Yorkshire Terriers FC has been kicking a ball around Leeds since 1997, when it became the first LGBTQ+ football club of its kind in the region. Nearly thirty years on, the club is still going strong as a founding member of the Gay Football Supporters Network league, with 47 members who mostly juggle training around busy working lives.
That scale brings a problem plenty of grassroots clubs know well. Without a football app, getting a straight answer out of everyone about who is actually turning up to training used to be hard work. Yorkshire Terrier FC co-chair Benjamin Hague explains that his team spent hours chasing individual replies, sometimes right up until kickoff. Since April 2026 the club has used Spond’s football app to bring training, matches and communication into one place, and the admin headache has all but disappeared.
“As a large group of adults who have busy lives outside of the club, getting confirmation of whether people were attending training or games or not was hard work! Spond collates all this information for us, sending frequent reminders and allowing us to have a cutoff point for each session,” says Benjamin.
From Chasing Replies to One Football App
Organising training every week used to eat up a lot of Yorkshire Terriers FC’s time. Numbers fluctuated constantly, which made it nearly impossible to plan ahead. Volunteers found themselves chasing members individually before every session, and sometimes the last reply landed just thirty minutes before kickoff.
The club switched to Spond on the recommendation of another coach, and it changed how training gets planned from week to week. With the whole squad on one football app, invites go out automatically and nobody has to chase a single reply by hand.
“Having the team on one football app, and being able to send invites to training, means we don’t have to do any of the leg work,” Benjamin explains. “Spond sends out the reminders and enables us to set a cutoff point so players can no longer attend last minute, which gives us the time to properly plan drills and team formations with the correct numbers.”
Saving Time and Simplifying Training Sessions
That cutoff point turned out to be one of the most valuable features for the club. Instead of scrambling for numbers at the last minute, coaches now know who is coming well ahead of each session and can plan drills and formations properly.
“It just simplifies the entire process and saves us so much time,” says Benjamin. “We are then able to add comments to each training session based on those numbers and can tailor each session based on the responses we get.”
Feedback from the wider squad has been strongly positive. Members who used to get bombarded with individual messages now get one clear invite and a reminder in the football app, and that is it.
Keeping Communication Inclusive, Not Just Efficient
Choosing the right football app mattered to Yorkshire Terriers FC for reasons beyond admin time. As an LGBTQ+ club, the group was conscious that not every member wants to be on social media, and nobody should feel forced onto Facebook or WhatsApp just to keep up with the team.
Using Spond instead removes that pressure entirely. The club also runs separate committee groups and subgroups for specific events, so important messages reach only the people who need them rather than flooding the whole squad with noise.
Benjamin also flags pinned messages as a small but vital feature for a club this size, keeping key information visible at the bottom of the chat for as long as it is needed rather than getting buried.
“It simplifies every process by keeping everything in one place,” Benjamin says. “We can easily track events, send notifications regarding events, and sign up new players easily without the need for social media platforms or being bombarded with WhatsApp messages.”
A Football App Built for Community Clubs
Yorkshire Terriers FC’s experience is a familiar one across grassroots football. Most of the clubs they play against are run by volunteers in a similar spot, juggling admin on top of everything else that goes into keeping a community club going.
Benjamin does not hesitate when asked whether he would recommend Spond. “We appreciate the time Spond saves us and would absolutely recommend it to anyone,” he says.
Nearly three decades after becoming the first club of its kind in the region, Yorkshire Terriers FC keeps growing. With a football app handling the admin, the volunteers who run it can spend more of their time on the football and the community built around it.
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