How To Organise The Squad At The Start Of The Season Without Losing The First Month

There is one thing almost every youth coach recognises: September never goes the way it was planned. The squad opens with eighteen, twenty-three turn up, three never get round to handing in the medical, and halfway through October there are still two players whose parent’s number is in a message you cannot find.

It is not incompetence. It is that the start of the season puts three things into the same week that cannot be done well at the same time: closing the group, dealing with paperwork, and starting to train. What follows is a way of separating them.

Step 1: close last season before you open the new one

The most common mistake is starting the new season on top of the old one: deleting names from a list, writing others over them, and ending up not knowing who was in the under-13s last year.

Before you call anyone up, do the closing. That means two concrete things:

• Record who leaves and where they go. Did the player move up an age group? Change club? Stop playing? In two years’ time, when the coordinator asks how many of the 2026 under-11s are still at the club, this is the only way to answer with numbers instead of memory.
• Archive the team, do not delete it. An old squad is worth exactly what the ability to look it up is worth. Call-ups, minutes, physical development, notes on a player: none of it has any value if the record dies with the season.

That is why, in My Team Manager, a team moves from season to season instead of being replaced: the previous version is archived and a new one is created with the squad that carries over. The history stays there, readable, and takes up no place among the active teams.

Step 2: split the squad into three lists, not one

In August nobody has a squad. They have a set of possibilities in different states. Treating them as a single list is what creates September’s confusion.

Make three:

1. Confirmed. They have trained, they have said they are staying, the paperwork is on its way.
2. Likely. From the age group below, or from last year, but with no confirmation from the parents.
3. On trial. They came to try out, there is no decision yet.

The advantage is practical: when the coordinator asks “how many have you got?”, the answer stops being a number you made up. And when it is time to close registrations, you know exactly who you have to phone, and you do not have to phone everyone else just in case.

Step 3: one record per player, done in one go

This is the boring work, and it is the work that pays. Every player needs one place, just one, with:

• Full name as it appears on the ID document (not the name everyone calls them by)
• Date of birth and the age group that follows from it
• Parent or guardian contact: two numbers, if possible
• Medical status and its expiry date
• Main position and, if applicable, a secondary one
• Shirt number

Do this in the first week, with the player and the parent in front of you, at the end of a session. Five minutes per player. It is radically faster than the forty phone calls you would make in October to gather the same information.

If you can, add a photo. It sounds like a detail, but for a coach who picks up a new age group in November (or for the assistant who runs the team on the weekend you are away), a list with faces is worth more than a list with names.

Step 4: decide who sees what

If you work with assistants, a team manager or a section coordinator, define from the start who handles what. In practice, almost always:

• The head coach touches everything.
• The assistants need the squad, the positions and the call-ups. They do not need to touch players’ personal data.
• The team manager needs the parents’ contacts and the list for the match sheet. Nothing else.

Setting this out at the start avoids the situation where four people edit the same list and nobody knows which version is the good one. And, while we are at it, it stops children’s personal data circulating among more people than necessary, which, besides being good practice, is what the GDPR expects of a club.

What you get out of it

None of this is revolutionary. It is basically deciding to do in August the work that, if it is not done, gets done anyway, but in pieces, on a Sunday night, with the match the following day.

The sign that it worked is simple: in October, when a player misses a session, you know who to phone without looking anywhere.

If you want to try a place where squad, seasons and permissions live together, My Team Manager has a 30-day trial, and the season rollover is already built in, so you do not have to rebuild the squad from scratch every August.