If you’ve ever sat in an AGM watching a new Treasurer receive a carrier bag full of bank statements and a Post-It note with a password on it, you’ll know that swim club committee handovers are often chaotic at best, catastrophic at worst.
March and April are AGM season for most swimming clubs. New committee members get elected, outgoing volunteers step down (often with a mix of relief and guilt), and somewhere in the chaos, critical knowledge about how the club actually runs is supposed to transfer from one person to another.
Often, it doesn’t.
Why Committee Handovers Fail
Knowledge lives in people’s heads. The outgoing Membership Secretary knows that Mrs Patterson always pays late but never misses, that the Johnson twins share one membership because they’re alternating squads, and that the direct debit system mysteriously fails on the third attempt for half the parents. None of this is written down.
Volunteer burnout means people leave suddenly. Someone who’s been chasing subs for three years finally hits their limit and announces at the AGM they’re stepping down immediately. There’s no handover period. The new person is thrown in the deep end (pun intended).
Systems are cobbled together over years. The membership database is a spreadsheet started in 2015. Squad allocations live in a different spreadsheet. Payment tracking is in a third one. The Head Coach keeps their own records because they don’t trust the official ones. Nobody knows which version is the source of truth. Modern platforms consolidate this — see our Club Organiser comparison and pricing for integrated systems.
Passwords and access are a disaster. The club Facebook page is still logged into the previous Chair’s account. The bank login details are shared via WhatsApp. The Swim England affiliation portal password was reset by someone who’s since left the committee, and nobody can get back in.
The result? New committee members spend their first three months just trying to figure out what the previous person was doing, let alone improving anything.
The Role-by-Role Handover Checklist
A good handover should start at least four weeks before the AGM and cover three things for each role: what you do, how you do it, and what they need to know that isn’t written down anywhere.
Chair
Core responsibilities:
- Running committee meetings (schedule, agenda, minutes)
- Main point of contact for Swim England, facility management, and other external bodies
- Handling complaints and escalations
- Strategic planning and club direction
What to hand over:
- Committee meeting schedule and templates
- Contact list (Swim England regional office, pool manager, safeguarding lead, club welfare officer)
- Ongoing issues or discussions (facility negotiations, complaints in progress)
- Access to club email account, social media accounts, and any shared drives
The unwritten knowledge:
- Which parents are helpful vs. which ones complain about everything
- Pool management quirks (who to speak to, how to ask for extra lane time)
- Committee dynamics (who works well together, who needs managing)
Treasurer
Core responsibilities:
- Collecting membership fees and squad fees
- Paying coaches, pool hire, and other regular expenses
- Managing the club bank account
- Producing financial reports for the committee and AGM
What to hand over:
- Bank account access (logins, signatories, card details)
- Current financial position (bank balance, outstanding payments, upcoming bills)
- List of all regular payments (direct debits out, standing orders in)
- Payment collection system (spreadsheet, software, whatever you’re using)
- Financial year-end process and accounts format
The unwritten knowledge:
- Which parents are reliable payers vs. which ones need chasing
- Payment quirks (who pays termly vs. monthly, who always pays cash)
- When bills are due (pool hire is first Monday of each month, Swim England fees are September)
- Coach payment arrangements (some prefer monthly, some prefer per session)
Membership Secretary
Core responsibilities:
- Processing new member applications
- Managing Swim England registrations and renewals
- Maintaining the membership database
- Tracking who’s in which squad
- Managing the waiting list
What to hand over:
- Membership database (spreadsheet, system, whatever you’re using)
- Access to Swim England portal
- Current waiting list and how it’s managed
- Squad allocation process
- New member onboarding process (trial sessions, kit, parent inductions)
The unwritten knowledge:
- Swim England portal quirks (it’s terrible, here’s how to work around the bugs)
- How squad moves actually happen (coaches decide, but you do the admin)
- Which families have multiple swimmers (sibling discounts, shared contact details)
- Historical decisions about membership criteria
Head Coach
Core responsibilities:
- Planning and delivering training sessions
- Squad allocation and swimmer development
- Competition entry and team selection
- Coach team management
What to hand over:
- Training plans and session structures
- Squad descriptions and entry criteria
- Competition calendar and entry process
- Coach team contact details and schedules
- Swimmer records (times, progress tracking, notes)
The unwritten knowledge:
- Which swimmers are being developed for what
- Parent expectations management (competitive vs. recreational families)
- Facility constraints that affect training (lane availability, equipment)
- Competition entry decisions (who gets priority, how to balance development vs. winning)
What to Document (Before the AGM)
The outgoing committee member should create a handover document covering:
- Regular tasks (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual) with step-by-step instructions
- Who you work with (names, roles, contact details, what they’re responsible for)
- Systems and tools (what you use, how to access them, where the data lives)
- Ongoing issues (anything the new person needs to pick up immediately)
- Annual cycle (what happens when, key dates and deadlines)
- Common problems (and how you’ve solved them in the past)
This doesn’t need to be a novel. A 3-5 page Google Doc per role is enough. What matters is that it exists and gets updated each year.
