Every swimming club runs on volunteers. The treasurer chasing subs at 10pm. The membership secretary updating spreadsheets on a Sunday. The chair fielding parent complaints between meetings. Without these people, the club simply does not function.
Yet most clubs struggle with volunteer management, and it is rarely because nobody is willing to help. It is because the club has no process. People are recruited by corridor conversation into roles nobody has written down, they start before anyone checks what clearances the role needs, and they leave without a handover.
Volunteer management for swimming clubs comes down to four things in order: define each role in writing, recruit into a named role rather than asking for general help, clear the checks that role needs before the person starts, and induct and support them so they stay. This guide covers each one, using what Swim England already publishes so your committee is not writing any of it from a blank page.
Why volunteer management is harder than it looks
The vast majority of affiliated swimming clubs in England are run entirely by volunteers. These are parents, former swimmers, and community-minded people who give up evenings and weekends for the love of the sport.
The problem is structural. Committee roles come with admin burdens that have grown over the years:
- Treasurers chase failed payments, reconcile bank statements, and prepare financial reports
- Membership secretaries maintain member databases, process new joiners, handle leavers, and manage Swim England registrations
- Competition secretaries coordinate gala entries across multiple formats (Hy-Tek, SportSystems, Lenex), track qualifying times, and manage entry fees
- Welfare officers maintain DBS records, keep the club aligned with Wavepower, and handle safeguarding documentation
When a role that was described as a couple of hours a week turns out to be most of an evening several times a week, on top of a full-time job, people step down after a season or two. For the treasurer in particular, this hidden admin load is the number one reason they resign mid-term.
There is a second problem underneath the first. Volunteering at a swimming club is not like volunteering at a village fete. Some roles sit inside a safeguarding framework with real requirements attached, and a club that recruits casually into those roles creates a compliance gap it may not notice for a year.
Start with Swim England’s published role descriptions
Most committees write role descriptions from scratch, badly, at the point of crisis. There is no need. Swim England publishes an organogram of club volunteer roles with a full description behind each one, grouped into three tiers:
- Key governance roles: chairperson, treasurer, welfare officer, secretary, membership secretary, volunteer coordinator
- Team roles: club captain, poolside helper, chaperone, team manager
- Additional governance roles: vice chairperson, fundraising officer, SwimMark coordinator, club president, fixtures or competitions secretary, marketing and press officer, parent liaison officer
Two things make this useful. The first is that it is a menu: a committee looking at a burned-out competition secretary can see that fixtures, chaperoning and team management are separate published roles rather than one heroic job. The second is that a written role description is the single cheapest retention tool there is, because almost every volunteer who quits early quits over a gap between what they were told and what the job turned out to be.
Our guide to swim club committee roles and responsibilities covers how the core officer roles fit together and which ones your constitution requires.
The volunteer coordinator, the role most clubs skip
Of the sixteen roles, the one that most often goes unfilled is the volunteer coordinator. It is not a condition of affiliation, but Swim England encourages clubs to appoint one, and it is the role responsible for overseeing all volunteers at the club and making sure they have a positive experience.
Without it, volunteer recruitment defaults to whoever the chair can catch in the car park, and volunteer support defaults to nobody. It is also a genuinely accessible first committee role for a parent who wants to help but does not want to be treasurer, which makes it a useful entry point into your committee pipeline.
Before a new volunteer starts: three gates
This is the part clubs most often get wrong, usually by getting the order wrong. A volunteer who is already on poolside when someone realises a check is missing is a much harder conversation than one who was told the sequence up front.
Gate one: Swim England membership
Anyone with a formal role at the club needs Club Support membership, formerly Category Three. Swim England defines the category as covering anyone involved in a club who volunteers or is employed by the club, including committee members, officers, teachers and coaches, as well as parent members.
This matters for two reasons. It is what provides insurance cover while the volunteer is carrying out their role, and it is a prerequisite for the next gate, because Swim England will only process a DBS check for someone already registered as a member of the club. Our guide to Swim England membership categories covers which category each person needs.
Gate two: a DBS check, but only where the role needs one
A DBS check attaches to the role, not to volunteering in general. Roles involving regulated activity with young swimmers need an enhanced check, in most cases with a children’s barred list check: coaches and teachers, team managers, chaperones, poolside helpers and the welfare officer. Purely administrative committee roles with no unsupervised contact with swimmers generally do not.
One point worth circulating to your parent body, because it costs clubs volunteers every season: Swim England’s DBS FAQs state that in accordance with DBS guidance no officials will require a DBS check, because officiating is not regulated activity. If you are struggling to persuade parents onto the officials pathway, the belief that it involves a criminal record check is often part of the reason, and it is not correct.
Three practical details that change how you plan:
- Cost is not the barrier people assume. Swim England covers the fee for a volunteer’s first check. Renewals, required every three years while the person remains in a role that needs one, cost £5.85, and volunteers can register free with the government’s DBS Update Service instead.
