The pool deck — where Member Splash was born, and where every feature decision has always lived.
A volunteer treasurer's kitchen table, late February. A cardboard box stuffed with paper membership applications. Checks from families who forgot to sign them. A laminated card system built in Excel by the "tech-savvy" board member three seasons ago that nobody else could navigate. A waitlist that existed as handwritten names in a spiral notebook.
This wasn't a cautionary tale. This was standard operating procedure for hundreds of community swim clubs and HOA pools across the country as recently as 2010.
Sixteen seasons later, those same clubs are sending push notifications to members' lock screens, running automated waitlists, collecting dues via credit card and ACH bank transfer, managing staff schedules from a mobile app, and loading prepaid snack bar balances from their phones on the way to the pool. The transformation didn't happen all at once — and it wasn't driven by a software company that discovered a market. It was driven by people who grew up at pools, built what the industry actually needed, and have spent sixteen consecutive seasons refining it based on feedback from the clubs using it.
This is that story.
The Beginning The Paper Era — How Pools Really Operated
Before digital, community swim club and HOA pool administration was a genuinely burdensome exercise in manual coordination. Paper registration forms were mailed to members in late winter, who mailed back checks — many of them unsigned or made out to the wrong name. Check-in at the front desk meant a printed roster and a handwritten sign-in sheet, supplemented by laminated photo passes that got lost, lent to neighbors, or never returned at the end of the season.
Guest passes were paper booklets, physical tickets, or the honor system — and "the honor system" at a busy community pool means exactly what it sounds like. Waitlists were literally notebooks. End-of-season treasurer reconciliation meant weeks of cross-referencing paper receipts against bank statements, hunting down the family whose check never cleared, and trying to figure out who the mystery $200 deposit in October actually came from.
For HOAs, the situation was often worse. Physical laminated cards were mailed to residents, tracked in binders maintained by property management companies, and updated via phone call during business hours. Residents with questions called. Residents with problems called. Residents who lost their cards called. The pool became the highest-friction amenity in the community — and the one generating the most calls.
The human cost was real. The membership chair, the treasurer, the front desk coordinator — all volunteers with day jobs — absorbed the operational chaos every spring. The clubs that ran well were the ones lucky enough to have the same overwhelmed volunteer show up year after year. The ones that struggled were everyone else.
The Founding Built on a Pool Deck — Not in a Boardroom
Member Splash founder Jamie Currie grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland — the kind of pool kid who started every summer at swim practice and ended every afternoon with the guards insisting the pool was closing and he had to go home. He became a lifeguard. Eventually he was managing a dozen clubs in MD and DC during summers home from college, with the operational reality of running a seasonal aquatic facility as familiar to him as the smell of chlorine.
His brother, John Currie, followed the same path and went a step further — buying out the pool company he worked for. As owner of Pool Personnel, John now provides complete pool management and staffing to clubs throughout Montgomery County. He knows, in the most operational and specific terms possible, exactly what a swim club board needs from a software platform — because he has been on the other end of the clipboard.
In 2010, John approached Jamie — by then a web developer running his own shop in southern California — about helping one of his clubs shift registration and dues payments online. It was supposed to be a one-off project. Neither of them realized they were founding a company.
"It seems impossible to think that something Melanie and I started with nothing more than an IBM Thinkpad, a few credit cards, a cat, and the hope that we'd somehow make enough to pay our rent has grown to the scale we're at and continues to grow. We both still remember calling our parents back in the day and telling them 'We're up to 10 customers now!'"
— Jamie Currie, Founder · Member SplashJamie and his wife, and co-founder, Melanie built Member Splash from nothing — an IBM Thinkpad, a few credit cards, and a genuine belief that the swim club industry deserved better tools than it had. No venture capital. No accelerator. No product-market fit deck. Just a real operational problem and two people who understood it from the inside.
What made that founding moment different from every other software origin story was not a market analysis or an investor thesis about the aquatics management space. The problem was felt on a pool deck, in a treasurer's living room, at a front desk running on a clipboard. The solution was built for that specific reality — not adapted from a general-purpose platform and described as a swim club tool.
