How Modernising Our Website Helped My Rugby Club Recruit Record Player Numbers
My biggest hobby away from the computer is rugby. I've been playing most of my life, and it brings a feeling of excitement and adrenaline unlike anything else. It's also helped me meet some of my best friends, which is a tricky thing to do as somebody getting into his 30s! I play for Edinburgh Northern RFC. We play in the lower tiers of the Scottish system, with us all giving up our some weeknights and Saturdays to play and train (and socialise afterwards). The club is run entirely by hard working volunteers.
Having been at the club a while, I started to wonder how I could use my technical skills to help us capture more of the recruitment market in a smart way and help out the club. For those who aren't familar, Scotland's capital is one of the biggest rugby cities in the world, and there's a lot of competition for player recruitment - there's over 10 clubs in a 2 mile radius of our clubhouse, many of which have better facilities and are more well known.
I realised there were two main issues in our way - discoverability, and friction. The best part is, you can apply this to any localised sports club, small business etc.
Discoverability - SEO & More
If people can't find you, they won't even be convinced to play for you because they're unaware of your presence. I took a couple of steps to rectify this.
Moving to SSR
Content was now fully rendered on the server, meaning that search engine crawlers could actually detect what content is on the website. Seems obvious, but a lot of people still deploy SPAs that render their content on the client instead, meaning search engines can't pick up the content. We can see here, Google picks up some very important information straight off the bat:
Opengraph and Metadata Content
As you can see above, I made sure that page metadata included the key details - essentially that we're looking for players this year. I've also made sure that the Opengraph image looks good when shared, as people often discover via social media:
Blogs
By having our match reports, and general club updates documented in our blog, keywords are picked up by search engines, helping our cause further. This also comes with the additional bonus of making the club seem very active, and giving prospective players an idea of what's happening at the club. The CMS I use is Zenblog, which is super easy!
Friction - UI/UX
Once people find you, you need to make it easy and appealing for them to get in touch with you.
Contacting Easily
You want as little friction as possible for somebody to contact you. The amount of club websites I've seen that don't list a contact method, or make you jump through extra hoops is crazy. People will drop off, or feel awkward about cold DM'ing. Instead, I just implemented a contact form with a message encouraging messages. This then fires a function that immediatley alerts me, and I can respond to an enquiry within minutes, helping the new player feel welcome and meaning they don't contact another team in the meantime!
Social Proof
People are human, and it's normal to be nervous to meet a huge new group at once, and not fitting in. As a result, I realised the importance of a bit of social proof on the website before the contact form to help ease any anxieties for potential new players. This quote is one of several listed before the contct form:
I've noticed a signficant spike in new players after implementing these quotes.
All in all, this is probably less than 10 hours work, and yet we've been able to grow our playing numbers by around 50%, resulting in more club revenue, better results on the pitch, and the people being able to make new friends and professionally network.
