Volleyball club venue schedule: your fixed weekly slots in one place
At almost every club the venue schedule exists as one document, made by one person. It is sent round at the start of the season, then vanishes into everybody's inbox, and from that moment on the question 'when do the juniors train again' is a text message to that one person. That is not because the schedule is complicated. It is because it is nowhere people can find it themselves.
The one-page schedule that gets retyped every year
A club's hall allocation barely changes from season to season. The same halls, roughly the same evenings, roughly the same teams. And yet nearly every committee starts again from scratch for each new season: somebody opens last year's file, changes three lines, and sends it round. Often in a layout that is unreadable on a phone.
The problem is not the typing. It is that the document lives with one person. Whoever has it, knows; whoever has lost it, asks. The coach who wants to swap with another team two months later has no idea which slot is free then. The coordinator looking for an extra court for a rearranged match first has to work out who is in the hall that evening. Everybody rings the same number.
And then there is the quiet version of the same problem: the schedule is out of date. Halfway through the season a team has been added, a slot has moved by fifteen minutes, and the weekend session is laid out differently. The file that went round knows nothing about any of it, because it is a snapshot. What you want is not a snapshot but a place: one list you update instead of resend.
What a venue schedule is — and what it emphatically is not
In Koach that page sits under Club dashboard → Venues. You open the club dashboard from your profile, the circle at the top right of the app. The Venues tab holds two things: the sports halls where you play and train, and the fixed slots inside each of them.
Worth being clear about straight away: this is reference. Nothing is scheduled from it. Not a single practice appears in anybody's calendar because you filled in a slot here, and no message goes out to players. The page replaces exactly one thing, namely the loose sheet of paper that currently gets retyped every year — no more and no less.
That distinction is not a technical footnote, it decides how you use the page. A coach who wants his practices in the app puts them in his own team's calendar, where players can sign up and cancel as well. The venue schedule sits alongside it, answering a different question: not what are we doing on Tuesday, but who is in that hall on Tuesday.
Think of it as a map next to a set of directions. The map tells nobody where to go, but without a map you cannot plan a route.
In short: the Venues tab schedules nothing. It is the fixed layout of your halls, written down somewhere every club manager can find it and keep it right.
The venue first, then the slots
You start with the hall itself. Under + Add venue you fill in four things:
- Venue name — whatever you call it among yourselves, not the official name on the front of the building. If everybody says "the old hall", put that in. A schedule full of names nobody uses does not get read.
- Address of the hall — optional, but fill it in. It appears under the name of the venue, and that is exactly what somebody needs who has never been there. For an opponent's hall it works differently: how to make sure the navigation ends up in the right place for an away match is in filling in the address of the sports hall.
- Number of courts — how many volleyball courts fit in the hall at the same time. That figure is your yardstick when filling in the slots: if an evening already has as many slots as there are courts, that evening is full.
- Note — the free field, and in practice the most useful one. This is where you put what fits nowhere else: where the key hangs, which entrance is open in the evening, that the nets are in the store room at the back, that the heating needs half an hour.
Add every hall where you do anything, including the primary-school gym where only the youngest group (roughly six to ten years old) trains. Those small locations are precisely the ones where nobody knows their way around.
A slot is a day, a time and a court
Under each venue sits + Add slot. A slot is one fixed hour on one fixed day. You fill in:
- Day — Monday through to Sunday.
- From and To — the start and finish time, picked from a time selector, so that "half seven" never lands in your schedule and the slots stay in the right order.
- Court — here you choose Whole venue or a single court number. This is the field most schedules come unstuck on: in a hall with two courts there are two teams in at once, and on a printed sheet that becomes one line with a slash through it that nobody understands. Enter them as two slots on court 1 and court 2 and the picture is right immediately.
- Team — pick the team from your club's list. If your teams are not in the club dashboard yet, that is the first thing to sort out; how you build that list is in managing your volleyball club.
- Description — optional, for slots without a team. "Recreational group", "Open play", "Hall hired by the gymnastics club".
