Running your club

On a laptop, go to Clubs and hit "Create club". On your phone, tap the + button and pick Club. Either way it's the same form. You need a club name and at least one sport. Everything else — venue, description, logo, cover photo, contact phone and email — you can fill in now or come back to later from Edit club. Whoever creates the club is its owner. Pick sports carefully: on a club session the sport list is limited to the sports the club plays.

Edit club, from the club page. Owners and admins can both get in, but they don't get in to the same form. The owner edits the lot: name, description, logo, cover photo, venue and address, contact phone and email, and the auto-approve setting. On your phone an admin's row is called Edit branding and covers the cover photo, the logo and the club colour — not the name, the sports or the venue. Two fields are platform-specific either way: the sports the club plays are edited on your phone, and the club's website address on a laptop. If you never uploaded a cover photo, the club page borrows the photo of your venue, which is why the page has never looked empty. It also means the picture at the top of your club's page probably isn't yours. Uploading one replaces it, and the form tells you which of the two you're currently showing. Save is one action, so you can fix four things in one sitting rather than four.

You can set one club colour, on your phone, from Edit club. It's used behind white text — button labels, badges — so it has to be dark enough to read against. The test is the standard accessibility one: 4.5:1 contrast against white. If your colour doesn't reach it, the app refuses the save, tells you the ratio it measured, and offers a darkened version of your own colour that does pass. Most club crests already pass; the ones that don't are usually a bright mid-tone. Frienemi's own orange fails it, at 3.4:1 — so if we can't use our brand colour there, neither can a club with a similar one. Take the suggested darker shade rather than fighting it. That's the only colour there is. There's no theme, no second colour and no font choice.

Every club gets a six-character invite code and a join link built from it. Anyone who opens that link and signs in is in the club straight away — no approval step, no waiting on you. On your phone, tap the share icon on the club page. You get the link, a copy button, a QR code, and an option to send the invite to someone you search for by name. That QR is the join link as a square, so it works on a poster on the clubhouse noticeboard or on the back of a sign-up sheet. On the web, the Invite button gives you the link and a share button. Watch which QR you hold up. There's a second one in the club's ⋮ menu, labelled QR code, and it opens the club's page without joining anybody — it's for showing the club to someone, not for signing them up. The one in the share sheet is the one that adds a member. Two more things worth knowing. The code doesn't expire, and there's currently no way to retire one and issue a new code, so treat the link the way you'd treat a door key and don't post it somewhere public if the club is meant to be members-only. And if the club charges to join, the link won't let someone in for free; they're sent to the membership page instead.

Requests to join show up at the top of the Members tab, headed "Join requests", on both the web and your phone. Each one shows the person's name, their ratings, and whatever note they wrote. Approve or Reject. You can also turn on "Auto-approve join requests" so anyone who asks is let in immediately, without you having to look. The person is told when you approve them. They are deliberately not told when you reject them — there's no rejection notice, so nobody gets an awkward push notification. If your club charges to join, be careful with Approve: approving is a comp. They get a full membership and the club records nothing against it. The button says so before you tap it.

There are three roles: Owner, Admin and Member. The owner is whoever created the club, and there is exactly one. Admins can do nearly everything: post and pin announcements, approve join requests, delete anyone's chat message, import and export the member list, edit the club's branding, remove plain members, see who's about to lapse — and, on the money side, connect the club's Stripe payouts, write and price membership plans, and turn paid joining on. That last group surprises people, so it's worth saying plainly: an admin can start the club charging. Four things are the owner's alone: promoting and demoting admins, opening the club's own Stripe dashboard, handing the club over, and deleting it. On the web the Finance page — balances, individual payments, refunds and payouts — is the owner's too. To make someone an admin, open the Members tab, tap the ⋮ next to their name and choose "Make admin". Only the owner sees that option.

Yes. Edit club → Transfer ownership, on either a laptop or your phone. Only the current owner can do it. You can hand it to any active member, not just an admin — a club whose only other admin has left still needs to be able to name a successor. Pick the person, then confirm with their name in front of you. Three things happen at once, and two of them are easy to miss: You stop being the owner and become an admin. You don't leave the club and you don't lose management access. They become the owner. Owners don't pay for their own club, so if they were on an auto-renewing membership, that renewal stops. Nothing is refunded and a one-off membership is left alone. And there's no un-transfer. Getting the club back means the new owner choosing to hand it back, which isn't something you can do for yourself. Be sure before you confirm. It's still worth creating a club in the name of someone who'll be on the committee next season — but a club created in the wrong name is now fixable rather than fatal.

