A BASINGSTOKE sports club with more than 500 members has thanked a free community sports organising platform for helping in coordinating teams across all age groups.

Basingstoke Hockey Club, which saw its membership grow substantially over the last 10 years, recently found it difficult to strictly manage attendance during the pandemic to maintain safety for its members.

But, the club vice-chairman Eliot Boyd said a free platform named Spond has helped its captains and committees to have full visibility of players attending training and games, so they could be confident of meeting rapidly changing reporting obligations to the governing body.

“Organising player availability on a weekly basis was, for a long time, managed via spreadsheets,” Mr Boyd said.

“Needless to say, this often did not run smoothly. Returning to normality in July 2020, the club was faced with the challenge of needing to strictly manage attendance to maintain safety for its members after the first lockdown.

“The club chose to tackle this task using Spond. It enabled us to navigate the safety requirements to help curb the spread of Covid-19.”

Established in the early 1950s, Basingstoke Hockey Club began life sharing a small pavilion at Odiham’s Cricket ground. It had two teams and only around 30 members at the time.

The club today has a playing membership of over 500 members. It fields six men's teams, six ladies' teams, 14 youth teams and a mixed team.

The club is represented in the National League by its Ladies 1st team, as well as regional and local leagues in its 11 other adult teams.

Over the last 10 years, the club has seen substantial growth in its membership numbers and standards of performance, culminating in the realisation of a long-term goal - to open a second state-of-the-art astroturf pitch in 2020 at its home in Down Grange Sports Complex.

Since then, Spond also has become an integral part of life at Basingstoke Hockey Club.

Boyd said Spond is an easy-to-use platform that helps the club communicate to its members and junior parents, and also coordinate teams across all age groups and source volunteers for key activities. This includes umpires, coaches and volunteers to help with the running of our facilities for internal and external hire.

More recently, the club also opted to collect annual subscriptions through Spond.

“Through doing so, we have found that we have been able to collect this money easier and with significantly less administrative burden to the club treasurer,” Mr Boyd said.

Spond said it currently has around 1.4 million monthly active users, and its App Store rating in the UK is currently 4.8.

The company added that it has also grown by 34 per cent during the pandemic.