That distinction has shaped every product decision in the sixteen seasons since. As Jamie reflected this year at the platform's sixteenth opening weekend — the same weekend Member Splash crossed $100 million in transactions processed in a single season: "As we head into our 16th opening weekend, we're both extremely grateful to have all of you on the journey with us." The clubs weren't just customers. They were the people who made it possible.
2010 – 2016 The First Digital Wave — Getting Off Paper
The first wave of digital adoption in community aquatics was straightforward: put the paper form online, accept dues payments by credit card and ACH. For most clubs, this alone felt like a revolution — and by any fair measure, it was. Eliminating the check-sorting, the lost applications, the bank deposit runs, the member who swore they mailed their registration in January — these were real operational wins.
Member Splash grew through this wave organically, one club at a time, through word of mouth among clubs that had actually used it.
Member Splash is born — online registration and dues payment by credit card and ACH for one club. A one-off project with no roadmap and no name yet.
Front desk check-in and bulk email communication added. Word starts to spread among neighboring clubs — not from marketing, but from boards talking to each other.
A board member from another pool spotted the system at a swim meet and reached out. No sales pitch. Organic traction from real results.
Photo check-in, full attendance and payment reporting, Excel/CSV exports, support for diverse pricing plans. Ten clubs and growing year-round.
450+ clubs across 30+ states. ~95% retention rate. Over $100 million in membership transactions processed this season — before opening weekend — with peak days hitting $7 million in 24 hours. The platform that started on one pool deck now runs hundreds of them.
The broader market context during this period exposed the problem with generic tools. The platforms available — general membership management software like ClubExpress and Wild Apricot, basic web form tools, sports association platforms — could accept a payment online. What they couldn't do was run a pool deck. They had no concept of photo ID check-in, seasonal household membership capacity limits, guest pass economics, or a front desk operated by a 19-year-old during the busiest hours of the summer.
What Member Splash understood from the start — because its founders had managed pools — was that a community swim club is not a membership organization, a sports team, or a parks department. It is all three at once, plus a physical facility that requires daily gate access management, real-time capacity control, guest revenue tracking, and a volunteer workforce with no technology background. No generic platform was going to serve that combination. It needed to be built specifically.
"Before Member Splash, our membership system was literally a card box. I spent weeks tracking down payments and organizing everything by hand — it was stressful and time-consuming. Now everything is streamlined online: payments, check-ins, and more all in one place. Member Splash has saved me countless hours and completely changed how smoothly our club operates. Paper is truly a thing of the past!"
Lauren DiStefano · Oakwood Valley Swim Club2016 – 2022 The Maturation Wave — Specificity vs. Adaptation
Photo ID check-in at the gate — the daily operation that separates purpose-built pool software from everything else.
As the community aquatics market matured, it began to fragment — and the fragmentation revealed something important about what actually serving a swim club requires versus what generic platforms offer.
Competitive swim team platforms (SportsEngine, TeamUnify, SwimTopia, Swimmingly, Club Assistant) grew into genuinely powerful tools for managing athlete rosters, meet entries, coach workflows, and USA Swimming integration. They're excellent at what they do. They were never designed for community pool membership operations — no household membership model with capacity-based waitlists, no photo gate check-in, no guest pass economics. Clubs that manage a summer swim team alongside their community membership operation discovered this quickly: team software and pool software are different tools for different jobs.
Swim school platforms (Jackrabbit Swim, iClassPro, SwimBiz) built strong class-based lesson scheduling tools for learn-to-swim programs. Same situation — excellent at their specific job, fundamentally wrong for seasonal family membership management.
Recreation department platforms (Amilia/SmartRec, CommunityPass, ACTIVENet, RecDesk) built enterprise-grade tools for parks directors managing publicly-operated facilities with professional staff and dozens of simultaneous programs. The paradigm is program registration. A swim club's paradigm is seasonal household membership with physical facility access. Volunteer boards using recreation department software consistently reported the same friction: too complex, too expensive, and designed for a customer — a parks director — who is not them.
