The backbone of community sport is under pressure. Here's how we protect it.

The backbone of community sport is under pressure. Here's how we protect it.

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Every weekend, millions of people show up to make sport happen – not as players, but as the coaches, committee members, registrars, scorers and first aid officers who keep the whole thing running. They don't get paid. Most don't get thanked enough. And increasingly, they're burning out.

Volunteering in sport is one of the most powerful forces for community connection worldwide. In England alone, 10.5 million adults volunteered to support sport and physical activity in the 12 months to November 2024 (Sport England, Active Lives Adult Survey). That contribution is worth an estimated £8.2 billion in annual social value. In Australia, over 2.7 million adults volunteer in sport and physical activity each year, contributing an estimated 145 million hours of time (Australian Sports Commission, AusPlay 2023–24).

The numbers look impressive on paper. But beneath the surface, the picture is more complex – and more concerning.

Fewer people, more pressure.

In New Zealand, the average number of regular sport club volunteers has nearly halved in the past five years, dropping from 31 to 18 per club (NZ Amateur Sport Association, 2024 National Sport Club Survey). Volunteer numbers across NZ sport clubs have fallen 28% since 2018. In England, despite the recent recovery, there are still 1.7 million fewer sport volunteers than seven years ago. And in a UK Coaching survey of over 30,000 adults, volunteer coaches identified balancing work and home life, training costs and the unpaid nature of the role as their biggest barriers to continuing.

The pattern is consistent across markets: participation is holding steady or growing, but the people who make it possible are stretched thinner every season.

The admin trap.

Here's where it gets personal. Ask any volunteer committee member what takes up most of their time and the answer is rarely "being involved in the sport". It's chasing registrations. Reconciling payments. Manually checking compliance credentials. Updating spreadsheets that nobody else understands.

Research from the University of Auckland found that volunteer coaches in New Zealand aren't stepping back because they've lost their passion – they're overwhelmed by administrative complexity, confused by compliance requirements, and carrying responsibilities far beyond what they originally signed up for. In many clubs, one or two people absorb the bulk of the operational workload, a phenomenon researchers describe as "role bleed".

This isn't a localised problem. Whether it's a basketball association in Victoria, a cricket club in England or a rugby organisation in Canada, the administrative demands on volunteers have grown significantly – while the tools available to manage them often haven't kept pace.

Technology should lighten the load, not add to it.

This is where we believe platforms like PlayHQ can make a meaningful difference. Not by replacing the human connection at the heart of volunteering, but by removing the friction that makes it unsustainable.

When registrations, payments, communications and compliance are centralised in a single platform, the hours spent on manual admin start to disappear. A treasurer doesn't need to reconcile cash at the bank. A club secretary doesn't need to chase families for missing paperwork. A safeguarding officer doesn't need to manually track credential expiry dates across dozens of coaches and team managers.

Take child safeguarding as an example. In Australia, PlayHQ's PlaySafe feature – powered by Oho – automates the collection, verification and monitoring of Working With Children Checks across every safeguarding-obligated role. What was once a manual, high-stress responsibility for a single volunteer is now handled seamlessly through the registration process. Basketball Victoria, with over 220,000 registered participants across nearly 500 clubs, was the first sport to adopt it.

These aren't small efficiencies. For the volunteer who was spending their Sunday nights updating a spreadsheet, it's transformative. For the governing body trying to ensure compliance across hundreds of clubs, it's a step-change in capability.

Protecting the people who protect sport.

The data tells us that volunteers still want to give their time. In the US, formal volunteering rates are climbing back toward pre-pandemic levels. In England, Sport England reports steady post-pandemic recovery. The willingness is there – but it needs to be met with better systems, clearer expectations and less unnecessary burden.

Community sport runs on trust and goodwill. Every payment that processes without a trip to the bank, every compliance check that happens in the background – that's time given back to volunteers. Time they can spend coaching, mentoring or simply enjoying the sport they love.

We built PlayHQ to support more than 100,000 administrators and volunteers across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and beyond. But the metric that matters most isn't scale. It's whether the volunteer who shows up next Saturday finds it a little easier to keep showing up the Saturday after that.

Want to see how PlayHQ can reduce the admin burden on your volunteers? Book a demo and we'll show you.

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