Booking a pitch shouldn’t need a phone call

12 July 2026

We studied every booking system UK clubs actually use before building ours. Here’s what they get right, what they don’t, and what your clubhouse deserves.

Most grassroots facilities are still booked by ringing the steward. The clubs that have gone digital use tools built for someone else: court systems that hide the price until you're three screens in, hall-hire diaries that treat a deposit as a line on an invoice someone has to chase, council platforms that don't know your under-10s train on the 3G every Tuesday. The best of them taught us plenty. The LTA's court booking shows the price inside every free slot — you know the cost before you touch anything. That's the bar, and we kept it: on a ClubTitan booking grid the price in each cell is YOUR price — members see the member rate, visitors see the standard one. But even the best fall over in the same three places. On a phone, you can only see one court at a time. Deposits and damage deposits are handled by hand, if at all. And none of them know what your club is doing — so the pitch gets double-booked against training, and someone has an awkward conversation. Ours starts from the club. Fixtures, training and club events block the diary automatically, so a space that's in use is simply never offered. A function-room hire takes a deposit at booking and the balance before the date, on its own. The refundable security deposit is charged with the final payment and released — or, if the room comes back worse than it went out, retained, with a human deciding, never a machine. Book the hall and the kitchen comes with it. Cancel, and the next person on the waitlist gets first refusal. And a visitor booking your five-a-side pitch on a Friday night? Name, email, pay — no account, no app. Their booking lives at a private link. If they never pay, the slot quietly goes back on sale. Idle facilities are the most common untapped income a grassroots club has. The clubhouse that earns its keep pays for the goalposts. That's the point of all of it.