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Dan Quirk

It’s something that every amateur sports club secretary or captain faces – a constant uphill battle of ringing and texting possible players, arranging transport and pitches and double checking everything.

Enter Dan Quirk and his Manchester Science Park-based company QMTech with their new web application, Clubhouse, a brilliantly simple idea that allows players to register their availability online and the selectors to simply pick the team and publish it.

Like most great ideas, it formed out of what Dan calls "necessity", after he found the system his club, Brooklands, were using to be far too cumbersome.

"I was playing cricket last year with the club captain and we got into conversation about how time-consuming selection can be when you have such a large club of people.

"We were using texts. Each Friday, you got a text message asking if you could play the following week and while it worked, I thought it could be done better – you couldn’t see more than a week ahead and if you didn’t answer the text, then you wouldn’t be picked.

In Clubhouse, you simply highlight if you make it

"And, of course, the guy at the other end had to collate 80 odd texts and then when selection had been made, he had to text everyone with team news, meet times and all that sort of stuff."

Not sport-specific

Dan knows the hard work of it all only too well – he’s a former university lacrosse captain who had to do all the arranging himself – which is why he decided to use his grasp of all things technical to help his leisure be more of a pleasure.

"I’ve got a company with a good friend of mine and we’ve been involved in technology and IT for quite a while. We’re used to using things online – when I book a flight or a train ticket, I buy them online – I suppose I found it odd that we were doing things by text.

"Plus I forget things all the time, so I’d forget about the text and end up not playing cricket. I just thought, ‘we could do something good with this’, and then the entrepreneur in me thought, ‘everyone else can use this too'."

"Any team sport can use it. There’s nothing specific to cricket about it. It’s simply a set of players making themselves available or not for certain fixtures and then a selection committee picking the team and letting them know.

"You find in a sports club that while everyone is friends, some people are closer than others and things are a little disjointed. People don’t see each other in the week - they live in different places, have different jobs – and we’ve found that this system allows everyone to communicate with each other and keep in touch."

'Phenomenally simple'

Dan says his own experience as a sports player didn’t just help with the initial idea – it has also meant he has an insight into what a team will actually want (and importantly, not need) from Clubhouse.

"The idea was to make it flexible. The thing we’ve learnt is that programmers tend to make things too feature heavy and complicated, and this is a nice balance between allowing you to do something and being phenomenally simple at the same time.

Green means you can play, red means you can't

"There just two statuses within it; a player role and an admin role – a player can make themselves available and see the rest of the team’s details, while an admin can pick teams, enter fixtures and that kind of stuff."

It’s still early days for Clubhouse. Dan has only tested it with his own club this season, to make sure it is what a team needs, but he says that interest in the application is picking up.

"We only built it in April; at the start, it was raw, but over the last few months, we’ve refined it and added the wiki and the blog to give it some infrastructure, mainly because we want to see other people using it.

"Recently I’ve taken it with Brooklands’ blessing to one of the leagues we play in, talked to about 20 clubs about and four have already signed up to have a look round it and get ready to use it for next season.

"It’s very new, but we’re in the process of letting people know about it. Our next step is to let the universities know about it, because it’s ideal for there – there’s a lot of young people who are used to using the web and lots of team sports – so it’s an exciting time."

Indeed it is, especially when you realise that the service is totally free to sign up to and use. It seems the prayers of the weary club secretary may have just been answered.