Sport organisation using CiviCRM
Welcome to civi. The approach I would recommend, having done it for several situations, is to use the Permissioned Relationship extension. This then allows you to daisy chain permissions so that local officer has a relationship to local club - and hence can see anyone how has the specified type of relationship to the club. Then you can also stack the local, regional, national (global) in the same manner, so a global officer sees everyone, the national sees everyone at or below the national level etc.

I have a diagram of this which may help explain the concept



So to answer the other part of the question head on, yes set up each club as an Organisation :-)

To extend that, what we have done is to then build drupal Views and Webforms which means the general club officer rarely has to actually go in to civi but get all their data, contacts etc from Views and Webforms (but that is jumping in pretty deep for a first time usage).

Happy to demo this quickly if it would help.