How to Run a Volleyball Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Volleyball has a higher floor than a racket sport — you can't run a meaningful session with four people the way a badminton club can. Six a side means you need twelve bodies on court before a proper game even starts, so everything about setup is geared towards getting and keeping numbers.

Court and venue

An indoor volleyball court is 18m by 9m, with a net height of 2.43m for men and 2.24m for women (mixed clubs usually settle on one height). The non-negotiable is ceiling clearance — you want a genuinely high roof, ideally 7m or more, because a volleyball lives in the air and a low ceiling turns every set into a let. In the UK that means a proper sports hall: leisure centres, universities and the larger secondary schools are your best bet. A standard badminton-spec hall is often too low, so check the ceiling before you check the price.

Lock in a recurring slot before anything else — a fixed "Wednesday 8–10pm" does more for retention than any flyer. Negotiate a discount on a block booking, and ask whether you can store your net, posts and ball bag on-site. Volleyball kit is bulky, and hauling net posts in and out of your car every week is the fastest way to resent your own club.

Equipment

You need: a net and posts (many halls supply these — confirm in writing, and check they reach full volleyball height), an antennae set if you want to play strictly to the rules, a bag of match balls (Mikasa V200W and Molten are the indoor standards; carry three or four so a stray ball doesn't stop play), a pump, and a first aid kit. Knee pads are a personal-kit item, but keep a spare pair for newcomers diving on a hard floor for the first time. Don't kit out a cupboard before you have members — buy what you actually run out of.

Format

Decide whether you're running open play (turn up, get put on a team, rotate winners and losers across the night — low commitment, very social) or structured sessions (fixed teams, drills, a coached block, or a club ladder). Most thriving volleyball clubs lean on open play to build numbers, because the social, "everyone gets a game" format is what brings people back. Layer structure on top once you know who your regulars are.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Because volleyball needs a dozen people to work, your member problem is different from a racket club's. You're not just recruiting — you're managing the gap between "fifteen said they're keen" and "eleven showed up on a wet Wednesday". Both halves matter.

Where to recruit

• Universities and recent graduates — volleyball has a big student following in the UK, and the stream of graduates looking for a club after they leave uni is your warmest audience. A post in local alumni and "new to [city]" groups converts well.
• Volleyball England's club finder — affiliating gets your club listed, which catches people searching "volleyball near me" and lends credibility with a venue.
• Local Facebook groups — town pages and "things to do in [town]" groups. A photo and a clear "next session Wednesday 8pm, £6, all abilities, no experience needed" gets replies the same day.
• Beach and grass leagues in summer — players who do beach or grass volleyball over the summer want somewhere indoors come September. Be the club they find.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested newcomer is to make them email you, wait for a reply, and then not know whether there's even space this week. 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 book a spot. 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, and a clear head-count for the night instead of a guessing game.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

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

Pay-per-session

Players pay £5–£8 each time. Pros: fair for irregular attendees, easy for one-off players trying the sport. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing money on the night is the most thankless job in club running — doubly so when you're also trying to count whether you've got two full teams.

Monthly membership

A fixed monthly fee covering unlimited sessions. Pros: smooth, predictable income and far less per-session admin. Cons: it doesn't suit shift workers or sporadic players, and in a sport where attendance swings week to week, some members will feel they're overpaying in a quiet month.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted monthly membership for regulars, plus a guest rate for one-off players. Best of both worlds — and because so many volleyball newcomers arrive via a friend "just to make up the numbers", a simple 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. A high-ceilinged sports hall is one of the pricier slots to rent, so divide the hire by a realistic attendance number (twelve, not your aspirational eighteen), add a little for balls, 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 club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a volleyball club either grows by word of mouth or quietly stalls. Players forgive a pricey hall or a bouncy floor. They do not forgive standing on the sideline for forty minutes while the same six keep the court, or being stuck on a team that loses every rally because the sides were never balanced.

The queue and the teams

With twelve on a court and more waiting, you need a system for who plays and who sits. A digital queue fixes the sideline problem: players tap to join from their phone, see their position, and get called on when a spot frees up. Nobody can skip the line, and you're not the bad guy keeping a mental list. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee.

Matching and rotation

Volleyball's recommended session format in ClubLono is King of the Court, perfect for a drop-in night. There's a "king" end and a "challenger" end: the team that wins the rally goes to (or stays at) the king's end and scores a point, the losers rotate off and a fresh team comes on at the challenger end. It keeps every team in a game and rewards winning without letting one side camp the court forever. Balance the teams up front for an even night, or let them fall as drawn for a free-for-all. Either way ClubLono handles the rotation so you can play instead of marshalling people.

Scoring

Volleyball uses rally scoring (points) — a point is won on every single rally, by whichever side wins it, regardless of who served. A full set is first to 25, win by 2 (so 25–23 is a result but 25–24 plays on). On a King of the Court night you'll usually play short — first to a set number per round, or a quick timed round — to keep teams cycling on and off. Set the target explicitly: "rounds to 7, win by 2" keeps the queue moving, whereas open-ended sets to 25 leave half the room watching. ClubLono tracks the points and standings so the scoreboard isn't an argument.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: three touches max per side (you can't hit it twice in a row yourself), the ball can be played off the net, and the basic rotation — when your team wins the serve back, everyone rotates one position clockwise. Don't drown them in libero rules on night one. Three rules, a forgiving team and a couple of decent rallies is enough to get someone hooked.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and in volleyball it's existential, because losing three regulars can be the difference between a full court and a cancelled night.

Communicate in one place

If session reminders live in a WhatsApp group, cancellations in a Facebook event and the "can anyone make up the numbers tonight?" plea in someone's DMs, people will miss things — and missed messages in volleyball mean an 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 "we're two short, who's free?" reaches exactly the right people.

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 is booked. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with capacity limits and a waitlist, and members get a push notification when something opens — so you watch the head-count climb towards twelve days in advance instead of sweating it on the night.

Add a competitive layer

Once you have a stable core, enter a team into a local league or run an internal ladder. Volleyball players who've found their level love a bit of structure to climb, and a regional or county league fixture gives the committed ones a reason to train. Keep open play as the welcoming front door, and let the competitive side sit alongside it for those who want it.

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 in a hired venue, and many venues require it as a condition of booking. In the UK the national governing body is Volleyball England, and affiliating typically bundles a basic insurance policy for affiliated clubs and members. Read what's actually covered, because affiliation cover is usually a floor rather than full protection — and check whether it covers your warm-up and any social or beach sessions, not just league play.

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 — and note that junior and senior players sharing a session brings its own safeguarding considerations.

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.

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, recruiting and "we need two more for tonight" chasing 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 put up the net, take attendance, run the rotation and lock up when you're away.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment chasing, session reminders, the queue and waitlist, 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 — venue contact, payment login, net height, where the posts and balls are stored, key codes — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small volleyball club on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a tin of cash. Plenty do. It works at fifteen members, creaks at forty, and becomes a part-time unpaid job once you're juggling two teams, a waitlist and a league fixture. 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 and waitlist stop being a head-count in your head and become 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.

ClubLono is £0/month 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 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. Premium pays for itself once a club is doing roughly £500/month in paid sessions on monthly billing, and there's no point at which it costs more than free. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: volleyball players who'd rather be spiking than counting heads and chasing fivers.