Only the owner can, and the app makes you mean it: you type the club's name, then re-enter your password. That second step is there because a phone left unlocked on a bench shouldn't be able to delete a club in two taps. If your club takes money, the first thing that happens isn't the deletion. Every member's auto-renewing membership is cancelled at Stripe first, and if even one of them can't be proven stopped, the whole delete is refused and the club is still there. A club that still exists can be fixed; a deleted club that's quietly still charging forty people cannot. Nobody is refunded. Cancelling stops the next charge; it doesn't hand back the last one. If your members are owed money, refund them from the Finance page before you delete. The club, its feed, its chat, its sessions and everyone's membership of it go. The payment records don't — they're kept, stamped with the club's name and the date it was deleted, so a treasurer can still reconcile a season the club no longer exists for. Your plans are switched off rather than erased, for the same reason. Members are told the club has been deleted. If what you actually want is to stop charging for a while, don't delete anything — turn paid joining off instead. If what you want is out of the job, hand the club over.

You can do this on either a laptop or your phone, whichever the spreadsheet is on. On the web: club page → Members tab → Import CSV, top right. On your phone: club page → the admin buttons under the header → Import CSV, then pick the file. Nothing is written until you say so. You choose the file, and you get a preview first showing what would happen to every row. Read it, then press Import. People who already have a Frienemi account are added to the club there and then. People who don't are recorded as invited, and they join the club automatically the moment they sign up with that same email address. That can be next week or next year — invitations don't expire. One thing to be clear about: Frienemi does not email the people in your file. Importing is not an invitation campaign. If you want them to know, send them the join link yourself — through your usual club newsletter or WhatsApp group. You can import up to 5,000 people in one file. Bigger than that, split it in two.

Only one is required: email. Four more are read if they're there: name, phone, plan and paid_through. Anything else in the file — notes, address, emergency contact, whatever your club keeps — is ignored, so you don't need to strip your sheet back before you upload it. You don't need to match our spelling. Headers are matched loosely: capitals, spaces, hyphens and punctuation are all ignored. So "Member Name", "E-Mail", "Mobile" and "Membership Type" all land where you'd expect. Your committee's own spreadsheet will very probably just work as it is. There is no role column, on purpose. An import can never make somebody an owner or an admin, so a stray column in a file someone forwarded you can't hand over the club. If a row can't be read — no email, or something that isn't an email address, or the same address twice — that one row is reported back to you and the rest of the file still imports.

Almost certainly because Excel reformatted them. Dates have to be written year first: 2026-08-01. The word NEVER is also accepted, for a membership that doesn't expire. What we refuse is 01/08/2026. To your committee that's the 1st of August. To a reader anywhere else in the world it's the 8th of January, and nothing in the file says which. Rather than guess and get it six months wrong, we hand it back and tell you we couldn't read it. Excel will rewrite a date column into DD/MM/YYYY the moment you open the file, so this is the most common reason a club's first import comes back half-read. The fix is to format that column as text, or as YYYY-MM-DD, before you save the CSV. A date we can't read never costs you the member — the row still imports, you just don't get the date.

No, and this is worth being blunt about. Importing puts people in the club. It doesn't record money. Even if your spreadsheet has a plan column and a paid-through date, no membership, payment or renewal is created from it — imported members arrive with nothing recorded against them. So if your club charges, exporting your roster, editing it and importing it back will not restore who's paid. Memberships are recorded when a member pays through Frienemi, or when you comp them. If you're moving an existing paid membership list across, talk to us first — email support@frienemi.com rather than trying to do it through the importer.

Yes, from the Members tab on either platform — Export, then pick a format. Spreadsheet (CSV) gives you the full list: name, email, role, when they joined, their membership status, how that membership was funded, their plan, what they're paid through, any credentials and student number, and then their ratings and how many social sessions and matches they've played in each of the club's sports. Dates are in your club's own timezone. It opens in Excel or Google Sheets. The funding column is the one a treasurer wants: a comp, a cash payment recorded at the door and a live card subscription are all truthfully "active", and this is the column that tells them apart. Printable roster (PDF) is the short version — name, email, role, joined, membership — formatted to read on paper. Good for a committee meeting or the desk at a working bee. Neither file carries amounts. It's a roster, not a ledger; for money, use Finance or the club's own Stripe dashboard. People you've invited who haven't signed up yet aren't in either file. They're not members yet. You can see them on the Members tab under "Waiting to join", where you can also withdraw an invitation.