General membership platforms (ClubExpress, Wild Apricot) handle dues collection and member databases cleanly for professional associations, hobby clubs, and nonprofits. The moment a family shows up at the pool gate and the system can't verify their photo, enforce a guest visit limit, or track a guest credit balance, the adaptation fails.
The dividing line that Member Splash identified early — and that the market was slowly learning — was photo ID check-in at the gate. Either your software understands that physical access control at a seasonal aquatic facility is the core daily operation, or it doesn't. Most platforms in the market don't. They never needed to.
While the broader market was fragmenting, Member Splash was deepening. Online dues collection by credit card and ACH bank transfer — giving members flexible payment options and clubs faster, more reliable revenue. Guest tracking and payment (credits, limits, revenue capture at the front desk). Waitlist automation that fills capacity-capped clubs without staff phone calls. Court reservation systems for swim and tennis clubs managing both facilities. Point of sale for the snack bar and concessions. Sponsorship revenue tools. Google Sheets integration for swim instructors. Financial reporting that exports in formats compatible with QuickBooks, so boards and treasurers can manage their books without duplicate data entry.
Every one of those features followed the same path: a real board member described a real operational problem in specific terms. The team built it. The club tested it. The feature went live for every club on the platform.
"Member Splash has not only stopped misuse of memberships with photo IDs, but it has also streamlined payments and reservations. Guest passes can now be purchased in bulk with no lost revenue, and event registration and payments are all in one place. It has simplified operations for both our staff and our volunteer board."
Ryan Wenstrup-Moore · Mt. Lookout Swim Club"We switched to Member Splash in 2017 and have never looked back. It's by far the easiest registration system we've ever used. The support staff is responsive, professional, and always kind. The level of service and care they provide makes the whole experience truly priceless."
Inverness Association2020 – Present The HOA Modernization Wave — A Distinct Shift
HOA pools are modernizing fast — driven by residents who expect the same digital experience from their pool as from every other part of their lives.
HOAs have managed pools for decades. What has changed is not the pools — it's the residents using them.
Millennial and Gen Z homebuyers now represent the majority of first-time HOA entrants. They manage everything digitally: utilities, documents, service requests, package deliveries, reservations. The expectation that a community amenity operates with the same digital fluency as everything else in their daily life isn't unreasonable — it's the baseline. The laminated card mailed in March that worked without complaint in a 1995 community generates board-meeting friction in 2025.
The questions HOA boards are now fielding from residents are consistent: Why can't I register online? Why is there no app for the pool? Why do I need to mail a check for a pool pass? Can I book a lap lane in advance? How do I know if the pool is closed today? These aren't edge case complaints — they're the new normal, and the boards and property managers being asked to answer them need tools that can actually deliver.
Property management companies — Associa, Sequoia, AMG, Abaris — managing dozens or hundreds of HOA communities with pool amenities are hearing the same requests from the communities they serve, at scale. These companies have become Member Splash partners, with co-branded partner pages built around the specific workflows HOA management companies need.
What MS built specifically for HOAs during this period: resident vs. non-resident pricing tiers and access rules built natively into the membership engine; the Geofence Form Field (draw a boundary on a Google Map, automatically validate whether an applicant's address falls inside your service area, apply different pricing and eligibility rules with zero staff involvement); a dedicated HOA solutions page and onboarding workflow designed for board and property manager schedules.
The critical framing for HOAs considering Member Splash: it is not a replacement for Enumerate, FRONTSTEPS, TownSq, Buildium, or AppFolio. Those platforms handle HOA accounting, violation tracking, ARC reviews, and governance — and they do their jobs well. None of them were designed to run a pool. Member Splash is the dedicated pool layer that runs alongside your HOA platform, handling everything the governance suite was never built to provide.
"Member Splash has been a great tool for checking in members. We can track residents vs. non-residents each month to ensure balance, and the reports help us monitor guest attendance and other key metrics. The campaign tab is also a fantastic way to communicate with all of our members and share important updates."
