Built the internal leaderboard and events ops for a private tennis club.

Quiet work for an active member base — a leaderboard platform that actually gets checked, plus the tournament and events coordination that keeps the calendar moving.

Private Club — 2025/26

Live

Internal Leaderboard

Ops

Tournament Coordination

01The problem

Members played. The standings lived in someone's head.

Like a lot of established clubs, Fitzwilliam ran a healthy programme of internal competition — ladders, tournaments, mini-leagues — but the standings, schedules, and results existed in spreadsheets, whiteboards, and the staff's collective memory. Members wanted to check their position. Staff wanted to spend less time updating things by hand.

"You don't need a CRM. You need the one thing members actually check, surfaced in the place they already look."

02Approach

Smallest viable internal tool. Real members. Real friction reduction.

A / 01

Leaderboard that staff can update in a minute

Built a lightweight standings layer that staff update post-match. No member self-reporting (that breaks under social pressure). The bar is "less than a minute per match to log."

A / 02

Tournament coordination layer

Fixtures, court allocation, comms to entrants — the boring middleware that turns "we should run a tournament" into "the tournament is happening on Saturday."

A / 03

Visible to members in a way they'll actually look at

The leaderboard surfaces through the channels members already check, not a separate login. The most-used feature is the one that gets a quick glance — anything heavier dies on contact.

Built with

Web stackSpreadsheet integration Lightweight UIComms tooling

03What I'd take elsewhere

Most "internal tools" want to be smaller than they end up.

The temptation with any private members club is to over-engineer — full CRM, full app, full database of preferences nobody asked for. Resist. The thing that earned daily attention here was a one-screen leaderboard. The thing that saved real time was a sane way to manage tournament fixtures. Two small things, well placed, beat one big thing nobody opens.

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