the welcoming, anyone-can-play front door wide open.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section. Roundnet has no single, established UK national governing body in the way badminton or tennis do — the sport is community-run here, with informal player networks and tournament organisers rather than an affiliating body that hands you a club insurance policy. That means you can't lean on a governing body's cover, so you arrange the essentials yourself.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running sessions in a hired venue, and many venues require it as a condition of booking before they'll let you in. Without a national governing body to bundle it, get a standalone policy through a sports-club or community-group insurer — they're inexpensive for a small, low-equipment club. If you ever affiliate to a recognised roundnet or multi-sport body that does offer cover, read what's actually included rather than assuming it's comprehensive.

Safeguarding

If you run sessions for under-18s you need a safeguarding lead, DBS-checked session leaders and a written policy. With no roundnet governing body to supply templates, borrow a reputable generic framework — the NSPCC's Child Protection in Sport Unit publishes free, adaptable materials — 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 — and it's doubly tempting to skip when the sums are small, which is exactly when bad habits set in.

7. Grow without burning out

Most volunteer-run clubs don't collapse from a lack of members — they collapse because the one person doing all the admin gets tired and quits. Roundnet clubs are especially prone to this: they often start as one enthusiast's net in a park, and that enthusiast becomes a single point of failure. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputy hosts who can collect the nets, peg out, take attendance, run the rotation and pack down when you're away.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment chasing, session reminders, the queue, refunds on a rained-off night — 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 or back home for the summer.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — venue contact, payment login, where the nets and pump live, the wet-weather plan — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small roundnet club on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a "winners stay on" honour system. Plenty do. It works at 12 players, creaks at 30, and becomes a part-time unpaid job by the time you've got five nets going and a waitlist.

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.
• Fees stop being chased and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• The queue stops being "who shouts loudest" and becomes a phone-based rotation nobody can skip.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook and live in one members-only chat.
• Sessions become a published calendar with capacity limits and automatic refunds when you cancel.

ClubLono is £0/month for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, round-robin matching, 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 for a venue tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing. There is no per-player fee, and there's no point at which Premium costs more than free. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a fast-growing, sociable group of roundnet players who'd rather be diving for a save than buried in admin.