A Day in the Life of Running a Club Event (Or: Why Your Trap Line Has a Spreadsheet Open On It)

There is a special kind of person who agrees to organise their club's next big event.

They are kind. They are capable. They are, at the moment of saying yes, completely unaware of what they have just signed up for. By the time they figure it out, three months have passed, the catering deposit is non-refundable, and someone named Trevor is asking whether the Vets category includes him "spiritually."

This is for that person. If you've ever run a club event — a shoot day, a championship round, a working bee that somehow needed a risk assessment — you already know. This is just so you know that we know, too.

Step 1: Set Up the Event in TryBooking (or Eventbrite, or Whatever You Picked in 2018)

You log in. You can't remember the password. You reset it. You discover the email it was tied to belonged to the previous secretary, who handed everything over in a single conversation that lasted four minutes and contained zero usable information.

Eventually you get in. You set up the event. You pick a fee. You stare at the screen wondering whether you should add the booking fee on top, absorb it, or split the difference and make it everyone's problem.

You absorb it. You'll regret this in approximately six weeks.

Step 2: Publish It to the Website

Or rather, ask Greg to publish it to the website, because Greg is the only person who knows the WordPress login, and Greg is currently away camping with no reception until Thursday.

In the meantime, you post it to the Facebook page. Three people react. One of them is Greg's wife. None of them have actually registered.

Step 3: Wait for Nominations

You refresh TryBooking. Nothing. You refresh it again. Still nothing. You begin to wonder if the link is broken, or if nobody likes you, or both.

Then, finally — a nomination. From someone you've never heard of. They're not a member. They haven't selected a category. They have, however, entered their date of birth as "1/1/01," which is either a typo or a deeply concerning admission.

You make a note to follow up. You will not follow up. You will discover this person on the morning of the event, standing on your range, holding a shotgun and looking expectantly at you.

Step 4: The Member Database Reconciliation

Nominations are now flowing in. Excellent. Now you need to cross-check every single one against the member database to confirm they are financial, that their licence is current, that they've done their mandatory participation, and that they are who they say they are.

This is a manual process. It involves:

• Exporting the TryBooking CSV
• Opening Members 2025 FINAL v4.xlsx
• Running a VLOOKUP that breaks because someone wrote their name as "Bob" on the spreadsheet and "Robert J. Wilkinson" on the nomination
• Discovering that three members have lapsed since November
• Discovering one member's licence expired during the nomination window and they didn't mention it
• Quietly going through the five stages of grief

You will do this every Sunday night for the four weeks leading up to the event. Your family will start describing you as "going through something."

Step 5: The Day-Of Briefing

The morning of the event arrives. You have not slept properly in a week. You arrive at the range at 5:30am. There is dew on everything, including the printed nomination list, which is now slightly translucent.

You set up the sign-in table. You lay out the briefing forms. You realise you've printed the 2023 version of the safety briefing. You sprint back to the clubhouse to print the new one. The printer is out of toner. You call Greg. Greg is still camping.

By 7:00am, members begin arriving. You begin the great pen-and-clipboard ballet of checking each one in:

Tick the box. Match to the list. Verify licence. Confirm payment. Hand them a squad sheet. Repeat 87 times.

By the time the first squad steps up, you have not had breakfast, you have lost a pen, and someone has asked you three times whether they can change category. You also realise you forgot to print the squad sheets in the right format and the scorers are giving you a look.

Step 6: The Scoring

Out on the trap line, scoring is being recorded on paper. This is fine. This is traditional. This is also how Margaret recorded a score as "20" when she clearly meant "21" and now there's a tie for second place that doesn't actually exist.

You will discover this discrepancy at 4:47pm, while trying to enter the results into Excel.

You will also encounter, in roughly this order:

The Score Sheet with No Name. Whose is this? Nobody knows. The handwriting is unfamiliar. It scored a respectable 23. It will sit in the orphanage pile next to the lost lens cover and the unclaimed thermos.

The Disputed Target. Two people swear they saw the bird break. The scorer swears they didn't. There is no video. There is no replay. You are, somehow, the referee.

The Member Who Forgot to Sign the Squad Sheet. Their score exists. Their attendance, technically, does not. This will become a problem for mandatory participation reporting in three months' time.

Dave. Dave shot. Dave always shoots. Dave's score sheet is perfect, signed, legible, and submitted within ninety seconds of finishing his round, because Dave is operating on a level the rest of us can only aspire to. Bless Dave.

Step 7: The End-of-Day Reconciliation

Shooting is done. The last squad is packing up. The BBQ has been packed away. You retreat to the clubhouse with a stack of paper, three coffees, and the will to live, in roughly that order.

You now must:

1. Enter every score into the spreadsheet
2. Cross-check against the nomination list
3. Calculate the category placings
4. Apply handicaps
5. Resolve the tie for second that doesn't exist
6. Update each member's score history file
7. Update mandatory participation counts
8. Reconcile TryBooking payouts against the bank
9. Send the results to the website
10. Cry, briefly, into a meat pie

By 8:30pm, results are published. They contain one typo. Someone will email you about it tomorrow. They will not be polite about it.

Step 8: The Week After

You assumed the event ended on Sunday. The event has not ended.

This week alone you will:

• Field three queries from members who think their score was entered incorrectly
• Reconcile two payments that "didn't go through" but actually did
• Discover that one nomination fee was refunded to the wrong card
• Be asked by the treasurer for a breakdown of revenue vs catering costs
• Be asked by the grading officer for a formal results submission
• Be asked by a member if you can "just quickly" send them last year's results too, for comparison

You will say yes to all of this. You will mean it. You will not do any of it for at least eleven days.

Step 9: Begin Planning the Next One

A committee meeting is held. The event is declared a great success. Numbers were up. Everyone had a wonderful time. You are publicly thanked. You smile graciously.

You are then asked to run the next one.

You agree, because of course you do. You are a club volunteer. This is who you are. This is your burden and your gift.

But you make a quiet promise to yourself that next time will be different. Next time, you will not be reconciling TryBooking against a spreadsheet at 9pm on a Sunday. Next time, you will not be discovering lapsed memberships on the morning of the event. Next time, the score sheet will not be made of paper that goes translucent in dew.

Next time, the system will do the work.

There Is, Genuinely, a Better Way

If any of the above gave you a small twitch of recognition, you are exactly the person we built Squadspot's event management for.

Nominations check member status, licence currency, and mandatory participation automatically — at the point of entry, not the morning of the event. Payments reconcile themselves against the nomination, the member, and the event, without anyone touching a spreadsheet. Day-of check-in is a QR code, not a clipboard. Scores (soon) flow live from the line to the results page. Mandatory participation counts update themselves. Records publish themselves. The week-after admin pile mostly stops existing.

Dave will still finish his round first and submit a perfect score sheet. Some things are beyond the reach of technology.

But the dewy clipboard, the orphaned score sheet, the VLOOKUP that breaks because Bob is sometimes Robert — those are negotiable.

See how Squadspot handles club events →