Setting up a squad coaching group

Introduction

This article assumes that the club at which you are coaching has permissioned you to provide squad coaching sessions. Squad coaching is when you provide regular sessions (say weekly) that may involve several courts and to which several clients attend each time.

You may well provide different sessions focusing on specific aspects of your sport. For example, you might have  "cardio" sessions and "skills" sessions. These may appeal to different people. So for each type of session you have, you want to set up an appropriately named group to which your clients can become members.

Group creation and management

• Go to My groups and choose the "group context" - this will be identified with the club name and something like "squad coaching"
• Click "New group" and you will be asked for the following:
  • The club at which you are offering the coaching (normally defaulted)
  • A special name you might want to assign to the group (say "cardio" or "skills" as per above examples)
  • Your fee based on a period of time together with any prepay discounting scheme
    • You'll also need to provide an indication of the normal duration of a session that your clients can expect
  • The maximum number of people you can take for any one session
  • Whether the group is private or public. Private means that only you can add others to your group. Public means that anyone can join your coaching group.
  • Give an indication (if applicable) of the number of sessions you plan to have. This is important to limit the number of prepaid sessions a client may choose to buy.
  • Elect to have your fee shared between all participants. This way, you set a fee that is the total you expect from the session and the more people join a session the less they each pay. You cannot set up prepay discounts for a shared fee arrangement.

For any group that you create you can change any of the above at a later time by clicking on the Details button.

You can also modify eligibility rules for your group by clicking on the Eligibility button. You can specify:

• Gender (Ladies, Gents or either)
• Age group
• Ability level

Only members meeting the criteria set will be able to join your group (if the group is public). You, however, will still be able to add anyone to the group and you'll simply get an indicator if a person in your group does not meet the criteria.

For public groups, any member may go to their My groups and add themselves into your group. But it may not be obvious to members that this needs to be done to avail themselves of your coaching services. To mitigate this you have a Publicise button. Once you confirm this action then every eligible member will see a prompt on their homepage to sign up to your group within the Things that require my early attention section. They get a simple choice - either to "bin" the prompt or to confirm they want in. You may want to Publicise your group every few months just to prompt and remind all members of your coaching service. However, this no replacement to other advertising and encouragement you may take externally of ManageMyMatch - the instruction being that you want members to go to My groups and sign up to your coaching group.

In My groups you can manage your clients (add and remove them) as well as see their basic contact details. You can message them (using the speech icon against their name). You can also message the whole group by clicking the speech icon next to Message the whole group prompt in the heading above your group members.

Each group maintains it's own account balance and this feature is covered in more detail in this article.

Setting a schedule

More than likely, you will be offering squad coaching on a regular basis. You'd generally use the same courts for a given set of slots each week for example. You need to agree with the cub on this schedule as only a club official has the authority to set this up. This is because regular block bookings of this nature must be sanctioned by the club as being available and appropriate for your use. There is some flexibility as to how this scheduling can be set up. For example, it could be on Monday nights from 7pm to 8pm. Or Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons from 3pm to 5pm. Once you have agreed this schedule with the club they can set this up against your group (each group can have its own schedule - club guidance on how to do this is described in this article).

Once the club has set the schedule you'll be able to book sessions at the permitted times. In most cases you'll want the system to book your session automatically. To switch this on you need to click on the Details button (as described above) and tick the box that says Automatically create regular sessions. Refer to this article for more details on managing your squad sessions.