About
Built by people who’ve done the admin.
Ovalis comes from running clubs, not from a workshop about running clubs.
Ovalis is built by Campbell Clayton and Sam Bramhall, who have both had a hand in running rugby teams and clubs. We have done the Thursday-night selection, the September membership chase, the fifteen-message thread to work out whether we have a front row, and the June evening spent reconstructing a season’s appearances from memory.
Campbell is the technical founder and Sam is the non-technical one. Those labels are tidier than the way it actually works: what Ovalis should do, and why, gets argued out between the two of us long before any of it gets built. We have played for Anselmians and Oxton Parkonians, and both of us have spent time on the back office side of a club, which is the part nobody joins a rugby club to do.
What we noticed is that clubs are rarely short of software. Plenty of them pay for something already, have a decent website, and still keep the member list in a spreadsheet and collect subs in cash. The tools exist. They just don’t join up, so a person joins them up instead. Usually the same person, every week, for years.
That person is who we are building for. Not the first team. Not the brand. The secretary.
Where we are
Built on a peninsula that takes rugby seriously.
Ovalis is built on the Wirral, which is a strange and wonderful place to make something for rugby clubs. It is fifteen miles end to end and you are never far from a set of posts. Birkenhead Park was founded in 1871, the same year as the Rugby Football Union itself, and hosted Wales against Ireland in 1887, the first Home Nations match played on neutral ground. Caldy, a village side out on the west coast of the peninsula, has played in the second tier of the English game. Between them sit a dozen more clubs running minis on a Sunday morning in weather that comes sideways off the Irish Sea.
It is a rugby microclimate, and it means we cannot get away with much. The people who would tell us this software is rubbish are the people we would run into at a bar on a Saturday afternoon. That has turned out to be the most useful design constraint we have.
Ovalis is available to volunteer-run rugby clubs across England, and we would rather hear from a club in Cornwall or Northumberland than not. But it was built here, by two people who have stood on these touchlines in that weather, and we think it shows.
How we work
A few things we’ve decided.
We only put things on this website that exist. If we describe a feature here, we can show it to you in a demo this week.
Pricing goes in public. When it is settled, it goes on the site in numbers.
Rugby only, for now. The vision is bigger. The product isn’t, yet, and pretending otherwise would make it worse for the clubs we actually have.
See Ovalis in action.
We’re working with a small number of clubs this season. If yours might be one of them, we’d like to hear what your week actually looks like.