Coaches

Enable coach bookings, set how many coaches a session needs, require credentials of anyone coaching it, and find sessions that lack cover before the night.

Coach bookings let members in the Administrator or Coach role book on to a session as a coach, so the club has a record of who is covering what. On top of that, a session can work out how many coaches it needs from its bookings, refuse anyone who does not hold the credentials it requires, and report itself as uncovered while there is still time to fix it.

Enabling coach bookings

Coach bookings are switched on at Admin > Settings > Sessions. Once enabled, coaches can book on to a session from the session details page, and an administrator can add a coach to a session manually from the same page.

A member added as a coach on a session, whether by self-booking or added manually, can manage that specific session without needing the Manage Sessions permission: editing the occurrence, managing its bookings, and viewing attendee details. See Editing sessions for what this includes.

Setting how many coaches a session needs

Open the session in Admin > Sessions, click Edit, and find Coaches needed. There are two ways to answer it.

• Fixed number: enter the number in Coaches required. The session always needs that many, whether two people or twenty have booked.
• One per N participants: enter a number in Participants per coach, and the requirement grows with confirmed bookings. The field below becomes Minimum coaches, and the requirement never drops below it, so a quiet week still gets the cover you set.

A session set to one coach per eight participants with a minimum of two needs two coaches at sixteen bookings and three at seventeen.

Setting the required number by hand on a single occurrence still wins. An administrator who has decided that one particular night needs four coaches keeps four, whatever the ratio works out.

Requiring credentials of a coach

A session can also say who is allowed to coach it. In the session editor, Coach Eligibility holds a second set of rules, separate from the eligibility rules that decide who may book a place.

Four rule types are available:

Three things are worth knowing about how the check behaves.

1. It cannot be worked around. The rule is applied wherever a coach is added, so an administrator adding somebody by hand is held to exactly the same requirement as a coach adding themselves. Adding several coaches at once adds the ones who pass and tells you which were refused and why, rather than doing nothing at all.
2. It is checked against the date of the session, not today. A certificate that is valid now but lapses before a session three months away is refused now, while there is still time to renew it. A qualification marked as Renewal in progress does not satisfy the rule: an expired certificate is expired.
3. Session leaders are checked too. Assigning a leader who does not meet the session's coach rules is refused when you save the session, and the message names the person and the reason.

Finding sessions that lack cover

Admin > Sessions > Cover lists every session in the next 28 days that is short of coaches, or whose coaches do not hold what the session requires on the day it runs. One row per occurrence, soonest first. Twenty eight days matches the default booking window, so a gap appears while the session can still be filled.

The columns are:

Expected is there because a ratio follows the bookings taken so far. A session three weeks out with six of its usual twenty four booked needs only one coach on paper and looks covered. Reading the expected number beside the required one shows the gap while it is still fixable.

Use Filter to narrow by Reason, choosing Every gap, Understaffed or Cover not credentialed. The list exports to CSV or Excel.

You do not have to remember to look. When sessions need attention, the admin dashboard carries a prompt with the count and a Review cover link straight to the list. When nothing needs cover, the prompt is not shown at all.

Reporting on coached sessions

To see a report of which sessions a coach has been booked on to, go to Admin > Sessions > Bookings. Use the Booking Type filter and select Coach to show only coach bookings. You can also filter by member name to see all sessions coached by a specific person.

This report can be exported to CSV or Excel, making it useful for tracking coach availability, hours, or coverage over a given period.

Tips

• Set the ratio on the sessions where cover is a safety rule and leave it off elsewhere. A session with no ratio behaves exactly as it did before.
• Put the credential requirement on the session rather than relying on a rota. The rota tells you who was meant to be there; the rule stops the wrong person being added in the first place.
• Record expiry dates when you add a qualification. A qualification with no expiry shows as No expiry recorded and cannot warn you about anything.
• Check the cover list at the start of the week rather than the night before. Twenty eight days of warning is only useful if somebody looks.

See also

• Member qualifications, recording credentials and their expiry dates
• Eligibility rules, how the rule builder works
• Creating sessions
• Check-in, recording who actually attended