The slots appear under the venue, sorted by day and then by start time. That way you read an evening the way it actually runs. A typical Tuesday in a one-court hall looks like this: 18:30 to 19:45 the juniors, 19:45 to 21:00 women's 2, 21:00 to 22:15 men's 1. Three slots of seventy-five minutes, neatly back to back, and one glance tells you nothing more fits in that evening.
How long such a slot ought to be varies with age: for the youngest groups an hour and a half is usually too long, for a senior team it is on the short side. Settle that once per age group and you do not have to defend it again every season.
Match day is a different schedule
The weekday evenings are the easy part. Where it grates is the day you play at home, because then it is not about fixed teams but about a run of matches back to back, and those take longer than people think. Reckon on an hour and a half to two hours per match including warm-up and clearing away; how long a volleyball match lasts sets the timings out.
For the venue schedule you do not have to enter those matches one by one — that would make it a calendar, and this page is not one. What you do record is the window: from what time to what time the club has the hall that day, and across how many courts. One slot from, say, 09:00 to 17:00, with Court set to Whole venue and "Home programme" as the description. Whoever divides the matches up afterwards then knows straight away how much room there is.
The same goes for the other direction. If a team plays away it is not about hall space but about transport, and that is a separate plan you make per team with the driving rota for away matches.
One owner, two moments a year
A schedule nobody maintains does more damage within half a season than no schedule at all. People rely on it, get caught out, and start ringing again. So agree two things.
Who keeps it up to date. One person from the committee owns this page, usually whoever arranges the hall hire. Everybody who is a club manager can get in and change things, and that is deliberate: if the owner goes on holiday the club does not grind to a halt. But one person is answerable for whether it is still right.
When you check it. Two fixed moments are enough: once just before the season starts, when the hall hire is settled and the teams are known, and once halfway through the season, when the first shifts are behind you. Walk through all the venues then and ask of every slot: is the right team still here, is the time still right. That takes half an hour.
If you delete a venue, the slots hanging off it go with it — the app warns you about that as well. That is exactly what you want for a hall you no longer hire, but it is not a way of having a quick clear-out. If a team moves to another hall, delete the slot, not the venue.
Finally, what is written here belongs in the wider story of how your club runs. The schedule itself lives in the app; the agreement that it exists, who looks after it and when it gets checked belongs in the club handbook. Then it survives a change of committee too.
What you notice
The effect is small and dull, and that is the point. The questions that now land with one person do not all disappear, but the simplest of them do. Whoever wants to swap looks for himself first. Whoever needs an extra court sees for himself where there is room. Whoever is driving to one of your halls for the first time reads for himself where the entrance is.
And at the end of the season you do not start again with an empty document. You open the schedule that is already there, change the teams that have moved, and you are done. The sheet that used to be retyped every year is simply a page you update.
Frequently asked questions
Do my players see this schedule too?
No. The Venues tab sits in the club dashboard and can only be opened by people who are club managers. Players, parents and coaches without club management do not see it, none of it appears in their calendar and no notification goes out. If you want a team to see the times, put the practices in that team's calendar.
I deleted a venue by accident — can I undo that?
No, you cannot. The app asks for confirmation first and warns that the slots under that venue go with it, but once it is deleted there is no bin to pull them back out of. You enter the venue and its slots again. If it is only a team that has moved, delete the slot and leave the venue alone.
Can somebody else keep the schedule up to date, and does that cost extra?
You add that person in the club dashboard as a club manager; after that he can change venues and slots without taking out a subscription of his own. There does have to be a Koach account on the email address you enter, otherwise you get the message that no account belongs to that address. So have him install the app and sign up first.
What happens to a slot if a team is renamed or disappears?
The team name on a slot is fetched from your club's team list every time, so a renamed team shows correctly by itself. If the team leaves the club altogether, the slot stays but has no name against it any more. Pick another team for it, or put in the description what that hour is now for.
