Chesterton Indoor Bowls Club, Cambridge — from a manual scoreboard to a system that pays for itself

The club’s previous scoreboard was manual, and updating it took real time. Every change meant somebody physically altering the board.

On a league night with eight rinks in play, that is a job nobody wants and a score that is always slightly behind the game. It also meant the board could do nothing else — no advertising, no club information, no revenue.

Scores are now entered on a laptop. Names are typed in and appear on the board immediately, and each rink has its own 32-inch screen where scores can be entered remotely from the rink itself.

That is the change that matters day to day: the people playing enter the score where they are playing, and it appears everywhere at once. Nobody walks anywhere, and the board is never out of date.

The master scoreboard runs advertising as well as scoring, and that has changed the economics of the installation.

A bowls hall holds an audience for hours at a time across several days a week. Selling that space to local businesses gives the club an income stream it did not have when the board was manual — and one that offsets the cost of the system itself.

The scoreboard was one part of a wider modernisation. Chesterton was established in 1973 and marked its 50th anniversary by reinvesting in the building — updated rinks, restaurant and toilets alongside the new scoring infrastructure.

The funding came from an unusual source: money the club generated when the NHS used the venue during the pandemic. It is a good example of a club turning a difficult period into a facility that will serve its members for the next fifty years.

Our other bowls installation, at West Denton Indoor Bowls Club in Newcastle, took the same approach a step further with a 4m x 2m totaliser and an eight-speaker PA system throughout the hall.

Every installation we have completed is plotted on our map. Tick Electronic Scoreboards to see the rest: installations.durantcricket.co.uk