Moving our rink bookings online: what we learned

Where we started

Like many clubs, we used a paper diary kept in the clubhouse foyer. It was a week per view diary, and before each season a member ruled six columns for every day, one for each rink. Our season runs from mid-April to mid-September, so that's around 150 days ruled by hand. She then wrote in all the league fixtures and special dates from our fixtures booklet, before anyone could make a booking. I don't think many members realised how much effort went into getting the diary ready each year.

The paper diary did its job, but it had limits. You could only check whether a rink was free if you were at the club. If you were arranging a match with an opponent from another club, you couldn't check dates without a trip down to look.

In August 2024 a neighbouring club mentioned they were using Rink Diary and we started looking into whether it would work for us. Rink Diary has a teams feature so that members can nominate and be selected for matches. We decided not to use this feature as we were already using Spond at that point and Spond has a similar feature.

Planning

A fellow member and I put together a proposal for our Management Committee. We felt the main benefits were:

• Members can see whether rinks are free before travelling to the club
• Members are able to check availability from home when arranging a match with opponents
• Members can see which matches are being played on a particular day, if they want to go and watch
• Members can create provisional bookings, useful when offering an opponent more than one date, which expire automatically if not confirmed
• The diary is easier to administer, for example, the administrator can do a bulk booking for all club afternoons rather than needing to write this into every week of a paper diary.

We also tried to think through what might not go so well. We were concerned that if the diary looked full, members might not come down to bowl, when with the paper diary people often just turned up and joined in. To help with this we agreed a standard format for naming bookings, so it was clear when a rink was booked for an informal roll-up, and we encouraged members to keep inviting others to join them. We also recognised that not every member would be comfortable using technology, although our recent experience with implementing Spond provided some reassurance as most members had signed up to Spond by then.

The biggest decision was slot length. We mapped out our fixed weekly fixtures - league matches, club afternoons, and the times the rinks switch direction - then looked at how different slot lengths would fit around them. Competitive matches usually need about two hours and sometimes three. Roll-ups vary from a quick hour after work to a couple of hours on a Sunday morning.

With Rink Diary, you book one slot at a time, so shorter slots mean more separate bookings for anyone wanting a longer game, and more cancellations for anyone wanting to delete a booking.

In February 2025 the Committee agreed to go ahead for the 2025 season with two-hour slots. A couple of committee members were concerned about introducing another new system so soon after we had started using Spond, and it was agreed that we would let both bed in for a couple of seasons before making any further changes. I thought that was a sensible approach.

Getting everything in place before the season

Once the Committee had agreed to go ahead, the order in which we did things turned out to be important.

Every year our club produces a fixtures booklet for members. It includes the dates of league matches for the leagues we play in, and a special dates page covering events such as President's Day and the bank holiday roll-ups. The Committee also agrees the regular weekly sessions, such as the ladies' morning and the club afternoon. League fixtures start to be published from about December onwards, and the booklet is usually ready for printing by February.

That gave us about a month or so to enter everything from the fixtures booklet into Rink Diary before the season started. It was essential to have all of this in place before members could book, so that the fixed dates were already there and nobody could make bookings in those slots. It was the same job that had always been done by hand in the paper diary, but once entered, the dates could be seen by every member from home.

Setting up Rink Diary also prompted some useful discussions at Committee about how we manage the green. None of these were new questions. We could have addressed them with a paper diary. But implementing an online system meant we had to think them through and agree them clearly.

We already had an agreed order of priority for rink bookings: national matches first, then county matches, league matches, internal club competitions, friendly matches, coaching, roll-ups and taster sessions. We reviewed this and included it in the Rink Diary user guide.

The Committee also agreed to rotate the direction of play: east to west during the day, and north to south after 4.30pm. This meant members knew which way they would be playing when they booked. Members with the first slot in the morning, or the first slot after 4.30pm, were expected to turn the rinks round, and we showed members how to do this at the ladies' morning and club afternoons.

We also had agreed rink colours for specific activities, such as particular league matches and the ladies' practice morning, to help manage wear on the green. Again, this wasn't new, but we published it alongside the Rink Diary guide, so it became much more visible to members.

Looking back, I think this was one of the less obvious benefits of moving online. Implementing Rink Diary was a good prompt for discussion, and these arrangements are now reviewed by the Committee each year before the season starts.

We published a link to the Rink Diary on our website and also created a section on Spond in All Members/Files where we put a link to the diary, the user guide and also the guidance on rink colours so everything was in one place.

