How a Leicester BMX club stopped losing its accident records

Tom Hadley is the club secretary at Soar Valley BMX Club in Leicester, which races 86 riders aged five to 16 on a council-owned track by the river. In November 2024 an insurer asked the club about a broken collarbone from the previous February, and the page that recorded it had been torn out of the accident book.

Where the club started

Tom is a quantity surveyor whose daughter started riding at six. He became secretary in 2022, when the club had 51 riders. By 2024 it had 86, nine volunteer coaches with British Cycling qualifications, and three sessions a week: Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday morning.

BMX is a sport where people fall off. Nobody at the club pretended otherwise.

• The accident book was a carbon-copy pad in a cash tin in the container. Coaches filled it in after the session, often in the dark, and the top copies went into a folder at Tom's house when he remembered to collect them.
• The page for the February 2024 collarbone had been torn out, almost certainly to write a phone number on. The coach who wrote it had moved to Nottingham. It took Tom four days and two phone calls to piece together what had happened.
• In June 2024 a 12-year-old took a heavy knock to the helmet on a Thursday. The Saturday coach did not know, and he raced at a regional round nine days later. His mother found out from another parent.
• Parents were told about injuries by whoever was standing nearest at pick-up, if anyone was.

What was actually wrong?

The club was recording accidents. It just could not find the records again, and the coaches never saw each other's.

The UK Concussion Guidelines for Non-Elite (Grassroots) Sport, published in April 2023, say a participant with suspected concussion should not return to competitive sport before day 21. Soar Valley's coaches knew the rule. What they lacked was any way for Tuesday's coach to tell Saturday's coach, other than a pad in a tin that nobody opened before a session.

"We weren't careless. We had the book, we had first-aiders, we had the forms. What we didn't have was any way for the person running Saturday to know what happened on Thursday, and with head injuries that's the whole game."

What Soar Valley set up in Bitir

The committee agreed the change in January 2025, using the approach in our guide to accident and incident reporting for clubs and classes, and it went live for the first session of the season in March.

1. A coaches-only channel, private, with the nine coaches, Tom and the club's two first-aiders. Parents and riders are not in it.
2. A pinned seven-field template: who, when and where, what the rider was doing, what happened, first aid given, witnesses, who told the parent. Coaches copy it, fill it in and post it before leaving the track, with a photo of the spot if it helps.
3. The session register taken in Bitir's attendance widget at the gate, so every report sits next to a list of who was riding.
4. A private message to the parent before the coach leaves, and a line in the report saying when it was sent.
5. A "day 21" line at the top of any report involving a suspected head injury, plus a written note to the parent to call NHS 111 within 24 hours.
6. A separate route for welfare concerns: anything that is not simply an accident goes straight to the welfare officer, Priya Mistry, in a private message, never into the coaches' channel.

The last point took the longest to agree. Two coaches wanted one place for everything. Priya argued that a shared log read by every coach is the wrong place for a concern that might involve one of them, and the committee backed her.

What changed in the numbers?

Tom compared the 2025 season, March to October, with what he could reconstruct of 2024.

The berm was the surprise. In June, Tom read every report so far in one sitting and found that 14 of the first 41 had happened on the entry to the second berm, where a lip had built up after the winter. He took the photos from the channel to the council's parks officer, the berm was re-profiled in the first week of July, and only three of the remaining 17 incidents happened there.

The insurer came back once in 2025, about a wrist fracture from April. Tom found the report, the register and the time the parent was messaged in under ten minutes.

"I used to think the accident book was for the insurance. It turned out to be the best map of the track we've ever had. The riders had been telling us about that berm for months, one crash at a time."

What Tom does in Bitir

• A private coaches-only channel that holds every incident report for the season in date order.
• A pinned report template so every coach writes the same seven fields.
• Attendance registers for all three weekly sessions, taken at the gate.
• Private messages to parents for same-day injury notes, so nothing medical appears in a group channel.
• An activity form each March for emergency contacts and medical details before the first session.
• Role permissions so coaches see the coaches' channel and parents only see their rider's group.

What he would tell another club

• Ask where last season's accident records are. If the answer is "in a tin", start there.
• Message the parent before you leave. Twenty minutes later it becomes tomorrow.
• Put the day-21 date at the top of every head injury report, where the next coach will see it.
• Read all the reports in one go twice a season. The pattern only shows up in bulk.
• Keep welfare concerns out of the shared log.

What's next

Soar Valley is hosting a regional round in 2026, and Tom wants visiting clubs' incidents on the day logged the same way, with a copy sent to the rider's own club. He is also keeping every report until the rider turns 22, and has stopped paying for the paper pads.

Related reading: accident and incident reporting for clubs and classes, and keeping member contact, medical and consent records.