The problem
Nobody knows who has the boat
Two crews, one hull, and a booking sheet that stopped being true on Thursday. The oldest problem in rowing, and why the spreadsheet does not fix it.
It is seven on a Saturday morning. A four is already on the water. The other crew booked for that boat is standing on the landing stage with their oars, looking at an empty rack. The sheet on the boathouse wall says the boat is theirs. The captain who knows what actually happened is not answering the phone.
Nobody did anything wrong. That is what makes it so hard to fix.
Why the sheet stops being true
A club keeps the booking record wherever it started. A paper sheet on the wall. Then a shared spreadsheet, because the sheet kept getting rained on. Then a group chat, because the spreadsheet was only ever right if someone remembered to open a laptop.
Each of those works for a while. Each fails the same way. The record and the boat are in different places, and the record only changes when a person remembers to change it.
So a coach swaps two crews on Thursday night and tells the group chat. A junior parent books a single on the spreadsheet without seeing the chat. The captain fixes a rigger and takes the boat off the water, and writes that on the sheet, which nobody reads any more. By Saturday there are three versions of the truth and none of them agree.
The people running the club then spend their morning on the phone instead of on the water. That is the cost. Not the double booking itself, which gets sorted in ten minutes of grumbling, but the hours a captain and a coach spend every week keeping three records in step by hand.
The chat is not the answer either
Clubs sometimes decide the answer is to make everyone use the group chat. It has the opposite effect. The chat holds every decision the club has ever made in one scrolling list, and the only way to know whether a boat is free is to read back through it. Nobody does. People ask, and the person who answers is guessing from memory.
A booking record has to be tied to three things: a named hull, a session with a time, and the crew that is going out in it. If any one of those lives somewhere else, the record breaks.
The app built around this
RowHQ
AvailableRowing club management software: boat bookings, crews, sessions and member records.
Read before you buy
The longer read.
How to run rowing club boat bookings without the spreadsheet
What goes wrong when a rowing club runs boat bookings on a spreadsheet and a group chat, and what to look for in a system that ties the boat, the crew and the session together.
Sound familiar too?
Other problems we built around.
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The flying day still runs on paper
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