- A check is tied to a level, not a person. Moving someone from poolside helper to team manager may require a fresh check if the new role needs a different level. Moving from chaperone to coach may not.
- You need to be sixteen or over to have a check carried out, which is the practical ceiling on how young a volunteer can go into a checked role.
Our guide to DBS check tracking for swimming clubs covers the renewal cycle, the Update Service and how to keep expiry dates visible.
Gate three: training and induction
Swim England lists Time to Listen, safeguarding training and team manager training as the core volunteer courses. Which ones apply depends on the role, and what Wavepower compliance actually requires sets out the safeguarding side in detail.
Induction is the part with no certificate attached and the part most often skipped. Swim England’s guidance is to give every volunteer an induction covering key information, expectations and the support available, and to assign a mentor or buddy so the new person has a named point of contact. Shadowing an experienced volunteer for a session or two costs nothing and does more for retention than any policy document.
Plan the calendar backwards
Put those three gates together and a new poolside volunteer is a multi-week project, not a same-week fix. They must be registered as a club member first. An average DBS check through the online service takes around two weeks. They cannot take up the role until Swim England confirms clearance to the welfare officer or secretary. Training runs on published course dates, not on yours.
The practical consequence is that if you want new helpers in place for September, the conversation happens in the summer. Clubs that recruit in the first week of the new season spend the first half of it short-handed.
Recruiting volunteers: what actually works
Swim England’s own advice on finding and retaining volunteers starts with two steps clubs routinely skip: work out where the need actually is, and define the roles clearly before advertising them. A general appeal for help at the AGM is not recruitment. It is a hope.
Beyond that:
- Ask for a named role, not for help. “Would you take on the fixtures calendar?” gets a yes or a no. “We need more volunteers” gets sympathy.
- Ask one person directly. Committee volunteers are almost never recruited by newsletter. They are recruited by someone asking them.
- Create short-term and small roles. Gala volunteers, social event organisers and kit coordinators do not need to be permanent committee positions. They are also how you find out who is reliable before offering a bigger role.
- Split roles that have outgrown one person. A competition secretary role is often better as two: entries coordinator and results manager.
- Look outside the parent body. Swim England suggests building links with local colleges and community centres. Former swimmers and students needing volunteering hours are an underused source, particularly for gala day roles.
- Be honest about the hours. “It only takes a couple of hours a week” is how you get a burned-out treasurer who quits mid-season. “About four to six hours a week in September, January and AGM season, and one to two hours the rest of the year, and we are automating the payment chasing to bring that down” is a description someone can actually say yes to.
Rotas, and why most club rotas fail
Most swimming clubs have a volunteer rota. Most swimming club rotas are a spreadsheet that one person maintains, circulated as a screenshot, out of date within a fortnight.
A rota works when three things are true. Everyone can see the whole season, not just the next fixture. Swaps happen between volunteers without routing through the organiser. And the person maintaining it can see at a glance who is doing too much, because the quiet over-reliance on three reliable parents is what produces next year’s resignations.
The gala rota carries a second constraint that catches new committees out: clubs are usually required to provide a set number of qualified officials for the competitions they enter, with a financial penalty for falling short. That means the rota is not only a fairness exercise, it is tied to how many licensed officials you have available on the day, which in turn depends on how many you put through the officials pathway last season.
Expenses, and where the line sits
Reimbursing genuine out-of-pocket costs is good practice and does not change anyone’s status. The DBS defines a volunteer as someone who is unpaid except for travel and other approved out-of-pocket expenses, which is also the definition that entitles them to the volunteer rate for checks.
Two things are worth getting right. Reimburse against receipts through the club’s normal finance process rather than informally, so the treasurer is not reconstructing it at year end. And recognise that paying someone beyond their actual costs, including a regular honorarium, is a different arrangement with tax and employment-status consequences. It is fact-specific and not something to decide from a blog post, so take advice before setting one up. Our swim club budget planning guide covers how paid roles sit in a club budget.
Keeping volunteers: recognition as a system
Most clubs are genuinely bad at this, not out of ingratitude but because the admin is invisible and only becomes visible when it goes wrong.
Swim England’s guidance on recognising and rewarding volunteers splits it into informal and formal. Informally: say thank you, match roles to people’s skills and interests, include volunteers in social events, and debrief after a gala so people feel part of a team rather than a rota entry. Formally: give every volunteer a written role description, run a proper induction, assign a buddy, make training opportunities visible, and include volunteers in decisions that affect them.
Add one more thing, which is the cheapest diagnostic available. Ask people, once a season, whether the role is what they expected, what the good and bad parts are, and what would help. A volunteer who is asked in November is a conversation. A volunteer who is not is a resignation email in March. Our guide to preventing volunteer burnout covers the warning signs in more depth.
