It’s getting to the middle of the season which means there’s a short time to catch your breath, start working off the Christmas indulgence and evaluate your current operations before you hit the run towards end of season.
We know there’s a lot to do in the second half, you’ll be planning Easter camps and the big summer tournament. Plus, there’s collecting final payments (chasing late payers!), organising the end of season awards, and perhaps organising a BBQ or a family fundraising day…
We’ve put together a football management checklist for you, to make sure you and the team are prepared. It always comes around faster than you think!
Mid season football management checklist
1. The AGM
A big part of closing off the season and chance for the club to complete finances and to set budgets for the new season. This is the time to go through the season and to discuss how things could be made better, do you need a new payments system? Are you spending too much time on admin? Can you apply for funding for next season? If you leave this too late then it can be difficult to get together, because of Summer holidays and clashing commitments.
2. Registration forms
The key to smooth operations, you need information from parents to sign up to the new season teams, and to input that info into the Whole Game System.
For a child to play in a team, parents need to send the club medical records, passport photos, birth certificates and more. It’s clunky and a real pain for Club Secretaries to administer. If you’re working in spreadsheets, this process can take months and a lot of back and forth, so you want to start working on that as early as possible. Alternatively get football management software that lets parents manage their own data and send reminders in plenty of time to get the information you need in one place!
3. Sponsorship of kids teams
Sponsorship is a staple for bringing in funding for club activities and can come from parents with businesses and with kids in the team, or from local businesses or local budgets from a big company.
Making sure that you communicate with existing sponsors is important to do soon, so you can tie down agreements or worst case, find new sponsors. Now is the time to remind your sponsors of what their support has achieved and how much is has spread their brand name (which is what they want to hear).
If you’re finding it difficult to find new sponsors, look at some innovative ways to raise funds and improve your organisation’s profitability – perhaps run a raffle ticket and sell tickets (between £10-£25 per ticket) and do the draw where the winning business gets their name on to the front of shirt.
4. Booking pitches, Referees
Club Secretaries will soon have to book pitches. If you have your own ground then you’ll need to book times & refs, as well as ordering new goals, balls bibs, cones…the list goes on!
All admin staff within clubs will be helping with this, so if you have football management software that can help with other elements of the club, such as making registrations & payments easier, then that can give you the time you need to organise your operations.
5. Sending out information packs
A new season will bring with it the need to send out welcome letters, with a list for the parents to fill in for sizes of kids kits. You could also include club rules & regulations and perhaps football boot regulations for what to buy for playing on 3G pitches, if you use them.
Sending out this information via a letter, or even individual e-mail can take a long time, especially if you need to create lists and are sending to a lot of people. If you’re using software like LoveAdmin, you could set up a template and schedule it to go out when people register. That saves a huge amount of administration time and the information can be stored against their account.
6. For Academies
Coaches are excellent at planning Football Academy training sessions, its core to their coaching training, and the best coaches are those that make lessons fun, and active for all, whatever age, or ability. They’ll set out lesson plans, identify age groups, mark out pitch plans for each group, set up break times and order medals & certificates for all.
Most if not all coaches are superb at this, and there are some amazing Academies & soccer schools around the country.
Most, if not all coaches, however, tend to be great coaches, but understandably not great at admin! LoveAdmin can be the ‘touchline’ coach, and help organise payments comms and registrations, enabling the coaches to do what they do best.
7. Leave enough administration time
If you don’t have football management software in place, you will need to spread your admin out over a good few months, or risk your volunteers and administrators having to work some long nights to fit it all in.
With software helping you out then, it’s just a case of making tweaks to any templates you usually send out or perhaps looking at ways to improve your process or revenue driving ideas.
If you’re looking to get some software set up then starting to look at what options are available is good to do between Jan – March. That way you have time to present proposals at your committee meeting and then start setting up your booking and payment system and communications. Some providers, like us, will manage all of that set up for you and others will provide the basic software for you to manage, so think about what your preferences are when you begin your search.
Good luck with the second half of your season, we hope this checklist reminder helps!
