Come & Try — how it works, from sign-up to session

Come & Try is the front door croquet has never really had. Most sports have an obvious way in — you sign up for a season, you join a gym, you rock up to a parkrun. If you've driven past a lawn and thought "that looks interesting", there has usually been no obvious next step. Come & Try is that step, and it is built to give clubs a steady, low-effort pipeline of new members rather than one-off flyers and trickle-in enquiries.

How it works, start to finish

Someone visits comeandtrycroquet.com and puts their hand up — name, email, postcode. The system finds their nearest participating club and takes it from there:

1. They book. A text message confirms the time.
2. A reminder lands the day before, so the booking doesn't get forgotten.
3. The club gets a heads-up that someone is coming, so whoever is hosting knows to expect them.
4. The session happens — a personal taste test, usually one-on-one or a small group. A mallet, a ball, a cup of tea. No instruction manual, no performance pressure.

From that point, the club owns the guest. The digital side has done its job — sign up, book, confirm, remind, tell the club — and what happens next is entirely the club's own strength: welcoming someone back to a normal club day, introducing them around, and having the enrolment conversation whenever it feels right. There is no hard sell built into any of this, from either side.

What a club actually has to provide

Not much. Session times that are real and current, a membership cost, and a welcoming face on the day. The advertising, the sign-up system, the booking and the reminders are handled centrally — a club's job is the part clubs are already good at: the in-person welcome.

Where it's been proven

The program was piloted at East Brisbane Croquet Club in early 2026. Sixteen people came through in six weeks — the committee called it the strongest membership growth they'd seen. The advertising, targeted at the 55–69 age group across nearby postcodes, cost $6.53 per lead — three to four times cheaper than expected.

Getting your club's times right

The single most useful thing a club can do before switching this on is make sure its own session times and membership cost are current and correctly recorded — a Come & Try booking is only as good as the time it's booking someone into. If you're not sure your club's details are current, get in touch and we'll check them with you.

For clubs: how to get involved

Come & Try works best with several clubs running it in the same region at once — the advertising finds interested people across a wider area, and clubs share the leads by proximity. Contact hello@croquetclaude.com to register your club's interest, or to check and update the details we hold for you.