I have been really busy with swim team the last couple weeks, it is taking almost all of my free time. I guess that is what happens when you volunteer to be the “IT guy” for the swim team!
Our swim team has been run over the years by volunteers (as most are) using paper and Excel. It hasn’t been the most organized swim team but the kids had fun. We did however, lose a lot of information which kids and parents would like, notably swim times.
Last year my wife agreed to run swim team and asked me to help her get the whole process computerized. I have developed a WordPress based plugin I call wp-swimteam to handle much of the work which when used in conjunction with WinSwim, is working pretty well to manage our season.
However, it is all new and there are lots of questions and lots of “we didn’t used to do it this way” but by in large, people are pretty happy with the way things are going. They certainly have a lot more information than they have had in the past. We had a fire drill this week to get data submitted for the local city wide invitational meet which required me to do a bunch of work to get our data submitted. This is the sort of activity which you don’t realize ahead of time, how involved it can be. I must have submitted our roster 10 times with the various changes.
WordPress is a great platform for a Swim Team (and probably many other youth sports). With the wealth of plugins available, it can handle pretty much anything we have thrown at it so far.