How a Birmingham junior cricket academy replaced the coach's notebook with one Bitir cohort

Daniel Pearce, an ECB Level 3 coach, runs Selly Oak Junior Cricket Academy in south Birmingham — 25 players across an under-13 and an under-15 squad. One season after moving off three WhatsApp groups and the spiral notebook he had carried for six years, weekly home-practice completion had risen from 36% to 82% and training attendance from 68% to 90%.

Where the academy started

Daniel played club cricket into his thirties and started the academy in 2018 with eight children in a school sports hall. By 2024 it had grown to 25 players, training on Tuesday and Thursday evenings through the summer and playing friendlies against other Birmingham clubs on Saturdays.

The coaching was good. The keeping-track was a notebook.

Every player's technical points — grip, front-foot stride, where the bowling was leaking runs — lived in a spiral pad Daniel carried in his kit bag. Parents never saw it. Match availability was collected across two squad WhatsApp groups plus a third group for the parents who preferred to message him directly, and on a bad week he was counting yeses across three threads at eleven o'clock on a Friday night.

The wider pattern is well documented. Sport England's Active Lives Children and Young People survey has repeatedly found that activity levels dip as children move through their teens, and junior clubs feel that drop-off directly — a player who stops practising between sessions is usually a player halfway out the door.

The breaking point

It was a Saturday morning, two players short, that did it.

Daniel had counted nine confirmed for an under-15 fixture on the Thursday. By Saturday two had dropped out in replies he had missed in a noisy thread, and a third had told a parent who had told nobody. He arrived at the ground with eight, borrowed a fielder from the opposition, and lost a game his squad should have won.

"Standing there a man short, when I knew I'd actually had the numbers on Wednesday — that was the morning I'd had enough," Daniel says. "The information existed. It was just scattered across three chats and my own bad memory."

The notebook bothered him for a different reason. A parent had asked, politely, what exactly her son needed to work on, and Daniel realised the honest answer was written in a pad she would never see. The people who could actually make a child practise at home — the parents — had no idea what the child was supposed to be practising.

Why the academy chose Bitir

Daniel had seen Bitir used by a parent who ran a swimming squad. He set up one group for the under-15s to test it before a fixture.

The deciding feature was the match-availability poll. One poll per fixture, opened on Monday, closed Thursday, with a running count he could read at a glance — no more scrolling three threads. The second was individual goals a parent could see. Each player's two or three technical targets could live in the app, visible to that player and their parent and nobody else, so a child who was behind was not exposed to the squad but their family still knew exactly what to work on.

He looked at two dedicated team-management apps first. Both were built around fixtures, leagues, and subscriptions, and both wanted a per-player annual fee for features a friendly-only junior academy did not need.

How Selly Oak set it up

Daniel migrated the under-15s first, then brought the under-13s across two weeks later. Each squad now runs the same way:

1. One private group per squad. Invite-only, parents added by phone number, players shown by first name and initial.
2. Individual skill goals. Two or three technical targets per player — a batting trigger movement, a bowling line, a fielding position to master — updated after each session and visible only to that player's parent.
3. Weekly home-practice assignment. One specific, named drill with a deadline before the next session: fifty straight-bat drives off a tee, twenty-four accurate deliveries at a single stump, that sort of thing.
4. Match-availability poll. One poll per fixture, opened Monday, closed Thursday, replacing the three WhatsApp threads.
5. Attendance. Marked at the start of each session, giving a season view per player.
6. Manager-only announcements. Rain-offs, kit, and ground changes posted once, seen by everyone, with no reply-all noise.

For the match-availability poll he followed the option-order and timing rules in our guide to designing polls your group will actually respond to, and he tracks the three signals set out in progress tracking for coaching groups — practice behaviour, individual skill progress, and the squad's match results.

Results after one season

The home-practice number is the one Daniel cares about most. A named drill with a deadline, visible to a parent, turns out to be a completely different thing from "have a hit this week". Players arrived at Tuesday training having actually done the thing, and the sessions moved faster because of it.

Match selection stopped being a Friday-night ordeal. With availability confirmed in advance for nearly nine players in ten, Daniel builds the team on Thursday and turns up on Saturday knowing who he has. Season-on-season retention rose from 61% to 88% — the clearest sign, he thinks, that players who feel progress and parents who can see it both stay.

The admin saving is the quiet one. His Sunday used to mean about two and a half hours of writing up notes and chasing replies. It is now about thirty-five minutes, because the notes are already in each player's goal and availability is already counted.

What Daniel does in Bitir

• One private group per squad — two groups, replacing three WhatsApp threads and the kit-bag notebook.
• Individual skill goals — two or three technical targets per player, visible only to that player's parent.
• Weekly home-practice assignments — one named drill with a deadline before the next session.
• Match-availability polls — one poll per fixture, closed before the team sheet is due.
• Attendance tracking — a season-level view per player, replacing memory.
• Manager-only announcements — rain-offs, kit, and ground changes posted once, with no reply-all.

What's next

Selly Oak is adding an under-11 squad next summer and Daniel is bringing a recently qualified Level 2 coach onto the staff to run it. He plans to give that coach a helper role on the new group — moderation and assignments, but not settings or fees — so the academy can grow without everything routing through one phone. "The notebook had a ceiling of one person," he says. "This doesn't."

Related reading: how to design polls your group will actually respond to, and progress tracking for coaching groups: what to measure and how.