How a Cardiff netball club lifted attendance to 92% and kept its teenagers

Nia Thomas coaches 48 girls across three age-band squads at Taff Vale Netball Club in Cardiff, a club affiliated to the netball pathway its players progress through. For six years she ran availability on three WhatsApp groups and attendance on a clipboard, and every year she watched the U15s thin out. In her first two terms on Bitir, with one private group per squad, weekly attendance rose from 76% to 92% and teenage retention from 61% to 88%. Nothing about the netball changed. What changed was that she could see who was drifting in time to send a message.

Where she started

Nia played county netball into her twenties, coached at a school club for a decade, and started Taff Vale in 2020 in a leased leisure-centre sports hall on the north side of Cardiff. The club runs three squads: U11 and U13 development groups and a U15 squad that plays competitively in a Saturday junior league, 48 girls in total, most attending one 90-minute training session a week.

The coaching was strong. The organising ran on her phone and a clipboard.

• A paper register per squad, ticked at the start of training and filed in a bag.
• Three WhatsApp groups, one per squad, where match availability, kit reminders, and parent chat all ran together.
• Match-day availability collected by posting "who's available Saturday?" on a Thursday and counting the replies.
• Player development notes and awards kept in Nia's head and a notebook.

The register recorded absences faithfully into a bag where they changed nothing. Availability was worse: a Thursday question in a 40-parent group produced a scatter of thumbs-up, three questions about lifts, and silence from the parents she most needed to hear from, so she spent Friday night messaging them one by one and still turned up on Saturday not certain of her seven.

The breaking point

What forced the change was the U15s. Nia lost five of a squad of 16 across one autumn term, and the pattern only became obvious when she went back through the register afterward. Every one of the five had missed two Saturdays in a row before quietly stopping, and none of it had surfaced while there was still time to act.

The national picture made it sting more. Women in Sport's research has repeatedly found that teenage girls drop out of sport at markedly higher rates than boys, often as school and social pressures build around 13 to 15. Nia knew the drop-off was coming for the age group; what she did not have was any way to see an individual girl starting to slip before she was gone.

"I had a register that told me exactly which girls were slipping away," Nia says. "I just wasn't reading it until half-term, by which point they'd already decided netball wasn't for them. The information existed. It was sitting in a bag under the bench while I was trying to run a session."

She looked at two club-management apps built around fixtures and league tables, decided both solved a problem her small local league already handled centrally, and trialled Bitir with the U15 squad first because that was where she was bleeding players.

What she set up in Bitir

Nia built the structure around the two jobs her phone and clipboard could not do: get a reliable squad count before Saturday, and catch a drifting player while a nudge still works. She followed the approach in our guide to sports club management software for grassroots clubs.

1. One private group per squad. Three groups, each with that squad's coaches and parents. A U11 parent never reads U15 logistics, and match talk is separated from parent chat.
2. An availability poll per fixture. Posted Tuesday with a Thursday cut-off. Only non-responders get a reminder, and Nia reads a live count instead of scrolling a thread.
3. Attendance every session. Coaches mark present, absent, or late in a few taps, and the register now lives where Nia already looks.
4. The two-absence rule. Any player absent two sessions running surfaces automatically, and her parent gets a short, warm same-day message. A check-in, not a telling-off.
5. One private goal per player. Each girl's individual goal is a concrete next step, a shooting percentage, a defensive skill, a court position to learn, visible only to her parent and the coach. No squad leaderboard.

What changed in the numbers

Nia compared the two terms after full roll-out against the two before.

The availability jump came first and fastest. A poll with a deadline turned a Friday-night guessing game into a Thursday-afternoon fact, and once parents answered once rather than being chased, the response rate roughly doubled. Nia stopped arriving at matches unsure of her seven.

The attendance and retention gains came from the two-absence rule. Once a second miss triggered a same-day message, the girls who used to vanish over half-term got a warm nudge inside the window where a nudge still lands. Most came back the following week, and the autumn collapse in the U15s did not repeat. Making each girl's progress visible to her own parent, rather than ranking the squad, meant the quieter players felt seen instead of exposed; the mechanics of that are in our guide to progress tracking for groups.

What Nia credits the change to, in order:

1. Availability moved to a poll with a deadline, so Saturday stopped being a guess.
2. Attendance moved somewhere she reads it, so a drifting girl became a message she sends, not a pattern she finds at half-term.
3. Progress became a private next step per player, so no one felt bottom of a leaderboard and quit over it.

What she would tell another club coach

Nia's advice to other UK club coaches is short and practical.

• Split availability from attendance. One is a forecast that needs a deadline; the other is a record that needs reading back. A chat thread does neither well.
• Decide the absence rule in advance. Hers is two consecutive misses, same-day message, no exceptions, so it does not depend on whether she happened to notice.
• Never rank teenagers publicly. A private next step per girl keeps the quieter ones in; a squad leaderboard pushes them out exactly when the national drop-off is already pulling.
• Do not buy fixtures software you do not need. If the league runs results centrally, spend the effort on the retention loop instead.

What's next

Nia is adding a U13 second squad in September and has started using Bitir's poll widget to set training times around the school-exam calendar rather than guessing. She has also begun mentoring a newer club across the city and has become quietly firm on one point: the sport keeps the girls; the invisible register is what loses them.

Related reading: sports club management software: what grassroots clubs actually use, and how to track attendance in a class or club without a paper register.