How to Run a Squash Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Squash is unforgiving in the best way: it's a hard, fast, one-on-one game on an enclosed court, and a good session leaves people genuinely tired and pleased with themselves. The trade-off is that it's not a "turn up and we'll squeeze you in" sport — only two players use a court at a time, so your whole operation is built around scarce court hours and matching people fairly.

Court and venue

A singles squash court is 9.75m long by 6.4m wide, with a front wall marked by an out-line at 4.57m, a service line at 1.78m and a tin (the "no" zone) at the bottom — 19 inches high in the standard game. Most UK clubs either own dedicated courts (the classic plaster-walled or glass-backed leisure-centre court) or hire court time from a leisure centre or racquets club on a recurring block. You won't be taping lines onto a sports-hall floor the way a badminton or pickleball club does — squash needs a proper four-walled court, so the venue largely defines the club. Lock in a recurring block of court hours first: a fixed "Wednesday 7–9pm, two courts" does more for retention than any flyer.

Negotiate on a block booking, and ask about storage for a club racquet bag and a ball tube. Courts get warm and airless, so check ventilation — a stuffy court empties faster than a cold one.

Equipment

You need surprisingly little: a handful of loan racquets for newcomers, a tube of balls graded by speed (the double-yellow-dot is the standard slow club ball, but keep red or blue dots — bouncier and warmer — for beginners and cold courts), protective eyewear (strongly recommended, required for juniors at most clubs), and a first aid kit. The graded balls matter more than people expect: a double-yellow that barely bounces convinces a nervous beginner that squash isn't for them. Start them on a bouncier ball and let them earn the slow one.

Format

Decide whether you're running open court time (members book or sign up for a court and arrange their own games — low admin, but cliquey if you leave it alone) or a structured club night (a rotation across courts, a box league, organised matches). Most healthy squash clubs do both: a booking sheet for casual games through the week, plus one or two organised club nights where newcomers actually get a game and the box league gets played. Open booking alone tends to favour the established pairs and quietly freezes out anyone new.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Squash has a loyal, slightly under-served following: plenty of people played at school or university, drifted away, and would happily come back if they had courts, opponents at their level and a low-friction way in. Your job is less "create demand" and more "make it easy for lapsed and curious players to find you and get a game".

Where to recruit

• Local Facebook groups — town pages and "things to do in [town]" groups work well. A photo, a clear "club night Wednesday 7pm, £6, racquets and a beginner ball provided, all levels", and you'll get replies the same evening.
• England Squash's club finder — affiliating gets your club listed (along with the equivalents in Scottish Squash, Squash Wales and Ulster Squash), which catches the steady trickle of people searching "squash near me" or "squash courts [town]".
• Leisure centres and racquets clubs — the venue you hire from often has its own enquiry list of people asking about squash, plus walk-up court bookers who'd join a club if asked. Ask staff to point them at you.
• Universities, workplaces and other racquet sports — squash recruits heavily from ex-players and from tennis, badminton and racketball/squash 57 crossovers. A noticeboard flyer or a Slack post reaches a warm audience.

Make joining painless

The slowest way to lose an interested player is to make them email you, wait for a reply, and fill in a paper form at the desk. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the roster, shows the next club night, 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 on the roster and in the box-league pool — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you to maintain.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

There are three models worth considering, and squash clubs often run all three at once because court costs and play patterns vary so much.

Pay-per-session

Players pay £5–£8 for a club night, or a court fee for a casual booking. Pros: fair for irregular players and lapsed returners testing the waters. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing a fiver off someone as they leave a sweaty court is the most thankless job in club running.

Monthly or annual membership

A fixed fee covering unlimited club nights, often with discounted court booking on top. Pros: smooth, predictable income that suits the committed core who play two or three times a week. Cons: it doesn't suit sporadic players, who'll feel they're subsidising the regulars.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted membership for the core, plus a guest rate for one-off players and a court fee for casual bookings. Best of both worlds — and given how many squash newcomers are "just seeing if my knees still work", 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 of your booked courts by a realistic attendance number (not the night everyone shows up), add a little for balls and incidentals, and round to a number people can pay quickly. Charging £6 instead of £5.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a squash club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a squash club either grows by word of mouth or quietly calcifies into the same six people who've played each other for a decade. Because only two players use a court at once, court time is your scarcest resource — and how you share it out is the difference between a welcoming club and a clique.