Handover: solve it before you need it
Every committee role should have a handover document, written while the person is still doing the job rather than in the fortnight after they resign. At minimum it needs what the role involves and a realistic time commitment, key contacts, credentials stored somewhere the club controls, the recurring calendar of deadlines such as Swim England registration and insurance renewal, and where the records live.
The credentials point deserves emphasis, because it is where clubs get genuinely stuck. If the membership records live in a spreadsheet on a departing volunteer’s personal Google Drive, the club does not own its own data. Our committee handover checklist provides a template to adapt.
Where the admin actually goes
None of the above reduces the underlying workload. It distributes it and makes it survivable. Reducing it is a separate job, and for most clubs the biggest single time sink is chasing money.
Moving from standing orders to automated Direct Debit takes the treasurer out of the collection loop entirely: mandates are set up once, collection runs on a schedule, and failures surface as notifications rather than as a reconciliation puzzle weeks later. Our treasurer’s guide to swim club Direct Debit covers how it works in practice, and Swimly’s billing features show one implementation of it.
The same logic applies elsewhere. Self-service portals let parents update their own contact details instead of emailing the membership secretary. Digital attendance means a coach taps a phone instead of someone transcribing a paper register. Compliance tracking shows DBS status at a glance rather than requiring a manual spreadsheet check before every gala.
The goal is not to eliminate volunteers. It is to make sure their time goes on the things only a person can do, which is running the club and supporting swimmers, rather than the things a computer should have handled.
If you are weighing up tools, our guide to choosing swim club management software sets out what to look for, and our guide to switching from spreadsheets walks through the migration.
Frequently asked questions
What does volunteer management for a swimming club actually involve?
Four things in order: define each role in writing, recruit into a named role rather than asking for general help, clear the checks a volunteer needs before they start, and give them an induction and a point of contact so they stay. Swim England publishes role descriptions for sixteen club volunteer roles, which means most of the defining work is already done for you.
Does a swimming club need a volunteer coordinator?
It is not a condition of affiliation, but Swim England encourages clubs to appoint one and publishes a role description for it. The volunteer coordinator oversees all volunteers at the club and is responsible for making sure they have a positive experience. In practice it is the role that stops volunteer recruitment defaulting to whoever the chair can catch in the car park.
Do all swimming club volunteers need a DBS check?
No. A DBS check is tied to the role, not to volunteering in general. Swim England requires an enhanced check, in most cases with a children’s barred list check, for roles involving regulated activity with young swimmers, such as coaches, teachers, team managers, chaperones, poolside helpers and the welfare officer. Purely administrative committee roles with no unsupervised contact usually do not need one, and Swim England states that in accordance with DBS guidance no officials will require a DBS check.
How long does it take to get a new swimming club volunteer poolside?
Plan for several weeks, not several days. The volunteer has to be registered as a club member before Swim England will process a DBS check, an average check through the online service takes about two weeks, and they cannot take up the role until Swim England confirms clearance to the welfare officer or secretary. If the role also needs safeguarding training, that is another date in the diary. Recruit in the summer for a September start.
Does a swimming club volunteer have to pay for their own DBS check?
No. Swim England covers the fee for a volunteer’s first DBS check. Renewals, which are required every three years while the person stays in a role that needs a check, cost £5.85, and volunteers can register free with the government’s DBS Update Service so the certificate can be re-checked online instead. Paid roles are charged differently, at £60 per application or £16 a year through the Update Service.
What Swim England membership do club volunteers need?
Club Support, formerly Category Three. Swim England defines it as covering anyone involved in a club who volunteers or is employed by it, including committee members, officers, teachers, coaches and parent members. Registering volunteers matters beyond the paperwork, because it is what gives them insurance cover while they are carrying out their role.
Can a swimming club pay its volunteers expenses?
Yes, and reimbursing genuine out-of-pocket costs such as travel does not change someone’s volunteer status. The DBS defines a volunteer as a person who is unpaid except for travel and other approved out-of-pocket expenses, which is also what entitles them to the free volunteer rate for checks. Paying someone beyond their actual costs, including a regular honorarium, is a different arrangement with tax and employment-status consequences, so take advice before setting one up.
Getting started
If your club has no volunteer process at all, do these three things in order and you will have covered most of the ground.
- Write down who does what now. Take Swim England’s role descriptions and mark which roles your club actually has, which are vacant, and which are quietly being done by someone holding a different title.
- Fix the sequence for new volunteers. Membership, then checks where the role needs them, then training and induction, then poolside. Give the welfare officer or secretary ownership of it so it does not depend on the chair remembering.
- Attack the single biggest time sink. For most clubs that is payment collection, and it is the change with the highest impact on committee workload for the least disruption.
None of this requires a strategy document. It requires someone to own it, which is exactly why the volunteer coordinator role is worth filling first.