Passwords and Access Management
This is where most handovers fall apart. Here’s what needs to happen:
Before the AGM:
- Create a shared password manager (1Password, Bitwarden, or even a secure spreadsheet) with all logins
- Document what each account is for and who needs access
- Test that backups exist for critical systems
After the AGM:
- Transfer ownership of club email accounts, social media, and other shared accounts to new committee members
- Update bank signatories (can take weeks, so start early)
- Change passwords for systems where personal accounts were used
- Remove access for outgoing committee members (especially if they’re leaving the club entirely)
The goal is that a new committee member can log in to everything they need on day one, not spend three weeks chasing the previous person for passwords.
Timing: Start Early
A good handover doesn’t happen in the week before the AGM. Here’s a realistic timeline:
4 weeks before AGM:
- Outgoing committee member creates handover document
- Identifies all systems and access requirements
- Documents ongoing issues
2 weeks before AGM:
- New committee member (if known) starts shadowing
- Joint access to systems is set up
- Handover document is reviewed together
AGM week:
- Official handover at AGM
- Final questions answered
- Outgoing member remains available for questions
2 weeks after AGM:
- New committee member leading, outgoing member on standby
- Any access issues resolved
- Final knowledge transfer
4 weeks after AGM:
- Handover complete
- Outgoing member off the hook (unless they’re staying in a different role)
Tools That Help (and Hurt)
Spreadsheets are how most clubs operate, and they’re fine for small clubs with stable committees. But they fall apart during handovers because knowledge lives in the person who built them, not in the spreadsheet itself.
Shared Google Docs/Sheets are better than files on someone’s laptop, at least the new person can access them. But version control is a mess and they still require the outgoing person to explain how everything works.
Swim club management software (if it’s good) can massively reduce handover pain because the system itself documents the processes. The new Treasurer doesn’t need to figure out how payment collection works; they just need to learn the software.
WhatsApp groups are where a lot of swim club knowledge lives (unfortunately). Critical information should be moved out of chat history into something searchable and persistent.
Modern swim club management software like Swimly is built for this exact problem. When a new Membership Secretary takes over, they don’t inherit a spreadsheet and a prayer. They get a system that already knows who’s paid, who’s on the waiting list, and how squad allocations work. The handover is “here’s how to log in” not “let me explain this formula in cell F47”.
The Real Goal
A good committee handover isn’t about perfect documentation (though that helps). It’s about setting up the new volunteer for success rather than stress.
Most people who join swim club committees aren’t doing it for fun. They’re doing it because someone has to, because their kid swims, because they want to help. The least we can do is not make their first three months miserable.
If your club’s AGM is coming up, start the handover now. If you’re stepping down, write down what you know. If you’re stepping up, ask for proper handover time.
And if your club’s current systems make handovers painful, maybe it’s time to fix that.
Swimly is working with founding clubs to build better systems for swimming club management. If you’re tired of spreadsheets and WhatsApp chaos, join the waitlist.
Make handovers painless. With Swimly, incoming committee members get instant access to membership records, billing history, and compliance status without messy spreadsheet handoffs. Clubs with learn-to-swim programmes can hand over swim school management seamlessly too.