About Spike
Spike exists because running an amateur volleyball club is an unpaid admin job nobody applied for. The person doing it is usually a player who volunteered, holding the club together with a group chat, a spreadsheet and their own bank account.
That setup breaks in predictable ways. Sessions get booked for players who never really confirmed. Fees quietly go uncollected and come out of someone’s own pocket. Members drift away and nobody notices until they have gone. None of it is hard work — it is just scattered across four places, and only one person knows where.
Built by a coach who needed it
I’m Denys Bielov. I play volleyball, and I started coaching as a beginner at a grassroots club that, like most, runs on volunteers.
I wanted to bring the club’s level up, and there were no tools to do it with. So I kept thinking: what if we had this? What if we had that?
I have also been a software engineer for ten years, with a lot of free time and a lot of passion for the game. So now every “what if” goes into the backlog, and then it gets built.
That is what Spike is, first of all: a system made by a volleyball player and coach who happens to write software, for clubs like the one I coach at.
— Denys Bielov, founder
What it puts in one place
The membership list and the roles, the schedule with position-based rosters, the fees, training plans, evaluations, match scoring and statistics, tournaments and the chat.
It is built for volleyball specifically rather than for every sport at once, because a line-up of six people who all play middle is not a team, and a generic headcount cannot tell you that.
How it gets built
Everything goes into the same backlog: my own ideas from training, and what the coaches, players and parents using Spike send through the feedback button in the app. What ships is written up in the release notes on the blog, and what is still missing is on the roadmap, listed as plainly as the rest of the site lists what works.
It is free for clubs, and it stays free — no member limit, no trial. Spike earns a share of the payments that move through it, which means it only makes money when a club is running sessions that people turn up to and pay for. A club that never charges for anything never pays anything.
Spike is made by Bielov Software Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales.