How to Improve Member Engagement at Your Sports Club (2026)
Most advice on member engagement tells clubs to communicate more: another newsletter, another post, another app notification. The Australian evidence points somewhere else. Adults mostly stay in club sport for the people, and most clubs give members no way to find each other outside the fixture.
This guide is for volunteer committees and club managers. It covers what the data says about why members stay, the gap most clubs miss, and seven things you can do this season without adding to anyone's workload.
The short version
- Members stay for other members. In a survey of 4,395 Australian club players, 72% said they play for social reasons and 66% to be with friends.
- Club communication runs one way, from club to member. Retention depends on contact between members, and almost no club tool supports that.
- The fix is small and regular. Help members who want a game find one or two others, at times your facilities are quiet anyway.
- Volunteers are stretched, so anything that needs more committee hours will not last.
What the Australian evidence says
People play club sport for the people
A study of 4,395 Australian club sport players aged 13 to 92, led by Rochelle Eime and published in Leisure Studies in 2024, asked why they play. Fun came first (92%), followed by fitness (78%), competition (77%), social reasons (72%) and being with friends (66%).
Social reasons mattered more with age: 74.7% of adults aged 18 to 59 and 79.2% of those aged 60 and over. The authors' advice to clubs was to build what they offer around friendship and fun.
One caveat. The survey reached people who were still playing in 2020, so it shows what keeps members, not why others left.
Most active adults are not in a club
AusPlay data for 2025 shows 13% of Australian adults, about 2.9 million people, take part in sport or physical activity through a sports club or association. By comparison, 69% are active informally on their own and 51% informally with family or friends.
Badminton shows the gap clearly. About 427,000 adults play, and roughly one in ten of them plays through a sports club or association. That club figure is a survey estimate with a wide margin, but the direction is plain.
The players exist. What a club can offer that a park or a hired court cannot is other people to play with, reliably.
Adults do walk away
AusPlay's Lifelong Participation in Sport report (November 2025) found that 30% of organised sport participants aged 18 to 24 had dropped, or were considering dropping, at least one of their sports. The figure was 25% at ages 25 to 34 and 17% at 35 to 44.
AusPlay does not publish the reasons adults drop a sport, so be wary of anyone who quotes a single cause.
Committees are already stretched
The Australian Sports Foundation's Clubs Under Pressure survey of 2,984 clubs, published in 2023, found:
- 63% named a lack of volunteers as their main challenge.
- 61% reported a heavier administration load.
- 68% reported higher running costs.
- 18% had considered closing.
So the test for any engagement idea is simple. Does it need more volunteer hours? If it does, it will not survive the season.
The gap: clubs talk to members, but members cannot find each other
| Tool | What it does well | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter and email | Tells everyone the news | Introduce one member to another |
| Booking system | Fills courts and takes payments | Help a member with no partner find one |
| Social media | Shows the club to the outside world | Reach members who do not follow you |
| Group chat | Quick chat among people who already know each other | Welcome new members, who must share a phone number to join a thread full of strangers |
| Social events | Bring people together a few times a year | Create the weekly contact that friendships need |
Every tool in that table runs from the club to the member, or serves people who are already friends.
Picture the member who joined in March. They turn up to their session, play and go home. They would play twice as often if they knew someone to hit with on a Tuesday morning. Nobody at the club knows that, and the member has no way to say it.
Seven things a committee can do this season
1. Ask one question at sign-up and renewal
Add a single yes or no question to your form: "Would you play more often if you had someone to play with?" The answers tell you how big the problem is and exactly who to help.
This is not a fringe issue. In AusPlay's 2025 data, about 8% of adults who do no sport or physical activity said having nobody to do it with was a reason.
2. Recruit five to ten connectors before you announce anything
Every club has members who know everyone. Ask them personally to host one small game a week for a month. If a new member goes looking for a game and finds nothing, they will not look twice.
3. Put small games in your quiet hours
Find the times your courts, lanes or nets sit empty, often early mornings and weekday middays. Make those hours the home of games that members organise themselves. You fill dead time, and nobody competes with pennant or training.
