How an Exeter hockey club took 42 juniors to an away festival without the chaos

Kirsty Halloran coordinates the junior section of Haldon Hockey Club in Exeter: 96 players from under-8 to under-16, training on Saturday mornings on a school astro pitch. Every May the club takes its under-12 and under-14 squads to a two-day junior festival in the Midlands, with one night in university accommodation. In 2024 that trip took her about 19 hours of organising, and she spent the first hour of the drive counting cash.

Where the club started

Kirsty is a physiotherapist who started helping at the junior section when her son joined the under-9s in 2021. By 2023 she was running it, alongside four volunteer coaches and a club treasurer who looks after the senior and junior accounts together.

The festival is the highlight of the junior year. It is also, by some distance, the hardest thing the section organises. In 2024 the trip involved 42 players, nine adults, a 57-seat coach at £1,180 and a block booking of rooms paid by the club in advance.

Here is how it ran:

• The trip was announced in the junior parents' WhatsApp group, which had 131 members, and replies came in over three weeks as messages, thumbs-up reactions and private texts.
• Consent forms went home on paper at training. Two were still missing at 6:45 on the morning of departure and were signed on the pavement.
• Families paid £58 per player in cash or by bank transfer, mostly on the day. Kirsty collected £1,340 in envelopes on the coach.
• Six players who had said yes did not turn up. Their seats and rooms were already paid for.
• At the Gordano services stop on the way home the headcount came back one short. The player was in the shop, and the coach left eleven minutes late.

During the two days Kirsty received 63 messages from parents, most of them some version of "are you there yet?".

What was actually wrong

Nothing about the trip itself. The festival, the coaches and the players were fine. The problem was that four questions lived in four places.

Who was going lived in a chat thread. Who had consent lived in a carrier bag. Who had paid lived partly in the treasurer's bank app and partly in envelopes. And who had a medical need lived on joining forms from whenever each child had joined, some of them three years old. The NSPCC's Child Protection in Sport Unit publishes guidance on away trips and overnight stays for exactly this kind of club, and almost all of it assumes the organiser knows who is with them and what each child needs. Kirsty did know, eventually, but only after a long evening reconciling paper against a phone.

The no-shows were the most expensive symptom. Collecting money on the day meant the club booked the coach and the rooms against a list of hopefuls, and every family that changed its mind cost the club, not the family.

"I had a spreadsheet, a carrier bag of forms, a cash tin and a WhatsApp thread with 131 people in it," Kirsty says. "The trip was the easy bit. Working out who was actually on it took me most of a week."

"The trip was the easy bit. Working out who was actually on it took me most of a week."

What Haldon set up in Bitir

The junior section moved its channels across in January 2025 for weekly training, and Kirsty planned the May festival from the start in the same place, following the steps in our guide to organising a group trip: consent, payment and headcount.

1. One trip notice on 10 March in the under-12 and under-14 channels, with a reply deadline of 24 March and every detail in the announcement itself.
2. A trip consent attached to each player's record, covering the coach, the overnight stay and the festival, plus a tick confirming the medical and emergency details on file.
3. Payment due on 14 April, three days before the coach deposit, by bank transfer with the player's name as the reference. The treasurer marked each payment against the roster.
4. A concession route agreed with the committee in advance, which three families used without anyone else knowing.
5. A named list closed on 15 April, with a yes, a consent and a payment against every name, used to book the coach and rooms.
6. Role permissions so the two trip leaders could see medical notes for the travelling players, the treasurer could see payments, and the volunteer coaches saw only their squad.
7. One-way updates to families at departure, arrival, the end of each day and twenty minutes from home.

One decision drew complaints. Two families asked to pay on the day as they always had, and Kirsty said no. Her reasoning was that the club had paid for six empty seats the year before, and the concession route existed precisely so that a deadline would not exclude anyone who genuinely could not pay early.

What changed in the numbers

Kirsty compared the 2024 and 2025 festival trips, which had the same number of players and the same coach operator.

The one no-show in 2025 was an under-12 with a temperature on the morning. Because his family had paid, the festival organisers returned his entry fee to the family and the empty coach seat cost the club nothing it had not already been paid for.

The consent figure is the one the committee noticed. Every one of the 42 trip consents was in by 14 May, three days before departure, and four families updated a medical note in the process, including one new nut allergy that had not been on the joining form. Our guide to member records, medical notes and consent explains why the trip is the best moment to catch exactly that.

The headcount took about three minutes at each stop, with two adults counting against the same named list on their phones. Nobody was left in a services shop.

What Kirsty does in Bitir

• A channel per age group for weekly training, used for the festival notice so replies land against each player.
• Member records for all 96 juniors, holding emergency contacts and medical notes.
• Trip consents attached to the player record, with a medical confirmation tick.
• Payment status on the roster, updated by the treasurer and visible to trip leaders as a tick, not an amount.
• Role permissions separating trip leaders, treasurer and squad coaches.
• One-way announcements for timed updates during the trip.

What she would tell another club

• Count the cost of your no-shows from last year before deciding payment can wait until the day.
• Ask for consent to this trip, and make families confirm the medical notes while they are at it.
• Close the list on a date and book against the closed list, never against the replies.
• Count heads by name, with two people, every time the coach stops.
• Give parents updates before they ask. They stop asking.

"Last year I spent the drive counting envelopes. This year I spent it watching the under-12s lose at cards to the under-14s, which is what I should have been doing all along."

What's next

The club is planning its first overnight trip for the senior women's development squad, and Kirsty wants the festival template reused rather than rebuilt. She is also writing the process into a one-page handover note, because the junior section's next coordinator, whoever that turns out to be, should inherit a list rather than a carrier bag.

Related reading: how to organise a group trip for a club or class, and safeguarding-aware communication for youth groups.