Where it all began

The conversation that started it all

Andy Lee was Northern’s Internal Leagues Manager. Every month he’d run the box leagues using old Windows-based software, print the tables and scores on sheets of A4, and stick them on the notice board. When a match was played, players would scribble the score on the sheet by hand — and if you’ve ever tried to read five different people’s handwriting on a notice board, crossed out and corrected, you’ll understand the problem.

At the end of each five-week session, Andy would spend the whole of Saturday on the phone, ringing round to confirm scores, chase down the ones that didn’t add up, and track down players who’d quietly dropped out without telling anyone. Then came three weeks in Excel to work out the season winners and the most active player.

One day Andy — who’d probably heard on the grapevine that Wayne was a software developer — asked if there was a better way.

There was. On 31 July 2009, the first Wazygoose league session began. Players entered their own scores online. The tables updated automatically. Nobody had to spend their Saturday on the phone.

Andy handed league management over to Wayne when he moved to Lanzarote. Sadly, Andy passed away not long after. For several years Wayne ran an annual memorial tournament in his honour at Northern — until COVID put a stop to it. It never restarted.

Andy asked one question. The answer is still running sixteen years later.

The yellow binder

Booking a court at Northern Squash Club in 2010 meant turning up in person and writing your name in a box.

Behind the bar sat a yellow ring binder. Inside it: one A4 page per day, four courts across the top, time slots down the side, 14 days’ worth of pages. Someone had to print it fresh every morning. To book, you came in and wrote your name. To cancel, you crossed it out — and if someone wanted that slot, they had to hope there was space to write their name in the gap. Sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes Tipp-Ex was involved.

There was one other option. You could phone the club from 9:30am and ask the bar manager to write your name in the book.

On 27 June 2010, the first Wazygoose online booking was made.

Keeping track of members

Once courts could be booked online it quickly became clear that knowing who was booking them mattered. The Memberships feature followed shortly after. The first Wazygoose membership season at Northern began on 1 June 2010.

The card machine

In those early years, court lights at Northern were operated by a card machine. Members were each issued a card; insert it into the box on the wall and the lights came on. The system worked — until it didn’t. The machine was fragile, prone to breaking, and there was exactly one person in the world who could fix it: Iain Lumsden, a retired electrician and devoted club member who’d taken the machine under his wing.

Single points of failure are a precarious thing.

Working with electrician Dave Mallett — who designed the hardware, wrote the embedded software, and wired it all in — Wazygoose Lights Control replaced the card machine entirely. Around 2012, court lights started switching on and off automatically with every booking. Dave went on to install the system at several more clubs across the North of England.

The empty court problem

By 2013, Northern had grown to around 275 members and something odd was happening. Courts were being booked — but then sitting empty. Members were frustrated at seeing what looked like unavailable slots that nobody was actually using.

The problem was simple: there was no incentive to cancel. Members held onto bookings they didn’t need because cancelling cost them nothing. The solution was the sliding scale refund — cancel early and get your money back in full; cancel late and get progressively less. The empty court problem largely disappeared.

Spreading beyond Northern

Wazygoose had only ever intended to be one club’s system. But in March 2011, the NCFE Squash League became the first external organisation to use it — just for league management at that stage.

Then something unexpected happened. Newcastle United Golf Club came on board in December 2011, followed by City of Newcastle Golf Club in September 2012. For a few years Wazygoose ran tee-time bookings for golf clubs alongside squash. It was a proof of concept that the platform wasn’t sport-specific — even if the golf clubs eventually moved on to dedicated tee-time platforms.

The next big squash club was Boldon in March 2016, followed by Carlisle in November 2016. Today Wazygoose is used by around 24 clubs and organisations across the UK — including a holistic therapy centre in Newcastle that books treatment rooms across seven buildings.

Courses, events, and beyond

Richard Vitty — Northern’s head coach — ran his first junior coaching course through Wazygoose on 10 September 2016. The Courses feature had been built around his Saturday sessions. Over time it broadened out, and in January 2023 Bob Aynsley began using it for adult group coaching.

Events and competitions followed, then integrations: SquashTV went live at Carlisle in December 2025, with cameras recording and streaming matches automatically linked to court bookings. SquashLevels national rankings integration launched at Northern in April 2026 — the first club in the UK to have its internal league results feeding automatically into the national ranking system.

The name

Wazygoose doesn’t mean anything, really.

Wayne’s online gaming handle had been Wazygoose for years — Wayne, plus a nickname from a friend who calls him Weazy, and a vague memory of a character called Wayzgoose in a Terry Pratchett novel (the spelling is different, and the connection is loose). When it came to naming the platform, he couldn’t think of anything better, so the placeholder became permanent.

Some of the best names are accidental.

Wazygoose is still proudly independent. Wayne is still a member at Northern Squash Club. The league Andy Lee asked about is still running. The yellow binder is long gone.