How to Run a College Fencing Club Team on FencR: Dues, Equipment Fees, and Practices

Most college fencing club teams run on a spreadsheet, a group chat, and a treasurer's personal payment app. Dues arrive as screenshots, equipment money gets fronted and chased for weeks, and the practice schedule lives in a pinned message that half the team has muted. FencR replaces that whole stack with one platform, and because FencR is completely free, with no tiers and no caps, it fits a student org budget of exactly zero dollars.

This guide walks a student officer through setting up a collegiate fencing team on FencR in six steps: create the club, build the roster, collect dues, invoice for everything else, publish the schedule, and put the team online. It applies whether you compete in USACFC, a regional club conference like the BWCFC or MACFC, or train alongside an NCAA varsity program.

Billing is also entirely optional. If your team just wants scheduling, communication, and a clean roster, do Steps 1, 2, 5, and 6 and skip payments completely. Everything still works, and everything stays free.

Step 1: Create your team's club

Sign up at fencr.app with email, Google, or Apple, then run the club creation wizard. It takes about two minutes.

Club basics. Enter your team name, and FencR generates your club URL as you type, in the form fencr.app/club/your-team. Claim something recognizable, because this link is what you will put on recruiting flyers and the activities-fair QR code. Then toggle the weapons your team runs: Foil, Épée, Sabre, or all three. Weapon choices flow through the whole app, from plan coverage to session filters.

Location. Add your practice venue: the campus rec center, field house, or wherever your strips live. If your team splits time between venues, you can add more locations later at no cost.

One thing to decide before you click Create club: whoever runs the wizard becomes the club's admin, the role that controls settings, plans, billing, and integrations. For a student-run team that should be the officer who owns operations, usually the president or the treasurer. Coaches can be added later with the Coach role to run the floor.

Step 2: Build your roster and squads

Open the Members page. If you just came back from the activities fair with a signup sheet full of emails, this is where it goes.

Add Member builds the whole roster at once: paste a list of emails, add names inline, or upload a CSV with email, full_name, and an optional role column. Everyone you add sits as pending with an "Invite pending" chip, and here is the part that matters for a club team: nobody is emailed until you choose to send their invite. Stage the entire signup sheet, sort out who is actually joining, then send invites when practice schedules are real. If someone already has a FencR account, perhaps from their home club, the app matches them by email so nobody ends up with a duplicate.

Invite Member handles one person at a time, with a role attached: Athlete for your fencers, Coach for your volunteer or hired coach, Admin for fellow officers who need access to plans and billing.

Two features here do a lot of work for a collegiate team:

• Groups. Tag members into groups like "Beginner", "Competitive Squad", or per-weapon squads. Groups drive bulk actions, scoped scheduling, and targeted messaging, so "email the épée squad about Sunday's scrimmage" is two clicks.
• Waivers. Most university club sports offices require a signed liability waiver on file. Upload your waiver PDF on the Waivers page and require it: every new member is gated as pending until they sign in the app, and there is a paper-upload fallback for signatures collected in person. When the club sports office asks for proof, the signed PDFs are all in one place.

Step 3: Collect your dues

This is the step that retires the screenshot-and-spreadsheet system. FencR gives you two layers: plans for dues that repeat, and invoices for everything else (that is Step 4).

On the Plans page, set up dues in whichever shape your team actually uses:

• Recurring membership. A monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription that renews automatically. Quarterly at your semester dues rate is the closest fit for teams that think in semesters and want auto-renewal.
• One-time credit pack. A single payment for a set number of practice credits, useful for teams that charge per block of sessions, or for a "try it out" pack for new members before they commit.
• Per-semester invoice. Skip plans entirely and send each member a dues invoice at the start of every semester from the Invoices page. Simplest model, most manual, totally valid.

A $0 plan is also allowed, so you can grant practice access to scholarship members or officers with no billing attached.

Then decide how the money moves:

• Stripe. On the Integrations page, connect the team's Stripe account (or create one on the spot). Members pay by card or ACH through self-serve checkout, recurring plans bill automatically each cycle, and payouts land in the team's bank account. Card processing costs are added to the payer's invoice as a processing fee line, so the team receives the full dues amount. FencR never touches the money and takes no cut.
• Zelle. Save the club's Zelle email or phone and display name, and invoices go out with Zelle payment instructions and no processing fee, which students appreciate. The treasurer marks each invoice paid as transfers arrive.
• Cash and check. Same mark-as-paid flow. The invoice records who marked it paid and how, so the ledger survives even when the payment happened at practice.

Every payment lands against a named invoice under the club's own accounts, not through anyone's personal payment app, and the Payments page shows exactly who has paid and who to nudge at the next practice.