Milestone Owners Association"I have used Member Splash for multiple properties. The process is smooth and easy to use. I'll be using them again next year. Highly recommended!"
Krishna SinghThe Hard Truth The Boardroom Software Problem
As community aquatics became a visible software market, the wrong builders started claiming it. The pattern is consistent, and it's worth naming specifically — because the clubs evaluating software in 2026 deserve clarity about what they're actually considering.
A scheduling platform built for sports academies — swim clubs, music schools, dance studios, rental facilities. It has real strengths in scheduling flexibility, and facilities running multi-sport or multi-activity operations find genuine value in it. What it doesn't have: reporting that integrates directly with accounting software (clubs on eSoft managing dues typically maintain two separate systems), a mobile app experience that works for members or volunteer admins, or the swim-club-specific family account depth that boards need. Verified Capterra reviews describe the member-facing mobile experience as "very difficult to do anything administrative on my phone and very challenging for our members." That's a livable trade-off for a sports academy. For a swim club where membership is the core product, it compounds every season.
Purpose-built for swim and tennis clubs — it knows its lane and works cleanly within it. Basic dues collection, check-in, court reservations, and clean member experience for simple operations. It's a solid starting point for clubs going digital for the first time. It's also a ceiling. Clubs that need waitlist automation, a mobile app, push notifications, staff scheduling, Splash Cards, Day Use Passes, or the operational depth that comes from fifteen years of feedback will hit that ceiling within a few seasons. Simplicity is a virtue until the club outgrows it.
Genuinely excellent for what it does — court scheduling, memberships, mobile app, and billing for tennis and pickleball facilities. 2,000+ facilities trust it for racquet sport operations. But CourtReserve's own platform describes pools as a "reservable space" alongside clubhouses and fitness studios. There is no photo ID check-in paradigm, no seasonal household membership model with capacity-based waitlists, no guest pass economics. A swim and tennis club using CourtReserve for courts still needs a completely separate platform for everything that happens on the pool side — because CourtReserve, by its own design, is not a pool platform.
General membership management for professional associations and hobby clubs. They handle dues and a member directory cleanly for organizations whose operations are primarily administrative. The moment a family shows up at the pool gate and the system can't verify their photo, enforce a guest visit limit, or track a guest credit balance, the adaptation fails. ClubExpress has also faced meaningful customer backlash following a recent acquisition — support response times have deteriorated and pricing has increased, making it an active switching market for clubs that chose it as a swim club solution.
A DC-area platform that started as a pool pass and check-in tool for HOAs and community pools — and has been making an aggressive push into the HOA amenity market. AGS does the pass-and-access piece reasonably well: online applications, ePasses, photo ID passes, basic check-in. For HOAs that need nothing more than a digital version of the laminated card they used to mail out, it's a functional and affordable solution. What it isn't is a full pool operations platform. There's no integrated membership waitlist, no snack bar POS, no staff scheduling, no guest pass revenue engine, no court reservations, no push notifications, no installable app, and no seasonal membership management depth. It's a check-in and access control tool that has expanded its marketing footprint to cover gyms, tennis clubs, co-working spaces, gaming lounges, and churches — which tells you something about how broadly it defines its market and how specifically it serves any one of them. HOAs that outgrow basic pass management and need a platform that actually runs their pool — not just controls who gets in — need something built for that full job.
Enterprise recreation management platforms built for parks directors, YMCAs, and publicly-operated facilities with professional staff. Powerful, scalable, and designed for a customer who is not a volunteer club board. Their paradigm is activity and program registration. A swim club's paradigm is seasonal household membership with physical facility access and daily gate operations — a fundamentally different problem. Club Automation, acquired by Daxko, illustrates a particular risk worth naming: when a platform is absorbed into a larger enterprise, development priorities shift to the acquiring company's broader roadmap. Club Automation customers have experienced this directly — feature development slowed significantly post-acquisition, and clubs that built workflows around specific capabilities have watched those capabilities stagnate or disappear in subsequent seasons. Feature runoff — losing functionality you counted on, year after year — is a real cost that never shows up in a demo.
