Managing a sports association: tips for optimizing your time

Do you find yourself wasting a lot of time running your sports association every week, and don’t know how to make the most of your time? There are several ways to help you solve this problem.

First and foremost, to be more efficient, it’s important to know exactly where you’re wasting the most time.

Is it sending e-mails to parents? Is it managing attendance? Or referees?

Here are a few solutions to help you save time in certain aspects of managing your sports association.

The registration period is a demanding time for the members of your association’s executive committee. You have to prepare registration forms, spend a lot of time on the phone, manage accounting and answer parents’ questions.

How do you manage the registration period?

If you’re in the habit of sending out a paper form and asking parents to mail it back to you, we’d advise you to stop now!

There are simpler and more efficient ways of keeping track of registrations, while saving time.

Avoid having parents travel and create an online registration form or PDF document. Simply send an e-mail with the link to the form. You’ll avoid days of waiting caused by delivery delays.

The days of paper registrations are over, and so must be your processes!

It will be easier to save each player’s data in an Excel file, or in a sports management application if you use one.

For payments during the registration period, make sure this task is entrusted to the right person, i.e. the accounting manager.

Of course, managing cheques is more time-consuming. You have to wait to receive the cheques from parents, deposit them at the bank, manually process the information in your files, and so on.

You could save a lot of time simply by allowing parents to pay by credit card via an online payment service like PayPal.

An even simpler way would be to authorize payment by Interac transfer, as the funds will be deposited directly into the association’s bank account.

To avoid wasting time, it’s important for association members to have an efficient system for communicating with each other and with volunteers.

E-mail communication is a good solution. However, the response time is sometimes longer, the e-mail may end up in spam, and it has to be seen among the 150 e-mails received every day.

It’s not very effective when a member needs an answer quickly.

Since you don’t see your club members every night, it can be interesting to have group conversations on Messengers, by text messaging or with applications like WhatsApp.

For volunteers, it’s possible to create a Facebook group at the start of the season and send an e-mail to all volunteers inviting them to join.

They’ll be able to communicate directly with each other and help each other out when needed.

Vous sauverez plusieurs coups de téléphone, car elle pourra écrire sur le groupe qu’elle à un empêchement et tenter de trouver quelqu’un pour la dépanner, au lieu de contacter l’entraîneur pour qu’il s’en charge.

You’ll save a lot of phone calls, because she’ll be able to write on the group that she can’t make it and try to find someone to help her out, instead of contacting the coach to take care of it.

To facilitate exchanges between members, you need a communication platform with contact details and availability. Using an application like MonClubSportif lets you find all this, in one place!

Coaches waste an immense amount of time communicating information to parents.

Keep a register of player and parent contact information for all teams. For a coach who receives several e-mails a day, it’s easy to delete a message by mistake.

If you send an e-mail with tournament information to parents at the beginning of the season, but the tournament isn’t until 2 months from now, chances are they’ve deleted the message by mistake in the meantime. You’ll have to resend the e-mail.

Of course, if this happens just once, it’s not the end of the world, but let’s be honest, it’s your daily life!

It’s hard for a coach to establish the link between parents and children simply with an e-mail address. The same goes for an administrative member of the organization, who has even less direct contact with them.

For a coach managing a dozen different teams, he doesn’t know all the players’ first and last names, let alone those of the parents.

He can easily waste the time of a field hockey period trying to find contact information for the parents.

In the event of a game cancellation, it’s even more important to have quick access to players’ contact details, as it’s often not the coach who contacts parents one at a time to notify them.

Admit it, if the technical director sent a single e-mail to all members in the event of a cancellation, things would go a lot faster!

Give important information to parents at the start of the season. Calendars and more formal documents are things parents can quickly take note of.

Simplify your task with a sports association management application.

MonClubSportif lets you view your events directly on the calendar available in the application.

You’ll also find the “documentation” tab, which lets you attach PDF or Excel documents. Parents can consult them at any time.

If you don’t use a sports association management application, you can make the documents public in a Facebook group.

There’s nothing more disappointing for a coach than to arrive at a practice and see that several players are absent and that he hasn’t been informed. Technical exercises planned for groups of 4 cannot be carried out, because too many players are missing.

At the same time, you don’t want to spend 3 hours on the phone on the weekend to confirm attendance.

Save hours of work with the attendance management module of a sports association management application. You’ll receive a notification when a player plans to miss a practice, as well as the reason for his absence.

There are no easy ways to know whether you’re going to have a practice with 4 or 10 players. You can set up a system with parents at the beginning of the season, asking them to notify you at least 24 hours in advance by e-mail or telephone.

By simplifying execution within a team, you’ll notice :

• Less time wasted on the team
• A lighter workload for coaches, who will be less inclined to quit.
• Coaches can focus more on player development
• The team will perform better and promote the association’s name.
• Young players will develop a greater sense of belonging to the club, due to better performance and stability of the coaching staff.

By streamlining administration, you’ll notice :

• Reduced turnover of volunteers and coaches
  less time spent on administrative tasks, leaving more time for program development and training
• A higher profile for the association

Accept the unexpected

Of course, you’re going to have to deal with a few unforeseen circumstances. Obviously, you can save a lot of time if you have the right tools at hand.

If you want a simple, effective solution, opt for a sports management application like MonClubSportif.

Don’t wait any longer, request a demo today.