Why Olympus Swim exists

Olympus Swim exists to make a swimming club sustainable to run. It was built by Joel Knight, a competitive swimming coach of more than ten years, because every club he coached at ran on the same scattered tools and depended on a few people's goodwill.

The problem I kept seeing

I coached competitive clubs across Wales and England for over ten years, including as a head coach, and worked alongside club committees throughout. Every club ran on the same arrangement: a spreadsheet the treasurer built, a group chat nobody could search, one system for registration, another for galas, and the club's working folders on somebody's laptop.

It worked, in the sense that the swimmers got in the water. It worked because two or three people held the whole club in their heads and gave it more hours than anyone was ever going to thank them for.

That is the problem. Clubs do not decline because people stop caring. They decline because the work outgrows the number of people willing to carry it, and then the people carrying it leave. Good people hesitate to take a committee role at all, because the scale of it looks overwhelming. Good coaches get buried in paperwork that has nothing to do with coaching.

Every platform I tried was built for the committee. None of them did much for the coaches. So Olympus Swim is built around both.

Three ideas everything rests on

One system, not seven. Membership, registers, messaging, session planning, galas, compliance and finance in one place, under one login, with one set of data underneath. When a volunteer steps down after four years, the club does not lose four years of knowledge with them.

Simple enough that anyone can run it. Someone should be able to do the job without being taught how. A new treasurer should be useful in a week, not a season. Lowering that barrier is what widens the pool of people willing to step up.

Clear enough to show the club what it needs to know. Squad income against squad costs. A swimmer's attendance drifting before they drop out. A DBS renewal before it lapses. Decisions made on evidence rather than memory, with the people in the club still making them.

What we will and will not do

We say what exists, what is coming, and what is not built. Clubs in this sport have been let down by vendor promises before, and honesty is worth more to us than a faster yes.

We treat the coach and the committee as equals. The committee holds the budget and gives its time voluntarily. The coach runs the club day to day and decides whether a system actually gets used. Both have to be well served.

We do not compete on being the cheapest. If a club only needs a simple messaging tool, that may be the right answer for it, and we will say so.

About Joel Knight

Joel Knight is the founder and director of Olympus Swim. He has coached competitive swimming for more than ten years across Wales, the South West and the South East of England, and holds a Level 3 swimming coaching qualification. Before coaching, he raced at national and international level. Alongside the sport he has a background in building software products, working directly with development teams on requirements and onboarding.

You can email him directly at joel@olympus-swim.co.uk. He reads and replies to every message himself.

About the company

Read how we handle personal data in our privacy policy.

Read next: swimming club software, coaching tools, squad finance, safeguarding and DBS and gala entries.