With summer just around the corner, who doesn’t want to spend more time outside on a warm sunny day? Coaches spend numerous hours and days throughout the year organizing their sports teams, practices, games and tournaments. By following a few simple tips you can become a more efficient coach, so less time is spent inside planning and more time can be spent outdoors!
Let time wasting be a practice of the past! Check out these 5 time saving tips for sports coaches:
Use the Resources you Have
Take a look around… what resources do you have right in front of you? Utilize volunteers or parents who are willing to pitch in and help with your sports team. Do any volunteers have an area of expertise they can help with? Plan early in the season and assign tasks to volunteers and parents so they are aware of what they are responsible for. If you have sport savvy volunteers, they can help with set up practice and overlook drills. Many parents are often willing and eager to help out and it makes them feel included in their child’s sport. Do not feel shy, let be open with them and ask for their thoughts and ideas. You never know when or where a great training idea will pop out from! Parents are also crucial when planning extra events like fundraisers – encourage them to get involved.
Plan in Advance – Create a Calendar
Planning events far in advance seems like a lot of work but will save you so much time during the span of the season. Last minute planning and scrambling leads to wasted time, poor results and unnecessary stress. Your practice may only last an hour, the key to get the most out of it is to have as much of those 60 minutes as ‘active time.’ The more you team play’s the more they learn. Creating a calendar of events for each month and for the entire season helps keep everyone well informed and organized. Parents will now have a resource to refer to just incase they forget the time of a practice or game.
Online Registrations
Put the pen and paper down… registrations can be done online in a fraction of the time. Say goodbye to countless hours spent filling out, reviewing and organizing forms because now all the registration information can be available at the click of the button. Your focus will shift from paperwork to more higher level strategic responsibilities.
Streamline Communication
Effective communication is a major component of sports management. As a sports coach, this is something you have to embrace. Make it known to parents how communication will be used so everyone is on the same page and aware of the benefits of using an online webpage for the sports team. Streamlining communication into one channel saves the trap of becoming to overbearing, and losing your audience’s’ attention and focus.
Delegate Responsibilities
A critical part of running a club, league, team, or all included, is to meet decision deadlines and make smart choices. A key component to doing achieving that is having an administrator who is able to make good decisions through all levels. To do this, the ability to delegate tasks to other members and/or volunteers is crucial. A good administrator does a lot of work themselves. A great administrator delegates jobs, leads through example and keeps on top of all involved.
So as a sports administrator, there are tools at your disposal to make managing the day-to-day aspects simple. One of these tools is PlayyOn. Whether you’re planning for an upcoming season or in the middle of a sports season it is never too late to try PlayyOn – the best online sports management tool, guaranteed to save you time. You have nothing to lose… literally… it is completely FREE! If you need help getting started, the team is happy to help you set up an account so you can hit the ground running!
