How to Run a Tennis Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Tennis carries more baggage than most racket sports — people arrive assuming whites, membership ballots and a three-year waiting list. A good club night quietly does the opposite: someone can turn up in trainers, borrow a racket, play three sets and be hooked before they've worked out the scoring. Setting up for that is the whole game.

Court and venue

A tennis court is 78ft long and 27ft wide for singles, widening to 36ft for doubles, with the net at 3ft 6in at the posts and 3ft in the centre. In the UK you're choosing between three surfaces, and the surface shapes your club more than you'd think: acrylic hard courts (low maintenance, play all year, the default for council and park courts), artificial grass or clay (kinder on knees, slower bounce), and real grass (lovely, seasonal, and a maintenance commitment most volunteer clubs should run a mile from). Floodlit hard courts are the workhorse of UK club tennis because they let you run on dark winter evenings — the difference between a year-round club and a summer-only one.

Most new clubs don't own courts; they hire them. Park courts run by the council (often via the LTA's ClubSpark booking system since the 2022 park-court investment programme), school courts, or block-booked hours at a leisure centre all work. Lock in a recurring slot before anything else — a fixed "Wednesday 6–8pm under lights" does more for retention than any flyer. Ask about a block-booking discount and whether you can leave a net winder and a court squeegee on site.

Equipment

You need less than you'd fear: a few loan rackets for newcomers, a steady supply of balls, a way to mark up the queue, and a first aid kit. Balls are the recurring cost that catches new hosts out — pressurised balls (the classic tube that hisses when you open it) play beautifully but go dead in a couple of weeks, while pressureless balls last for months but feel heavier. Buy in bulk, label opened tubes with the date, and accept that you'll get through more than you budgeted for. If your courts aren't permanently lined and netted, you'll also need a portable net, which is heavy and a pain — another reason on-site storage is worth negotiating hard for.

Open play vs structured format

Decide whether you're running open play (turn up, get matched into sets, rotate partners and opponents — low commitment, very social) or structured sessions (fixed ladders, box leagues, members' singles nights). Tennis has a strong "rock up and rally" culture that open play serves perfectly, and it's the easiest format for absorbing beginners and casual returners — the lapsed players who used to knock up at uni and fancy starting again. Most thriving clubs run open social sessions as the welcoming front door, then layer a ladder or box league on top once they know who the regulars are.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Tennis has a recruitment quirk most sports would envy: huge latent demand (everyone played at school, half the country watches Wimbledon) but a reputation for being closed and a bit stuffy. Your job is to convert that latent interest by being visibly the opposite — open, casual, beginner-friendly — and then to channel it without the session descending into chaos.

Where to recruit

• Local Facebook groups — town pages and "things to do in [town]" groups convert fast. A photo of a busy court, plus a clear "next session Wednesday 6pm, £7, rackets and balls provided, beginners genuinely welcome", and you'll get replies the same evening.
• The LTA's club and court finder — registering your club (or your venue, if you run on park courts) gets you listed on the LTA site and the ClubSpark/Rally apps, catching the steady stream of people searching "tennis near me".
• Park courts themselves — a laminated sign on the court fence ("Social tennis here Wednesdays, all welcome") reaches the exact people already walking past with a racket.
• Padel, pickleball and squash players — racket-sport players cross over constantly, and the padel and pickleball booms have created a wave of people who'd happily add a tennis night to their week.
• Lapsed players — the biggest untapped pool in British tennis is people who played as teenagers and stopped. "No standard required, we'll lend you a racket" speaks directly to them.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested newcomer is to make them email a secretary, wait three days for a reply, and fill in a paper membership form on arrival — exactly the stuffy-club experience they were bracing for. 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, no committee approval bottleneck unless you choose to gate it.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Court hire and floodlight time make tennis pricier to run than hall-based racket sports, so getting the money model right matters more here than most. There are three approaches worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-session

Players pay £6–£10 each time, reflecting court hire and lights. Pros: fair for irregular attendees, easy for one-off guests trying a session, no awkward "I've not been in a while" conversations. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing money on the night — when someone's always a fiver short and "will get you next week" — is the most thankless job in club running.

Annual or monthly membership

Tennis clubs have a long tradition of annual membership, often pegged to the summer season. A fixed fee covering unlimited sessions. Pros: smooth, predictable income and minimal per-session admin. Cons: a single big annual payment is a real barrier for newcomers, and it doesn't suit sporadic players who'll feel they're subsidising everyone else.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted membership (monthly is gentler on newcomers than a lump-sum annual fee) for regulars, plus a guest rate for one-off players. Best of both worlds — and given how many tennis newcomers want to "just try a session" before committing, a guest rate is essential rather than optional. 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 and floodlight cost. Divide the total by a realistic attendance number (not your aspirational one), add a little for balls — your biggest consumable — and round to a number people can pay quickly. Charging £7 instead of £6.80 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a club over twenty pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a tennis club either grows by word of mouth or quietly stalls. Players forgive a slightly pricey session or a court with a worn baseline. They do not forgive standing on the side for forty minutes while the same four people monopolise the only floodlit court — and with tennis games running long, that risk is real.