In late March we then put out a communication to bowling members telling them that we were now using an online diary, that all fixtures for the season had been entered and attached a user guide which included instructions on how to create an account. We told members we would be available to help on club afternoons or at other times on request. Our Committee minutes are published to all members so there was already a general awareness amongst members that this was coming.

Thinking about who would use it

One thing that helped us was thinking realistically about who would actually need to book. Some members only come to club afternoons and organised events, which the admins block-book, so they would never need to use it. For groups who play regular roll-ups together, only one of them needs to be comfortable booking. We expected the heaviest users to be our more competitive bowlers booking rinks for external matches. They were already using Spond, the Bowls England competitions portal and the county website, so we didn't expect them to have much difficulty.

We added Rink Diary to our process for new members, as we had done with Spond the year before, so every new member was registered and given a short introduction as a matter of course. For the first season one of us was available at every club afternoon to help anyone who was stuck.

How it went

On the whole members were very positive. By the end of May, 93 of our roughly 140 bowling members had registered. We got some positive comments immediately with members saying that they found it easy to use.

Over the 2025 season members made just over 1,200 bookings themselves, in addition to the fixtures entered by the admins, and 79 different members made at least one booking.

Something I noticed was how new bowlers took to it. Our internal competitions are towards the end of the season, and by then new members had been booking roll-ups all summer, so booking their competition matches was straightforward for them. As an aside, using Spond also meant that members could contact each other to arrange a match without needing to know anyone's email or phone number so the combination of Rink Diary and Spond made arranging these matches easier.

For 2026 we installed a laptop on a shelf in the clubhouse, which shows the diary so members can check it as they would have done with the paper version, and they can log in to book there too.

Slot length: an ongoing balancing act

As our membership grew, so did demand for the green. With two-hour slots, a rink booked for a one-hour roll-up is empty for the second hour, and on busy days that became noticeable. For the 2026 season we moved to one-hour slots, which has made better use of the green. There was a small one-off cost to add 2 more slots to Rink Diary so that we could have 10 slots from 10:30 to 20:30.

The downside is that competitive bowlers generally want two or three hours, so each hour now has to be booked separately. This becomes particularly noticeable when arranging a competitive match, because you may need to offer an opponent two or three possible dates.

A two-hour match could therefore mean four to six separate bookings, and if three hours are needed it could be as many as nine. That's a lot of bookings for one match, particularly when some of those dates are only provisional while you wait for the opponent to choose.

But it also illustrates the wider challenge: the more members a club has the more important it is to make every available hour count.

I don't think there's a single right answer. It depends on how busy a club's green is and on the mix of competitive and social bowling. But it is worth thinking about early, because slot length affects both how efficiently the green can be used and how easy Rink Diary is for the members who use it most.

Looking back

As our membership has grown and more of our members are playing competitive bowls, I've found that the way we use the green has changed too. In particular, we need to make the most of every available hour while still making it straightforward for bowlers to arrange matches. It is also important that bowlers keep their bookings up to date, for example by cancelling unwanted slots. Rink Diary colours members' own bookings in the diary yellow and sends a confirmation email when a booking is made. However, it doesn't have one place where a member can easily see the bookings they have made. This means that members sometimes forget to cancel bookings. The automatic provisional booking expiry helps with this to an extent but it relies on members marking a booking as provisional in the first place and also the booking is only released when the expiry period ends rather than as soon as the member knows it isn't wanted.

That experience was one of the things that led me to develop Green Rinks. Having implemented and used an online rink diary at my own club, I had a much better understanding of the practical challenges involved and the different needs of clubs and their members. I've taken what I learned from that experience into the development of Green Rinks.

Having said that, I don't see this as one system being better than another. Rink Diary works well, is simple to use and administer, and for many clubs it will be exactly the right fit. I'm a great believer that there is room for everyone in bowls technology. Different clubs have different needs, and different solutions will suit different clubs. Many of the tools now appearing in bowls are developed by small businesses or individuals who understand and care about the sport, and I think they all deserve encouragement.

Bowls is a very fragmented community, spread across thousands of clubs and associations, and it can be hard for bowlers to find out what is available and for small providers to reach them. I'd love to see more support and visibility for innovation across the sport as a whole, so that clubs can find the solutions that work best for them.

I'd be very interested to hear about other clubs' experiences of using online rink diaries. What has worked well for you, what have you found more challenging, and have your needs changed as your membership or use of the green has changed?