Swim Teams

The Relationship between Swim Club Members and Teams

Swim teams can be important stakeholders for a swim club, representing an important steady income stream and attracting new members and families. But the swim team’s activities, especially a swim meet, can sometimes result in scheduling conflicts between your swim team members and your more recreational members.

Harmony between your swim club and swim team can be achieved with three vital components:

• Scheduling
• Communication
• Volunteer Management

Scheduling

When you have efficient scheduling to help you meet the needs of lessons, camps, and teams, you can balance the usage of your facility.

In addition, facility usage data can help you in your scheduling. For example, if you know that classes scheduled at 9 a.m. sell out, but ones scheduled at 8 a.m. only fill to 50%. Then you can maximize your facility usage by selecting the best times for lessons and arrange swim teams around those slots. If you’re using a check-in and check-out system, you can identify peak days and times.

Scheduling tools that allow you to see the big picture can help you maintain harmony. Especially between team and member usage of the club’s most popular spaces.

Communication

Great customer service is about expectations. Your members expect the club to be open and available to them during predictable hours. When you have swim team commitments that change your operating hours, you must clearly communicate and share these changes with your members.

Take swim meets for example. Typically, swim clubs will close for swim meets even if it means leaving their swim club members without a pool. They do this because swim teams can make up a large percentage of the club’s revenue.

Your scheduling tools should support your communication strategy. For example, you can post the pool availability on the club calendar. So that members can determine if it is available on a particular day. Or you can send an email announcement to all members or just members that would potentially be affected. Your swim club management tools should support multiple methods of communicating scheduling changes.

Volunteer Management

Swim meets are also big-time productions for most swim clubs. The list of necessary tasks run the gamut – from designating times to reserving pools to communicating schedules to the public. And even after all these things are complete, the swim team still needs to recruit people to officiate the races, keep scores and sell concessions.

All of this requires time and money. By allowing people to volunteer at swim meets, you can reduce the amount of hired workers and alleviate some of the Team or Activity Manager’s workload.

Because of the income benefit of a swim meet, many swim clubs offer incentives for volunteers who help support the event – regardless of their involvement directly with the team.

Members may feel less connected and interested in volunteering for a swim meet. But if you can reassure them that they receive credit or appreciation for their support, you can create harmony between swim team and non-swim team volunteers.

Some clubs have gone to a volunteerism requirement – which you’ll need to track. Or you might consider giving your volunteers discounts on the membership, guest passes, swim lessons or location rental. These items don’t have to cost much and can be offset by the value of work being completed by the volunteer.

Make it easy for your people to volunteer with the training and resources that they need to be successful. An online collaboration portal will allow volunteers to know when you need volunteers and what they’ll be doing.

Conclusion

With an organized operation that includes smooth scheduling, consistent communication, and a motivated group of volunteers, your swim team can become an indispensable part of the swim club’s operation. Ultimately, bringing in extra revenue that can potentially lower the cost of operations that will in turn benefit swim club members.

When all stakeholders see the benefit of cooperation, you can achieve harmony at your swim club.

eSoft Planner is an easy-to-use solution to help you manage your swim club more easily – with membership management, scheduling and communication tools built in. Schedule a demo today to see how you can spend less time and hassle on administration and more time supporting your swim club and swim team.