Enterprise platforms built for country clubs with restaurants, golf courses, tee time management, spa operations, and full-time professional management teams. They are genuinely excellent at that use case. A community swim club running a snack bar and a volunteer board does not need marina management, tee time scheduling, or F&B accounting modules. These platforms are priced and scoped for organizations with six-figure software budgets and dedicated IT staff — a reality that has nothing to do with how a 300-family swim club operates.
The thread connecting all of these platforms is the same: they were built for a different problem and adapted — or described — for the pool use case. The tell is always consistent. No photo ID check-in model. No seasonal household membership with capacity-based waitlists. No guest pass economics built into the billing engine. No volunteer-board-first support design. And pricing models — per-member fees, per-transaction charges, per-module add-ons — that penalize clubs for growing.
"A platform can look impressive in a 30-minute demo. It looks very different on opening weekend when 400 families are trying to register simultaneously, a 19-year-old lifeguard is running the front desk, and the board treasurer is answering member questions on their personal cell phone."
Member Splash has been on that opening weekend. Every season for sixteen years. The features that exist in the platform today aren't hypotheses about what clubs might need — they're answers to questions boards actually asked, in specific operational language, during pre-season calls and end-of-season surveys. That difference is not a marketing claim. It's a methodology.
"We absolutely LOVE everything Member Splash has to offer. It has completely transformed our ability to track membership, manage events and fundraisers, and even run our Snack Bar with the POS interface. Most importantly, Member Splash has made our processes easier for members, staff, and volunteers. We cannot stress enough the value and convenience it has brought to our club!"
Drew Powers · Bower Hill Swim Club"Member Splash has absolutely helped move our club forward. The integration of email campaigns and payment options like ACH and credit card have taken us out of the stone ages and made registration season run smoothly. All of our board administrators use the platform with ease, and we couldn't imagine running the club without it!"
Juniper Lane Swim Club2025 Building the Foundation
A pool in winter doesn't look like much from the outside. From the deck, nothing is visibly happening — the lanes are empty, the gates are locked, the season is over. But the clubs that open smoothly in May started getting ready in October. The plumbing is being maintained. The infrastructure is being reinforced. The team is preparing for what summer demands. What happens beneath the surface in the off-season is what makes summer possible.
2025 was that kind of year for Member Splash.
In June 2025, the development team expanded with three new engineers — the talent directly behind the 2026 feature releases that clubs are opening their seasons with now. The support team grew alongside development: more staff, faster response times, broader coverage across the season.
The 2025 releases were quieter than what clubs will see in 2026 — but they were anything but idle. Visit management got meaningful improvements: admins can now delete visits directly from the front desk screen with automatic guest credit restoration, a checkout time filter shows who is currently at the facility, and every deletion is logged in the audit trail. Small features. Exactly what front desk staff had been asking for.
Member Mail — the integrated email tool — matured significantly, adding email scheduling (plan your communications in advance, send at the optimal moment for member attention) and advanced deliverability reporting tracking delivered, bounced, opened, and clicked rates. Sending emails without knowing whether anyone reads them isn't communication — it's noise.
The Settings Hub was overhauled: all admin settings now live in one clean, card-based dashboard inside the Member Splash admin panel. The old WordPress settings menu is gone. This kind of infrastructure work is invisible to members and invaluable to the admins who use the platform every day.
In November 2025, the Geofence Form Field launched — genuinely new capability for HOA pools and boundary-based clubs. Draw a service area on a map. Link it to your registration form's address field. The system automatically validates whether an applicant's address falls inside or outside your boundary and applies different pricing, eligibility rules, or form logic accordingly. No staff verification. No manual lookups. No ambiguity.
All of that work — the team, the infrastructure, the refinements — was the foundation. What follows is what it made possible.
The 2026 Season The 2026 Explosion — What 16 Years of Listening Builds
The 2026 season marks something different at Member Splash — not just new features, but a genuine step-change in what the platform can do for a club. Every release below came from the same source: real boards, real treasurers, real admins, describing real operational problems in specific language across hundreds of conversations over sixteen seasons. Here's what they asked for. Here's what got built.