The queue

The traditional approach — names chalked on a board, or an unspoken "whoever's been waiting longest" honour system — works until it doesn't, and it quietly rewards whoever's confident enough to chase a court 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 on when a court frees up. Nobody can jump 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 rotation

Fair matchmaking is the single biggest factor in retention. A beginner who keeps getting bagelled 6–0 by a county-standard player stops coming back; a strong player stuck rallying with someone who can't return a serve gets bored. The fix in tennis is short, rotating games so nobody is stuck in a one-sided match for an hour. ClubLono uses the round robin format by default — over a session everyone plays a spread of partners and opponents rather than the same pairing all night — and a built-in rating (we call it HLR) updates per match so groupings stay balanced without you doing the maths. Because tennis is singles by default but supports a doubles toggle, you can run a singles ladder night or a doubles social from the same roster; doubles, with four on a court instead of two, is the friendlier choice when numbers are high and courts are tight.

Scoring

ClubLono scores tennis the real way: points to 15, 30, 40 then game, deuce and advantage at 40–40, six games to a set (win by two), and best-of-three sets by default. For social nights that's often too long to fit a rotation, so the common shortcuts are a single set, a short set (first to four games), or a match tie-break (first to 10 points, win by two) in place of a deciding set. Decide the format before the first ball and announce it — without a rule, one marathon three-setter leaves everyone else watching. ClubLono tracks the score and standings so you can play instead of refereeing a clipboard.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers, because tennis scoring is genuinely baffling the first time you hear it. Cover the three things that actually matter on the night: the funny scoring (15, 30, 40, then game), that you get two serves, and that the ball must land in the diagonal service box on the serve. Skip the rest of the rulebook — a few rallies with a patient partner teaches more than any lecture.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and for an outdoor, weather-dependent sport where one washed-out month can break a casual player's habit, it's where the real work is.

Communicate in one place

If session reminders live in a WhatsApp group, weather cancellations in a Facebook event, and the social plans in someone's camera-roll chat, members will miss things — and a "is it on tonight?" message at 5pm when rain's forecast is the most common question in tennis clubs. 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 "courts are flooded, we're off" reaches exactly the right people, not all 80 members.

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 courts are booked for a tournament or the clocks have left you without light. 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 a seasonal sport, publishing the winter floodlit schedule early is a quiet signal that the club keeps going when the casual players assume it's stopped.

Make it social

The clubs that retain best are the ones where people make actual friends. Tennis lends itself to it — a club championship finals day with a barbecue, a winter social, an end-of-season knockabout mixed-doubles tournament. None of this is software's job, but it shouldn't get in the way either: post the photos in the chat, and let the standings from your ladder give people a reason to keep turning up.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — and in tennis most of it is well covered by the national governing body, the Lawn Tennis Association.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running sessions in a hired venue, and many councils and venues require it as a condition of booking the courts. Registering with the LTA (the Lawn Tennis Association — the governing body for tennis in Great Britain, with Tennis Scotland, Tennis Wales and Tennis Ulster as the home nations) typically includes a liability policy as part of club registration. Read what's actually covered, because affiliation cover is usually a floor rather than full protection — and if you run on council park courts, check whether the council requires its own named cover too.

Safeguarding

If you run sessions for under-18s you need a welfare officer, DBS-checked coaches and a written safeguarding policy. The LTA publishes a full safeguarding standard and templates — use them rather than writing one from scratch, and note that any coach you bring in should hold an LTA accreditation and their own DBS check.

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 tennis clubs, with their annual subs and court-hire bills, move more money than most.

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. Tennis clubs are especially prone to it: there's the court booking, the floodlight key, the ball orders, the membership renewals, the weather calls. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck before they burn out.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputy hosts who can unlock the courts, put up the net, take attendance and make the rain call when you're away.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment chasing, session reminders, the queue, refunds when a session's rained off — 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 — court-booking login, floodlight key code, ball supplier, payment login, where the portable net lives — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small tennis club on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a chalkboard. Plenty do. It works at 15 members, creaks at 40, and becomes a part-time unpaid job at 80 — and tennis clubs reach 80 quickly once word gets round that yours actually lets beginners play.

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 a chalkboard 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 become a published calendar with capacity limits and automatic refunds when you cancel a rained-off night.

ClubLono is free 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 clubhouse 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 tennis players who'd rather be on court than buried in admin.