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.
SportsHQ, software for sports clubs
Less admin.
More of the sport.
Rowing, sailing, canoe and kayak clubs run on volunteers. Our apps take on the bookings, rotas and records so those volunteers can get back to the water. Gliding is next. SportsHQ oversees all of them.
Three problems we built around
Sound familiar?
Each one has an app built around it. The status next to each name is the real one.
Nobody knows who has the boat.
The booking sheet in the boathouse is out of date, two crews turn up for the same hull, and the person who knows what happened is not answering their phone. It is the oldest club problem there is.
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Boat bookings, crews and sessions in one place, so the club can see which hulls are out before anyone carries one down to the water.
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Craft and equipment records that follow the kit beyond a single booking, alongside club sessions and trips.
The duty rota lives in one person's inbox.
A race day needs a race officer, safety boat cover and someone on the galley. Filling those slots by email takes a week and the rota is still wrong on the morning.
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Duty rotas, boats, members and race programmes together, built for the shore-side work that makes a sailing day possible.
Member records are spread across three spreadsheets.
Contact details in one file, qualifications in another, and who is on the next trip in a third, each kept by a different volunteer. When one of them steps down, the club loses the lot.
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Paddler records, sessions and trip records kept together for canoe and kayak clubs.
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Member details and club records held with the bookings, so the committee works from one view.
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Being built to connect aircraft records, member information and training records for gliding clubs. No public launch has been confirmed.
How to choose.
Pick the app for your sport. Each one is built around that sport's kit, sessions and roles.
RowHQ knows about crews and hulls. SailHQ knows about duties and race programmes. KanuHQ knows about paddlers, craft and trips. None of them is a general club database with a sport name on the front.
RowHQ, SailHQ and KanuHQ are available now, and each product's own website has current pricing and how a club gets started. GlideHQ is in development, so ask us about it rather than looking for a sign-up page.
Runs more than one sport? Email us and we will say plainly which app fits, or whether none does yet.
Meet the SportsHQ collectionRead before you buy
Guides for club volunteers.
Running a sailing club duty rota that fills itself
How sailing clubs set duty expectations, why swaps are the hard part, and how to organise race officer, safety boat and galley cover so a race day does not depend on one volunteer chasing everyone.
Canoe club sessions, kit and consent: getting the records right
A canoe club runs two seasons with different limits, borrowed kit and paddlers of every level. This guide covers the records a club needs for sessions, trips, equipment and consent, and how to keep them in one place.
What a gliding club actually needs from flying-day software
A gliding club's day produces one record that five people depend on: the flight. This guide sets out what that record has to carry, what clubs use today, and the questions to ask before trusting any software with it.
Talk to the people building it
Find your next HQ.
A question about an app, or about the company?
We'll point you in the right direction.