Coaching tools for swimming clubs

Coaching tools for a swimming club cover the work a coach does around the water: planning sessions, sharing them with the coaching team, taking registers, arranging cover, logging hours and noticing when a swimmer needs support. In most clubs that work lives in Word documents, paper registers and group chats. Olympus Swim puts it in the same system as the club's members and records, so the coaching side of the club is as organised as the admin side.

The week around the water

A coach's week is more than the sessions. There is the plan written the night before, the register taken on a wet phone at 5:45am, the message about a swimmer who has been quiet, the cover request when someone is ill, the timesheet at the end of the month. None of it is difficult on its own. Spread across four apps and a notebook, it adds up to hours each week that have nothing to do with coaching.

I coached competitive clubs across Wales and England for more than ten years, and every club I worked at ran its coaching this way. Olympus Swim is what I could not find.

Session planning that the whole team can use

Build a session once in structured blocks (warm-up, main set, cool-down), save it to the club's session library, then reuse and adjust it as the season moves. When it is ready, load it straight onto a date in the timetable.

• Bring your existing plans with you. Import a session from a PDF or a spreadsheet, check what was read, fix anything missed and save it to the library. A photo of a paper plan saved as a PDF works too.
• Share across the coaching team. Every coach can find sessions in the library, so a plan written by one coach can be picked up by another.
• Take it poolside. Open a session in set card view on a phone, one set per card, or print it to A4 for the clipboard.

For the club, plans in the system mean continuity. When a coach is ill, the cover coach has the plan. When a parent asks why a squad has done three weeks of backstroke, the committee can see what was actually coached.

More on this: session plans that survive cover and coach changes.

Registers in under a minute

Take the register on a phone at the poolside: present, absent or late, with a reason. A swimmer's medical notes and emergency contacts are a tap away from the register. When a parent marks a child absent, it is already on the coach's register before the session, with no squad chat noise.

Over weeks, attendance shows patterns. A swimmer whose attendance is drifting is visible before they stop coming altogether. Read why poolside registers matter.

Coach rota, cover and hours

The weekly rota shows who is on poolside for every session. When a coach needs cover, they raise a cover request and another coach claims it, with the head coach able to see every request and every gap. Holiday requests sit in the same place.

Hours are logged against the sessions each coach was assigned, so a timesheet matches the rota without anyone rebuilding it. Hours export for payroll. When one coach runs several squads in the same slot, they are paid once for the shift and the cost is split between the squads, which keeps the squad finance figures honest.

Read more: coach rota and cover without the group chat and logging coach hours fairly.

Wellbeing and training load

Wellness logging is optional and is switched on squad by squad by the club's chair or vice-chair. Where it is on:

• Swimmers aged 14 and over can log how they feel from their own account. For younger swimmers, a parent can log on their behalf.
• The log has up to four optional factors on a 1 to 10 scale, with no free text. Entries appear against the coach's register. Nobody is alerted by this log.
• Named staff with a duty of care can record a separate observation. An observation flagged amber notifies the head coach.

The platform also works out a weekly training load for each swimmer from the planned distance of the sessions they attended, and flags a sharp change from one week to the next. It makes no decision about a swimmer and blocks nothing. It is a prompt for a conversation with the coach, never a diagnosis, and it works alongside the club's safeguarding process, not instead of it.

Read more: training load and wellbeing in age-group swimmers.

Qualifications and messaging

Coach qualifications are tracked alongside DBS records, so the head coach and welfare officer can see what each coach holds and when anything needs renewing.

Coaches message parents directly and run squad chats inside the platform. Swimmers are never participants in messaging, and every message is kept in an audit trail the welfare officer can read. See safeguarding and DBS.

What the committee gets from the coaching side

The coaching tools also give the committee evidence: what was coached, who was poolside, what each squad's coaching costs, and that cover was arranged properly. A committee that can see the coaching side of the club can defend its decisions about it.

Common questions

Can I import my existing session plans? Yes. Import a session from a PDF or spreadsheet, check what was read, correct anything missed and save it to the club library.

Can other coaches see my sessions? Sessions saved to the club library can be found and used by the club's coaching team, which is how plans are shared and handed over for cover.

Does the wellbeing log alert anyone? No. Entries in the swimmer and parent log notify nobody. Only a separate staff observation flagged amber notifies the head coach.

Can coaches message swimmers? No. Coaches message parents and squad chats. Swimmers are never participants in messaging on Olympus Swim.

Do coaches need to download an app? No. Olympus Swim runs in the browser and is fully usable on a phone at the poolside.