Optimise efficiency and reduce the burden for Rowing Coaches and Athletes with Rowplan
- Adam Donaldson
- Oct 31, 2024
- 3 min read
With over 600 clubs in the UK alone and thousands across Europe and the USA, and most operating as non-profits, reducing the workload for coaches and athletes is crucial for enhancing efficiency and ensuring smooth operations. This post explores practical strategies that rowing clubs can use to streamline processes and create a more effective environment.
Understanding the Administrative Burden
Tasks can pile up quickly, taking away valuable time and energy that coaches and athletes need for training and competition. Common responsibilities include:
Creating and managing schedules: Coordinating practice times and transportation for athletes.
Communication: In the UK, we've had more than our share of Red Flags! Keeping everyone informed about status changes or announcements is key.
Compliance: Ensuring adherence to safety regulations and guidelines.
Boat booking: Ensuring smooth allocation of club boats to squads and individual athletes.
These tasks, while necessary, are often run independently of each other on various spreadsheets, and can certainly lead to workload and stress for coaches, captains and athletes trying to organise and execute squad training sessions. can lead to burnout among volunteers who juggle multiple roles. Clubs that identify these burdens can take proactive steps to reduce their impact.
Embrace Technology to simplify key Processes
A number of national governing bodies such as British Rowing enable registered clubs to use a portal to administer club membership and events.
Creating training programmes and then organising attendance and crew allocation is one of the most important aspects of a coach's job and can be very time consuming at clubs and colleges where athlete attendance is voluntary.
RowPlan
RowPlan is a simple cloud based solution designed specifically for rowing coaches and athletes, recently updated to include boat booking.
The App, available on smartphones and your computer, focuses on the essential requirements for coaches and athletes to have well planned and executed training sessions.
For Coaches:
Storing and updating your coaching details (eg. powerboat licence, coaching qualifications, DBS check)
Creating and calendarising training sessions for your squads
Setting session capacity limits and monitoring sign up
Changing session plans and auto-notification to athletes signed up for the session
Boat booking
Take a look at the summary video for coaches below.
For Athletes:
Store and update your key rowing skill details (eg. swim test, competence level for sweep & sculling)
See all sessions available for your squad and remaining spaces available
Book yourself on a session and add any notes for/from the session (eg. 1RM)
Change your booking session status and auto-notify the coach
If you are permitted, then book club boats for use.
Get a sense of the App for athletes below.
More information
With a number of clubs now using Rowplan, the latest release now enables boat booking within the App.
The App is developed by Adam Donaldson of Demand Economics - specialising in developing system enabled process efficiency solutions for organisations. Having been a club/college rowing coach for 10 years in his spare time, Adam has been acutely aware of the time taken to construct and execute training programmes for multiple squads - the RowPlan cuts out time wasting and enables everyone to be on the same page with training, available spaces, automatic notification of any changes and boat booking.
Do get in touch if you would like more information.
Adam Donaldson, Demand Economics Ltd.
T: +44 7907 581094
Feel free to leave a message by clicking below.
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