The ask, repeated by hundreds of boards over years: "Can members just do this themselves from their phone?"
The full Member Splash experience, installable directly from the browser on any device — iPhone, Android, tablet, desktop. No App Store approval. No Google Play submission. No waiting. Members get a home screen icon, full-screen experience, and app-like performance. This is not a mobile-optimized website. It is an installable application that works on every device your members actually own.
Members tap to check in from their phone at the gate. Staff receive a real-time notification. No paper lists. No manual lookups. No bottleneck at the front desk on a busy Saturday afternoon. Lifeguards stay focused on the water.
Direct to the member's lock screen. Pool closure. Weather alert. Lane availability. Swim lesson reminder. Event announcement. No open rates to optimize. No newsletter to design. Send and be seen — immediately, on the device members actually check.
Browse availability, book a court or lane or facility, and pay — all from the app. Payment collected at booking. Manage and cancel from the same interface. Works with your existing Paid Reservations setup.
Register for swim lessons, clinics, and programs directly from the app. Payment at registration. Automated reminders keep members and instructors aligned without staff follow-up.
Splash Cards, Paid Reservations, and Day Use Passes — revenue your club was already generating, now captured automatically.
The ask: "We're leaving money on the table and we know it. How do we capture it without adding staff?"
Collect payment at the time of booking — courts, lap lanes, party areas, cabanas, and any facility your club chooses to monetize. Set flat or hourly pricing. Configure separate member and guest rates. Pass through service fees. Members pay via saved credit card or ACH bank transfer at checkout. Staff receive real-time email notifications on bookings and cancellations. Automatic refunds within your policy window. No more chasing fees after the fact.
Prepaid digital spending accounts for the snack bar and POS. Members load funds online using a saved credit card or ACH bank transfer. Balances deduct instantly at checkout. Spending is always capped by what's on the card — no surprise bills, no debt, no awkward "I'll pay you next time" at the concession window. Members create multiple cards (one per child, one for the family), view transaction history, and manage everything from their account page.
Sell one-day access for guests and non-members — online or at the gate. Set capacity limits to prevent overcrowding. Tiered pricing by adult, child, and senior. Passes tracked and validated inside Member Splash. A revenue stream most clubs haven't been able to capture cleanly until now.
The ask: "We're a volunteer board, not a professional management company. Can we operate like one?"
Build and publish staff schedules. Employees clock in and out from their phones. Approve time-off requests without back-and-forth email chains. Export hours and pay summaries directly for payroll. The first tool designed specifically for managing pool staff — lifeguards, front desk, concessions — built into the membership platform itself, so you're not managing people in a separate system.
Configuring complex facility availability used to mean hours of manual setup across multiple facilities and time slots. Now: describe your facility rules in plain language, and AI builds the schedule. Handles complex recurring availability across multiple facilities. Review and adjust before publishing. What used to take hours takes minutes.
Push a message to every member the moment they log into their portal. Add images, text, and links. Set start and end dates so messages appear when they're relevant and disappear when they're not. Members acknowledge and dismiss. The fastest way to get a rule change, event reminder, or urgent notice in front of your entire membership — without an email campaign.
Every invoice your club sends now reflects your identity — your logo, your brand colors, your club name. Not generic software. Not a third-party billing platform. Professional billing that looks like it came from your organization, because it did.
The ask: "Our HOA platform handles governance and accounting. It can't run our pool. What do we use?"
Draw a boundary on a Google Map. Link it to the address field in your registration form. When a resident applies, the system automatically checks whether their address falls inside or outside your service area and applies different pricing, eligibility rules, or form logic accordingly. No staff verification. No manual address lookups. No appeals from applicants who live one block outside the boundary — the system is the answer.
All of the 2026 features — the app, push notifications, Paid Reservations, Splash Cards, Day Use Passes, the Staff Scheduler — apply directly to the HOA pool context. The community pool stops being the highest-friction amenity the management company handles and starts running itself.