4. Make the first three visits count
New members who know nobody are the easiest to lose. Give each one a named connector, with one goal: by the third visit, the new member has played with two people they did not arrive with.
There is no Australian club sport study on this window, so here is the nearest evidence, clearly labelled. A study of 5,240 gym members in Brazil found 63% had quit before their third month. It is a different setting with the same warning.
5. Let members organise their own games, two to four at a time
This is the step most clubs skip, and it is the one that scales. A committee cannot run enough events to connect 300 members. Those 300 members can organise hundreds of small games between them if they can see who else wants one.
It needs a private place that only members can enter, where anyone can post "doubles Thursday 7am, need two" and others can join without the whole club swapping phone numbers. A group chat does this for 20 people who know each other. It struggles at 200.
This is the job the Bunchups Community Portal does. It is a private, invite-only space inside the Bunchups app that carries your club's logo and colours. Both members and the club can post activities, and members can message each other without sharing contact details. Our post on how the Community Portal works covers setup and admin controls.
6. Reward turning up, not signing up
If you run a prize draw or an incentive, tie entries to games played, never to downloads or registrations. Sign-ups look good in a committee report. Attendance is what renews.
7. Measure it inside one season
Renewal figures arrive too late to act on. Track three things each month instead:
- How many members played outside their usual session.
- How many played with someone new.
- How many say they intend to renew, from a one-question poll mid-season.
If your booking system accepts a reference code, use one for member-organised games. You can then count them with no extra admin.
What this looked like at one Victorian club
We set up a Community Portal with a Victorian badminton club with around 3,000 members. It is too early to publish results, and we will not guess at them. Five decisions shaped the launch:
- Seed before launch. A small group of club champions posted games first, so no member arrived to an empty feed.
- Anchor to quiet courts. Early-morning sessions became the default slot for member-organised games.
- Use the systems the club already has. A booking code entered in the club's existing booking system shows which bookings came from member-organised games.
- Send people to the right door. QR codes on posters point to the club's own space, not to a general homepage.
- Keep it fresh. Old or expired games on display make a club look quiet, so they are cleared out.
Mistakes to avoid
- Launching to an empty room. The first impression decides whether a member comes back.
- Adding another channel for the committee to feed. If volunteers must post to keep it alive, it will go quiet.
- Counting sign-ups as success.
- Treating the whole-club group chat as the answer.
Why it is worth the effort
Research by La Trobe University's Centre for Sport and Social Impact, done for AFL Victoria in 2015, estimated at least $4.40 in social return for every $1 spent running a community football club. Australia has an estimated 70,000 or more not-for-profit sports clubs.
It is hard to see how a club produces that kind of return if its members never get to know each other.
Free resources for committees
- Game Plan from the Australian Sports Commission: a free online tool to assess how your club runs, with templates and resources.
- 7 Pillars of Inclusion from Play by the Rules: a free framework for making a club welcoming.
- Good Sports from the Alcohol and Drug Foundation: free help with alcohol and drug policies and training.
- Vicsport resources: guidance on governance, volunteers, mental health and child safety.
Frequently asked questions
What is member engagement in a sports club?
It is how often members take part and how connected they feel to the club and to each other. Practical measures are attendance, playing outside a usual session, volunteering and intention to renew.
How do you retain members at a sports club?
Help them make friends there. In Australian research, 72% of club players said they play for social reasons. Introduce new members by name in their first few visits, make it easy for members to organise small games, and track repeat attendance.
Why do adults drop out of club sport?
No single national reason has been published. AusPlay shows that 30% of organised sport participants aged 18 to 24 and 25% of those aged 25 to 34 have dropped, or are considering dropping, at least one of their sports. Research on current club players shows friends and social reasons are among the main reasons they keep playing.
How can a club lift engagement without more volunteers?
Move the organising from the committee to the members. Recruit a handful of well-connected members to start small games, give everyone a private place to post and join them, and use quiet facility hours.
Is a group chat enough?
For a small squad who already know each other, often yes. For a whole club it tends to break down: joining means sharing a phone number, one thread carries everything, and new members do not know anyone in it.
See it for your club
If you want your members to be able to find each other, book a walkthrough of the Bunchups Community Portal.
