Charlie Ernst, President of Southport Croquet Club, on the club's switch from manual booking and cash handling to online booking and cashless payments. Two and a half minutes. The headline isn't the technology. It's the rule he closes with.
The pitch
COVID forced the change. Manual check-in and cash payments became impossible, so Southport went online — booking system on a website, cashless terminal at the door.
"It probably took a little bit of convincing to start off with. But certainly if we were to take that away from members now, they would probably even be more of a backlash about taking away the technology." — Charlie Ernst
Members didn't have to learn anything new. They were already using QR codes and tap-to-pay everywhere else. The club just stopped being the one place that still required cash and a sign-in book.
The real reason it matters
Most arguments for club technology are about member convenience. Charlie's is about something else.
"Like all clubs, it'll only be a handful of members that are actively involved in running it. If you want new members to come into the club and take on these roles, they're going to be less inclined to take it on if it involves a significant part of their time. If you can make their job easier, they might be quite comfortable taking on a role as a president or a treasurer or a secretary, if they're not having to sweat over the books for hours a week." — Charlie Ernst
The technology isn't for the players paying for their court time. It's for the treasurer who used to spend Sunday morning reconciling the cash tin and now has the morning back. Do that across every committee role and the question of who'll volunteer next year starts to look different.
Charlie's rule
For any change at the club
If we're going to make any change, it has to fit three criteria.
Simpler. Better. Easier.
If it doesn't meet all three, don't change it.
"One of the things that I've tried to adopt in my role as president of the club is that if we are going to make any changes, it's got to fit three criteria. It's got to be simpler, it's got to be better, and it's got to be easier. If it doesn't meet those criteria, then why are we changing?" — Charlie Ernst
This is a filter worth handing to any committee considering a change. Two out of three doesn't pass. "Better" without "simpler" and "easier" is how clubs end up with the kind of complexity that drives volunteers away.
One line to take to the committee meeting
The point of club technology isn't to look modern. It's to free up the few people who keep the place running so the job stops feeling like a second one.
On the cut
The clip itself was already a clean edit, nothing to re-cut. The writing here pulled the three-criteria rule to the top of the post so it's the first thing a reader takes away, and gave Charlie's volunteer-recruitment point its own section so it doesn't get read as a generic "use technology" piece.