Every club has the same recruitment problem. Players move, graduate, get injured, have children, and the squad that was thirty strong in April is twenty-two in September. Meanwhile, a few miles away, someone who just moved to town is searching for a rugby club and finding nothing but a dormant social media page. Claiming your club’s profile on Rugby Football Club Finder closes that gap. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it puts your club in front of every person who searches your area.
What claiming actually does
The directory already lists a great many clubs from public records, each with a name and a location. A seeded entry gets your club onto the map, but it cannot say when you train, who you welcome, or how to get in touch. Claiming it links the listing to a manager account, so the person who actually runs the club controls what it says. Once a moderator approves the claim, you can edit the profile from the dashboard, and every change is live on the public page immediately.
If your club is not listed at all, the same manager account lets you create it. New clubs and new claims are both reviewed by a moderator before they go live, which is what keeps the map trustworthy for the people searching it. You get an email when the approval comes through.
The profile fields that recruit for you
A profile does its best work when it answers the questions a nervous newcomer has before they turn up. In order of how often people ask them:
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Practice days and times. This is the single most-read field on any profile. Someone deciding whether to come along wants to know that training is Tuesday and Thursday at seven, not “see our socials”.
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The sides you field. A club with several teams registers each one with its category and division, and each side appears on the profile and in the home-page filters, so the club is found by men’s, women’s and youth searches alike.
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Your about text. Two or three sentences on playing standard, who you welcome, and what the club is like off the pitch. Say “beginners welcome” if it is true; it is the sentence most people are hoping to read.
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Address and pitch location. Set the exact point on the map so the pin lands on the clubhouse, not the middle of the parish.
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Contact details and socials. A phone number, an email and your Instagram or Facebook handle. The app formats them and makes them tappable.
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Tournaments, events and jobs. Public listings for the sevens tournament you host, the summer touch league, or the coaching role you are trying to fill.
Make it look like your club
Upload your crest and register your team colours, and the public profile is tinted in them: the header, the highlights, the buttons. The app’s own branding steps aside on your page so that a visitor sees your club, not ours. A club registers a full palette, a primary colour plus a secondary and an accent, and those same colours flow into the
kit designer when you come to order jerseys, so the shop’s garments match the profile.
A roster that fills itself
Once your profile is claimed, players and coaches can request to join it from their own accounts. Each request lands in your dashboard for approval, and approved members appear on the public roster, grouped by coaching staff, active players, alumni and supporters. You can file members under a specific side, remove people who have moved on, and see who has not been assigned to a team yet.
The roster is more than a display. Approved members are the people who get asked whether they are coming to practice, who see the fixture list, and who can see and order the kit the club publishes to its members. Building the roster is how the rest of the app starts working for your club. That loop is described in
our guide to practice attendance.
One club, several sides
A club that fields a men’s first XV, a women’s team and a youth section is still one club, with one profile and one pin on the map. Under the Teams row on your dashboard you add each side with its own category, division and practice slot. From then on the profile shows all of them, the home-page filters pick the club up for every side it fields, memberships can be filed per side, and practice sessions are generated per side from that side’s own training days. Nothing about the club’s single listing changes; it simply gets more accurate.
How to claim your club today
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Sign up as a club manager. You can be a player and a coach on the same account too.
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Search for your club by name on the claim page. If it is listed, submit a claim; if not, create it.
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Wait for the moderator’s approval email, usually quick.
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Open the dashboard, fill in practice times, teams, colours and contact details, and save.
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Tell your current players to sign up and request membership, so the roster is full before the first newcomer searches.