An announcement is the club talking. Only you and your admins can post one. It has a title and a body, you can attach photos, you can pin the important one to the top, and every member gets a push notification when you post it. Members can like it and comment underneath. The club chat is everyone talking. Every member is in it automatically, anyone can post, and a member can mute it if it gets busy — though being @mentioned still reaches them. You and your admins can delete anyone's message; a member can only delete their own. Rule of thumb: court closures, fee reminders and AGM notices are announcements. "Anyone free Thursday?" is chat. Posting an announcement also drops a short quote of it into the chat, so people who live in the chat don't miss it.

Yes — Members tab, ⋮ next to their name, Remove from club. They lose the club feed and the chat, and they're told they've been removed. Two limits. An admin can only remove plain members, never the owner or another admin; only the owner can remove an admin. And if the person has a live paid membership, removal is blocked until that's cancelled — the button is greyed out with the reason underneath it, for example "They have a paid membership until 12 Aug". Removing somebody refunds nothing, and refunding somebody doesn't remove them. They're two separate actions and you may want both. If your club is public, someone you remove can ask to join again. If it's private they can't, so you'd have to send them the invite link.

They can leave themselves, from the club page. You don't have to be involved and you aren't asked to approve it. A short system line appears in the club chat so it isn't a mystery. Two people can't. The owner can't leave their own club — hand it over first, then leave. And a member with a live paid membership is told to cancel that first, because walking out early would forfeit access they've paid for and nothing would stop the renewal. Once they cancel, they leave the club automatically on the day their paid access runs out, and the app tells them that date. Someone whose renewal has failed and is still being retried is in the same boat until Stripe gives up. So if a member messages you saying the Leave button won't let them out, it's almost always a membership still running. Cancel it or refund it from the Finance page and the door opens.

Quite a lot, on purpose — the club page is how a new player decides you're worth turning up to. Anyone, signed in or not, can see the club's name, description, logo and cover photo, sports, venue and map pin, website, when it was founded and how many members it has. They can read your feed and your announcements. They can see upcoming sessions with the time, place and price. And they can see sessions you've already played, so someone deciding whether to come along on Thursday can see that Thursday actually runs. What they can't see: the chat, your contact phone and email, and the full roster — a visitor only sees the owner and admins, with a line saying to join to see everyone. By default, signed-out visitors see people credited to the club rather than named, which is deliberate for clubs with juniors. Signed-in players see names normally. If your club is private, it doesn't appear to non-members at all — the only way in is the invite link.

Almost everything is on both. The rule of thumb is that club stuff is on both, court stuff is nicer on the phone, and money administration is a laptop. On either: create the club, edit its details, invite people, the member roster, importing and exporting the list, join requests, announcements, the club chat, creating a session and running the rounds, and handing the club over. Phone only: choosing which sports the club plays, the club colour, tonight's session fee, and correcting a court's score after you've already recorded it — on the web a score is locked once it's in. If you're the kind of organiser who fixes scores, run the night from your phone. Laptop only: the club's website address, and the money administration — connecting payouts, membership plans and prices, refunds, payouts, the finance page and the at-risk list. Nothing about this restricts your members. A member can join the club, RSVP, pay for a session, buy, change or cancel a membership, see their own receipts, verify a student email and fix a failed card, all on their phone.

Every club you create is public, and neither app currently offers a switch to make one private. If members-only listing is a condition your club can't do without, know that before you set up. Public is less alarming than it sounds. It means the club turns up when someone browses clubs, and that anyone with the link can read the page — the description, the venue, your sports, the announcements, the nights you've run. It does not mean people can help themselves to what's inside. The chat and the full roster are members-only, and if you leave auto-approve off, nobody is a member until you press Approve. So the control you actually have is the join door, not the listing. Leave join requests on and you decide who's in, one at a time. That's the setting most committees are reaching for when they ask this. There is a private-club setting behind the scenes, and it's why the club page mentions private clubs. Neither app will turn it on today, and neither would turn it back off, so we don't offer the one-way trip. If it matters for your club, email support@frienemi.com and tell us why.