How a Liverpool swimming coach ran 40 juniors as four squad cohorts

Nathan Brooks coordinated 40 junior swimmers across five overlapping WhatsApp groups and a laminated register clipped to a poolside file. Swim England, the sport's national governing body, sets clear expectations for safe, well-organised training environments — and Nathan was spending most of his coaching attention just working out who would turn up. One Bitir cohort per squad fixed that: weekly training attendance rose from 72% to 91% and advance availability for galas from 44% to 90% in a single season.

Where he started

Nathan swam competitively into his early twenties before a shoulder injury moved him onto the poolside. He took his Swim England Level 2 qualification in 2017 and built the junior section at Mersey Tigers from 14 swimmers to 40 over six years, training out of a council leisure-centre pool in south Liverpool with three evening sessions a week.

Forty swimmers is a lot of children to keep organised, and they were not one group. They split naturally into four ability bands — development, junior, age-group, and a small performance squad — each on its own session times.

His coordination ran on whatever was to hand:

• Five WhatsApp groups: one per squad, plus a whole-section parents' group that nobody could mute.
• A laminated paper register he ticked at the start of each session.
• A flurry of individual messages every gala week chasing who was available.

It worked at 20 swimmers. At 40 it had quietly stopped working, and Nathan had not noticed because the failure was spread thinly across every week.

The breaking point

The moment came at a county-qualifier gala in early 2025. Nathan had entered a relay team off a WhatsApp thread where four parents had given a thumbs-up. On the day, two of the four did not show — one family had replied "yes" to the wrong week, the other had never seen the message under 60 others. The relay was scratched.

"I'd done everything right and still stood on poolside a swimmer short, because the place I asked parents to confirm was a place nobody could actually find the question."

That was the diagnosis. With everyone in one whole-section chat, no single message stood out, and a yes was indistinguishable from a thumbs-up to someone else's photo. The bigger the section grew, the worse it got — the classic large-group problem where everyone assumes someone else has answered.

What he set up in Bitir

Nathan rebuilt the section over a fortnight, deliberately keeping each squad as its own cohort rather than recreating one big group. The structure mirrors the one we set out in our guide to managing groups of different sizes: never one space for the whole crowd.

1. One private group per squad. Four cohorts of nine to eleven swimmers, each with the parents of that squad and no one else. A development-squad parent no longer wades through performance-squad gala logistics.
2. A two-minute attendance register. Nathan marks each session in the squad's group in under two minutes, and the term's attendance is visible per swimmer instead of trapped on a laminated sheet.
3. A gala-availability poll. One structured poll per gala, per squad — available, not available, or unsure — that closes 48 hours before he has to submit entries. He sees a clean count, not a guess.
4. A per-swimmer target. Each swimmer has a goal card with one personal-best target for the term — a time to beat in their main stroke — visible to that swimmer, their parent, and Nathan.
5. A squad helper. A team manager parent in each squad has helper rights to chase availability and welcome new families, taking the load Nathan used to carry alone. The roles split follows our leader, helper, member model.

What changed in the numbers

Nathan compared the season before the switch with the one after, across all 40 swimmers.

The gala number is the one Nathan cares about most, because a scratched relay or an empty lane is a child who trained all term and then didn't get to race. Knowing his availability two clear days out, per squad, ended the poolside guesswork.

What he puts the change down to, in order:

1. Smaller squad feeds. A question posted to ten families gets answered; the same question posted to forty got lost. Splitting the section was the single biggest lever, not any one feature.
2. The structured availability poll. A closed poll with a deadline gave him a count he could trust, where a scatter of WhatsApp thumbs-ups never had.
3. Per-swimmer targets. Once a swimmer could see their own personal-best target and tick off attempts, the older age-group children started turning up to the optional Friday session they used to skip.

What he would tell another sports coach

Nathan's advice to other UK club coaches is direct.

• Don't run a big section as one chat. Split it by squad or age band so each child belongs to a group small enough that their absence is noticed.
• Make availability a structured poll with a deadline, never a free-text reply. A thumbs-up is not a confirmation, and you cannot build a relay team on guesses.
• Give each squad a parent helper. The team manager who chases availability is the difference between a coach who coaches and a coach who does admin all week.
• Let swimmers see their own target. A personal best to beat does more for the optional sessions than any amount of encouragement from poolside.

The way Nathan structures availability and attendance per squad draws on the same logic as our guide to the right group size — small enough to be seen, with one manager holding the overview.

What's next

Nathan is rolling the same four-cohort structure out to the club's masters (adult) section next season, and is piloting a shared end-of-term celebration post across all four junior squads so the section still feels like one club even though it trains as four squads. He is also using the term's attendance data, now finally in one place, to make the case to the leisure centre for a fourth weekly pool slot.

Related reading: managing groups of different sizes: 5, 15, and 30+ members, and the right group size for coaching, teaching, and mentoring.