With communication and engagement now well established, our next challenge was to tackle another major part of running any sports club — managing shared facilities. Every club has resources that need scheduling and coordination: football pitches, cricket nets, tennis courts, basketball courts, even clubhouses or function rooms. For some clubs, it’s also about booking coaching sessions, training slots, or meeting spaces.
Until now, these bookings were often handled through spreadsheets, emails, or verbal requests — and as every volunteer knows, that can quickly turn into chaos. So, our goal for this stage was simple: create a clear, secure, and flexible way for clubs to manage their facilities and for members to easily book them.
Defining What a Facility Is
In ClubAssemble, a facility is anything a club wishes to make available for member use on a scheduled basis. The design journey began with administrators — giving them a way to create and define facilities within their club’s profile.
Each facility can be given:
- A name and description
- Booking rules, such as whether it’s free or chargeable
- Approval settings, defining whether requests are auto-approved or require admin confirmation
- Availability windows, specifying when bookings can occur
- Minimum booking duration, to prevent awkward overlaps
We also introduced a new role in our RBAC model: the Facilities Admin. This role focuses exclusively on managing facilities — creating them, handling bookings, and approving or rejecting requests — keeping responsibilities well defined and secure.
Balancing Flexibility and Control
One of the key design principles was flexibility. No two clubs operate exactly the same way. Some offer free use of their facilities to members; others rent out spaces to generate income. Some allow members to book freely; others want manual approval before confirming.
To support these varied needs, we made each facility fully configurable. For example:
- A cricket net might be free to use but require booking in 30-minute slots.
- A function room could be chargeable and require admin approval once payment is verified.
- A tennis court might be blocked out every Friday evening for team training.
Administrators can easily reserve recurring time blocks when facilities are unavailable — keeping the system in sync with real-life usage and ensuring members always see accurate availability.
Building the Member Experience
Once the facilities were defined, we turned our attention to the member experience. The goal: make booking a facility as simple as checking a calendar.
Each member has access to a facility booking page that presents:
- A calendar view showing all available and unavailable time slots
- Clear visual cues indicating their own existing bookings
- The ability to select and reserve available slots
When a booking is submitted, ClubAssemble automatically generates a confirmation message within the Messaging Hub — creating a consistent experience across the app. If a facility requires admin approval, the member is notified that their booking is pending, and once approved, they receive an updated confirmation automatically.
Empowering the Administrators
Of course, facilities management also needed robust admin tools. Admins can view all bookings for each facility in a clear, structured dashboard showing:
- Who has booked what, and when
- Which bookings are awaiting approval
- The ability to cancel or reschedule bookings (automatically notifying members)
- Utilisation charts that show how often facilities are used and when demand is highest
These analytics help clubs understand how their facilities are being used — enabling better planning and helping justify future investments.
A Shared Asset, Made Simple
The introduction of Facilities Management marked another step in our mission to reduce administrative friction. Where clubs once relied on messages, notebooks, or chance conversations to manage their spaces, they now have a structured, transparent, and easy-to-use system that empowers both members and administrators.
It’s not just about booking a court or a room — it’s about giving clubs better control of their shared assets and making those assets more accessible to everyone.