The Wirral and the North West
Rugby club management, built on the Wirral.
Fifteen miles of peninsula, a dozen clubs, and a lot of Sunday mornings in weather that comes sideways off the Irish Sea.
Why here
A rugby microclimate.
The Wirral is not a big place. You can drive its length in half an hour. What it has, out of all proportion to its size, is rugby.
Birkenhead Park was founded in 1871, the same year as the Rugby Football Union, and in 1887 it hosted Wales against Ireland: the first Home Nations match ever played on neutral ground. Caldy, a village side out on the western coast, has played in the second tier of the English game. New Brighton have been going since 1875. Around them sit Wirral, Hoylake, Anselmians, Oxton Parkonians, Port Sunlight and more, most of them running minis, juniors, women’s sides and three or four men’s teams on the same set of pitches.
Cross the water and it keeps going. Cheshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Cumbria have hundreds of clubs between them, almost all of them run in the evenings by people who already have jobs.
What that means for the software
We cannot get away with much.
Building where the clubs are has one obvious consequence. The people best placed to tell us this software is rubbish are the people we would run into at a bar on a Saturday afternoon.
That turns out to be the most useful design constraint we have. It is harder to ship something half-finished when the fixture secretary who has to live with it knows where to find you.
It also means the demo is a conversation rather than a webinar. If your club is in the region and you want to sit down with the people who built it, that can usually be arranged.
The same everywhere
The problem is not regional.
None of this makes North West clubs special in the way that matters. A club in Redruth or Rotherham has the same week: chase the availability, pick the sides, tell the right people, write down what happened, then find it again in June.
Ovalis is available to volunteer-run rugby clubs across England. The North West is simply where it started, and where the people building it stand on a Saturday.
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.