The queue and the booking sheet

The classic squash booking sheet — a laminated grid by the courts, or the leisure centre's online slot booker — works for casual play, but on a club night it rewards whoever books fastest and quietly punishes newcomers who don't know the system. 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, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session.

Matching players

Fair matchmaking is the single biggest factor in squash retention — a lopsided match is brutal because the weaker player barely touches the ball. Beginners who lose 11–1, 11–0 stop coming; strong players stuck rallying with someone who can't keep the ball off the tin get bored. ClubLono runs sessions on a round robin by default — over a club night each player gets several short games against others at a similar standard — and the built-in rating (we call it HLR) updates per game so pairings stay fair without you doing the maths. If your players track an external rating, Premium clubs can export results.

Scoring and rotation

Squash is scored in points: modern point-a-rally scoring (PARS) means a point is won on every rally regardless of who served, and games go to 11, win by 2 — so 11–9 is a win but 10–10 plays on to 12–10, 13–11 and so on. Matches are usually best of five games, but on a busy club night you'll want shorter formats: single games to 11, or best of three, so the court keeps turning over. Set the rule explicitly before you start — without one, a marathon 15–13, 14–12 epic leaves four people standing in the gallery. ClubLono handles scoring and standings, so the only thing you referee is the occasional let or stroke call.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: hit the front wall above the tin and below the out-line, the ball can bounce once before you return it, you can use the side and back walls, and — most important for safety in an enclosed court — give your opponent room to play the ball, which is what "lets" and "strokes" are about. Don't recite the rulebook; three rules, eyewear and a patient partner is enough to get someone hooked.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and squash players are creatures of habit, which works in your favour once you've got the habit started.

Communicate in one place

If club-night reminders live in a WhatsApp group, box-league results on a clipboard and the social plans in someone's camera-roll chat, members will miss things and the league will stall. 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 "court 2 is double-booked, all on court 1 tonight" reaches the right people, not all 80 members at once.

Schedule sessions ahead

"Same night every week" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks, including the weeks you're not on because the courts are hosting a tournament or closed for resurfacing. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with capacity limits per court, and members get a push notification when something new opens — no separate Facebook event needed.

Run a box league

Nothing keeps squash players coming back like a box league. Sort players into boxes of four or five by standard, give each box a month to play their round-robin matches, then promote the top one or two and relegate the bottom. It gives every member a reason to chase a game every week and a tangible sense of progress. Keep casual play and the club night as the welcoming front door, and let the box league sit alongside for those who want the competition.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — most of it is well covered by your national governing body.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running sessions on hired or owned courts, and many venues require it as a condition of booking. Affiliating to England Squash (or Scottish Squash, Squash Wales or Ulster Squash for the rest of the UK) typically includes a basic policy — read what's actually covered, because affiliation cover is usually a floor rather than full protection. Squash is an enclosed-court contact-risk sport, so eye-injury and collision claims are the realistic exposure; make protective eyewear the norm and you'll cut the risk and the premium argument at once.

Safeguarding

If you run sessions for under-18s you need a safeguarding lead, DBS-checked coaches and a written policy. Use England Squash's templates and SafeSquash guidance 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 and court money with your personal current account is the fastest route to a difficult committee meeting two years from now.

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, running the box league and chasing court fees 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 open up, sort the courts and run the club night when you're away, and hand the box league to a willing organiser.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment chasing, session reminders, the queue, box-league standings and refunds can all be a tool's job. A league table that lives only on a clipboard in your kit bag falls over the moment you're on holiday.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — venue and court-desk contacts, payment login, key codes, where the loan racquets and balls live — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small squash club on a booking sheet, a WhatsApp group and a box-league clipboard. Plenty do. It works at 15 members, creaks at 40, and becomes a part-time unpaid job once you're reconciling court fees, membership and a multi-box league by hand.

Dedicated club software collapses several 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 a laminated booking grid and becomes a phone-based list nobody can skip.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook and live in one members-only chat.
• Sessions and standings become a published calendar and an automatic box-league table, with automatic refunds when you cancel.

ClubLono is free for a single club with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, round-robin 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 court-side 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. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a regular group of squash players who'd rather be on court than buried in admin.