Pre-season checklist - scheduling and finances

A new season is knocking on your door and it’s time to get everything ready to hit the ground running.

This week we will dive into some things you should get through early on so that you can focus on your athletes and their work.

Today we will talk about getting the most out of your season with proper event and financial planning.

Scheduling

Now is the time to create the draft for your next season. You will have to take your athlete’s ambitions as well as the goals of your club into account when deciding on the events you want to take part in.

Events

Your athletes, for the most part, train in your club in order to attend different competitions which can come in various forms. What they all have in common is that you have to prioritize early on your events into different categories.

Your A events (races, tournaments, etc) are the ones where you want to get the best possible results. Everything is geared towards having your athletes in peak condition for these events. Your B events serve as a backup if something bad happens on your A events or you can even use them as a warm up event for your A events.

Some even plan for C category events which are mostly events where you basically train through them and look at them as just another practice session. You can check out some new tactics, equipment, or something similar. C category events are usually events that are quite close to you so they don’t require a lot of logistics and are fairly cheap to attend so you can use them as a premium experience for just another workout.

Training sessions

Based on how you defined your A/B/C category events, you start planning out different training cycles which can go down to individual weeks. We have a whole series on this that you can check out here.

The key is now to define the volume and intensity for the upcoming months which all have the goal to have your athlete in peak condition when the time is right.

Keep in mind that most of your athletes have sports as an addition to the rest of their lives and not the other way around, so you will have to do a lot of shuffling and adjustments as you go along.

Test events

As we talked about yesterday, you want to know your athlete’s current fitness level before the season starts but you also want to monitor their progress throughout the season so you can dial the training loads accordingly.

A 4:00 min/km speed session early in the season can easily become a 3:45 min/km or faster in the later stages of a season. You should always have a test event planned for your athletes (usually ever 6 to 8 weeks) where you do the same assessments with them and gauge their improvements and subsequently adjust their training load.

Financials

Once you have a general overview on what events you want to attend, it’s advisable to have a calendar available for your members where they can sign up for individual events.

This will make it easier for you to plan your budget for individual events as well as the entire season.

You can then start the fee collection as well as talk to your current sponsors about your plans and how well they can support you.

Late summer and early autumn are also ideal times to start applying for different grants in your local community as this is the time when a lot of them are also working on their budget for next year and are allocating a portion to local causes.

Don’t shy from asking for help because there can be a lot of free money waiting for you to take it and do something good with it.