Coming This Summer What's Next — Summer 2026 Pipeline
The 2026 season releases are live — and the development team isn't stopping. Three features currently in progress will roll out before summer's end:
Members will be able to reload their Splash Card balance directly from the app — poolside, before heading to the concession stand. No logging into a laptop. No running out of balance mid-summer.
Members order concessions from their phone and pick up at the window. Less line pressure during peak hours. More throughput. More revenue captured per visit. The concession stand becomes a mobile-order operation.
The most operationally significant item in the pipeline. Clubs will be able to offer membership dues on subscription (monthly recurring) or installment plans — spreading an annual fee across multiple payments, collected automatically by credit card or ACH. For families: a $600 annual membership paid as $100/month removes the barrier that keeps waitlisted households from converting. For clubs: predictable year-round recurring revenue instead of one registration-season spike — cash flow that funds off-season operations, staff training, and facility maintenance. For HOAs: assessment-style billing that aligns with how residents already pay community fees.
The Bigger Picture Forward-Thinking — The Investment Being Made
The swim club software market is changing. Larger recreation platforms are building swim-specific modules. Booking tools are adding pool management landing pages. Enterprise platforms are pitching down-market. The space is getting noisier — and for clubs evaluating software, that noise makes an already difficult decision harder.
Member Splash's response to that environment is not defensive positioning. It's investment — made possible by a platform that has earned the trust of nearly 500 clubs over sixteen seasons and is operating at a scale that was inconceivable when Jamie Currie made that first call to his parents: "We're up to 10 customers now."
This season, Member Splash crossed $100 million in membership transactions processed — and did it before opening weekend even arrived, with peak days running at $7 million in 24 hours. That's not a press release milestone. It's what happens when hundreds of volunteer-run swim clubs and HOA pools trust a single platform to handle registration season, and the number keeps climbing as pools open their gates.
The largest development investment since the platform's founding — new CTO, expanded engineering team, the infrastructure and capacity behind the 2026 feature releases. The output is visible. The commitment behind it is permanent.
As the development team grew, so did the support team. More staff, faster response times, broader seasonal coverage. The same free support model that has been included since 2010 — not tiered, not paywalled, not replaced with a paid onboarding package.
As the platform has grown, as features have expanded, as engineering investment has increased — Member Splash has not passed those costs to customers through pricing tier increases or support model changes. Better product. Same price. By design.
The PWA, push notifications, self check-in, in-app reservations, mobile snack bar ordering — this is a deliberate repositioning for what community aquatics management is becoming: mobile-first, self-service, and built around the member experience, not just the admin experience.
That last point matters more than it might appear. The platforms entering the swim club space right now are building for where the market is. The investments Member Splash is making are building for where it's going — and sixteen years of being inside this market gives a different view of that direction than any competitor entering it from the outside has.
Member Splash was first to the pool deck. It intends to stay there.
The Bottom Line Why Clubs Stay
Most software is built by people who saw a market. Member Splash was built by people who had the problem.
That difference is not just an origin story — it's a methodology that has compounded over sixteen seasons. Every feature in this article, from the first webcam check-in in 2013 to the AI-powered availability builder in 2026, came from a real conversation with a real board member describing a real operational problem. Nearly 500 clubs. Thousands of demos — conducted not to close sales, but to listen. Sixteen consecutive end-of-season surveys. Pre-season discovery calls before every registration season. Beta testers who are actual pool board members, not hired QA engineers.
The result is a ~95% retention rate — not a number Member Splash advertises, but a byproduct of actually listening. Platforms that fit how you operate don't get replaced. When the software was built by someone who managed pools, is maintained by a team that surveys clubs every season, supported by people who know what "opening weekend" means in practice, and priced in a way that doesn't penalize clubs for growing — it keeps working, season after season, for the people who need it most.
The clubs that stay are the ones where the incoming treasurer hears from the outgoing treasurer: "Don't overthink it. We use Member Splash. It works."
"The transition from our old service to Member Splash was seamless. Erin, our point of contact, guided us through everything, and we were back up and running in no time."
Nicoletta SerenataThe clipboard is still there. It's just digital now — and it knows everyone's face.