Step 4: Charge for equipment, travel, and anything else

Dues are the predictable part. The chaotic part of club-team finance is everything else: the group equipment order, the van and hotel split for an away tournament, entry fees, apparel, the fee for hosting your invitational. On FencR all of it runs through the Invoices page.

Create an invoice for any member with itemized line items: "Absolute Fencing starter set: $189", "USACFC Championships travel share: $95", each on its own line with quantities and unit prices. Set a due date, pick the payment method per invoice (Stripe checkout or Zelle instructions), and send. The member gets an email with a pay link, overdue reminders go out automatically, and the treasurer's job shrinks to watching invoices flip to paid.

Because payment method is chosen per invoice, you can run dues on Stripe autopilot while collecting a one-off equipment order by Zelle, or the reverse. Refunds for Stripe payments are handled in the team's own Stripe dashboard and mirrored back into FencR's records automatically.

For tournaments specifically, there is a better tool than a bare invoice, which brings us to the schedule.

Step 5: Run practices, open fencing, and tournaments

The Schedule page is where the team actually lives, and it works whether or not you set up any billing. A club with no active plans books sessions at no charge, with no credits involved. FencR supports the session types a collegiate team runs:

• Group practice. Your weekly practices with recurrence, so "Tuesday and Thursday 8 to 10 pm in the aux gym" is entered once for the whole semester. Cap participants if your strip count demands it, scope sessions by group so beginners and the competitive squad see their own calendars, and edit or cancel a single date or the whole series when the rec center bumps you for finals week.
• Open fencing. Drop-in floor time with optional capacity.
• Private lessons. If your team has a coach who gives individual lessons, publish bookable lesson blocks and let fencers claim slots.
• Tournaments. Create a tournament event with open sign-up and attach entry fees through the custom invoice flow, ideal for your home invitational or for collecting entries before an away trip.

Turn on member self-enrollment in Club Settings and teammates book themselves into sessions, which is how a student-run team should work; nobody has time to be the enrollment desk. Coaches and officers take attendance from the roster view, and the analytics dashboard tracks participation and cancellations, which is exactly the graph you want in hand when the club sports office asks for evidence of active membership at budget-renewal time.

Step 6: Put your team online

Recruiting is oxygen for a club team, and your setup ends by making the team visible.

• Your public club page at fencr.app/club/your-team shows your description, weapons, schedule, and a join flow. Put the link in your Instagram bio and print it as a QR code for the activities fair table.
• Embed widgets. Club Settings gives you copy-paste iframe snippets for a live schedule widget and a join form. If your university hosts a page for every club sport, drop the embeds in and your official page stops being a stale PDF; it shows this week's actual practices.
• Messaging. From the Messages page, email the whole team, one group, or one member with a rich-text composer. Announcements land in inboxes instead of dying in a muted group chat.
• Calendar sync. Members can connect Google Calendar or iCal so practices and tournaments appear on the calendar they already check between classes.

Semester launch checklist

Run this list the week before the activities fair:

Frequently asked questions

Is FencR free for college club sports teams? Yes, completely. Free for every club and every member, with no tiers, no feature gating, and no member caps. FencR never takes a cut of your dues or fees.

How do we collect dues online? Create a plan (recurring membership or one-time pack) or send a dues invoice each semester. Members pay by card or ACH through the team's Stripe account, or by Zelle, cash, or check with a treasurer marking the invoice paid. Card processing fees are added to the payer's invoice, so the team keeps the full dues amount.

Can we charge teammates for equipment or tournament travel? Yes. Invoice any member for anything with itemized line items, a due date, a per-invoice payment method, and automatic overdue reminders.

Do we need a coach or the athletics department to set this up? No. Any student officer can create the club in minutes and becomes its admin. Invite a coach with the Coach role if you have one; nothing about setup requires one.

Can we use Zelle instead of cards? Yes. Save the team's Zelle handle in Integrations and invoices carry Zelle instructions with no processing fee. You can mix methods across invoices.

Does FencR work for NCAA varsity programs too? Yes. The platform is identical; varsity staff tend to lean on scheduling, attendance, and communication, while club teams lean on dues and self-service booking.

Can we put our schedule on our university club website? Yes. Club Settings provides iframe embed snippets for a live schedule widget and a join form that work on university-hosted pages.

Do our members have to pay for FencR? No. Members only pay what your team charges them. FencR itself costs members nothing.

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Ready to move your team off the spreadsheet? Create your club free at fencr.app. For the full setup walkthrough of every screen mentioned here, read How to Manage a Fencing Club Using FencR, and for what each role sees once you are running, read How Can I Use FencR?.