Every register secure.
Every handover recorded.
How South Wales Sports Schools moved registers holding allergies, medical needs and emergency contacts out of WhatsApp screenshots and into a monday.com system where each coach sees only their own sessions.
A well-run business with its most sensitive data in the wrong place
Sports Xtra, now rebranding as South Wales Sports Schools, has delivered sport and activity provision across South Wales since 2005. It runs after-school clubs in around 16 partner schools, holiday camps at The Vale Resort and Cardiff High School, PPA cover for schools and weekly classes, all for children aged 5 to 13.
What already worked
Quite a lot. Active Network handled bookings, payments and parent emails reliably, and it stayed as the booking system. Deputy worked well for scheduling and payroll. And the long-standing school relationships, built through years of direct networking with headteachers, were the real engine of the business.
Where the risk sat
Coaches had no access to Active Network. So shortly before each session, registers listing children's allergies, medical needs and emergency contacts were screenshotted and shared through WhatsApp. Those copies stayed on personal phones indefinitely, including the phones of staff who had since left.
Around that sat a set of manual workarounds:
- Incident reports were paper forms on clipboards, 50 to 60 of them each summer, filed by date and venue and copied out by hand when a parent asked for one. Forms could be incomplete or lost, and there was no reliable record that parents had been informed.
- There was no record of which adult collected each child at the end of a session.
- Policies and risk assessments lived in Google Drive with no version control and no proof staff had read the current version.
- School relationships were tracked in a basic spreadsheet, with contacts siloed in individual inboxes and key knowledge held by individuals.
- Day-to-day communication ran across several disconnected WhatsApp groups.
- Sector
- Children's sport and activity provision, ages 5 to 13
- Location
- Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales
- Team
- Owner, an operations lead, an operations and scheduling lead, and around 20 coaches
- Services
- After-school clubs in around 16 partner schools, holiday camps at 2 venues, PPA cover and weekly classes
- Systems
- Active Network and monday.com (Deputy since retired)
From first conversation to live system before the summer rush
We kept Active Network as the booking system and built around it, with the summer holiday camps, the busiest period of the year, as a fixed deadline.
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April 2026
Discovery
A discovery session mapped the full tool stack and every manual workaround, from the WhatsApp registers to the clipboard incident forms.
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April to May
Access to live booking data
We worked directly with Active Network to secure API access to the booking system, so session and registration data could flow in automatically instead of being copied by hand.
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May
Proof first, then the plan
A working integration was demonstrated before anything was committed. A written transformation proposal and an in-person discovery workshop in Cardiff followed.
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June
Build and implementation
The full build across three monday.com workspaces, followed by in-person implementation and training in Cardiff for the leadership team.
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July
Coach training
Training sessions for the coaching team ahead of the summer holiday camp season.
From proposal to live system took around three weeks, and we have supported the team ever since.
Three workspaces, each with a clear owner
Everything runs on monday.com, connected to Active Network through automated integrations built and maintained by Inflowstructure.
It is the same approach we take for other membership and activity businesses: keep the tools that work, and design the monday.com implementation around how the business really runs.
Operations: digital registers for holiday camps and clubs
The coaches' daily tool. Bookings flow in automatically, a register appears on every session day, and every handover is recorded.
- Seasons and sessions synced automatically from Active Network, including registrations, capacity and fill rate
- Alerts when a session is over capacity, full, or above 80% fill
- Digital registers generated on every session day, timed separately for holiday camps and after-school clubs, with an on-demand refresh for same-day bookings
- Every register lists each child's medical needs, allergies, emergency contacts, authorised collectors and photo permissions
- A mobile workflow for coaches: venue directions, sign children in, sign them out, complete the session, and the register archives itself
- Parent or carer confirmation at sign-out, recording every handover for the first time
- Coaches see only the sessions and registers they are assigned to, with no access to business data, and join as free guest users
- An incident form that cannot be submitted incomplete, alerts the safeguarding lead immediately, tracks whether and how the parent was informed, and escalates until they are
- A branded PDF incident report for parents, with a reference number
- Club and camp task trackers that replaced Excel, creating a checklist per school automatically each new season
Sales CRM
For leadership only. School relationships that used to live in one person's inbox now belong to the business.
- Pipelines for winning new schools and new camp venues, with defined stages
- School and venue records linked to contacts, with full email history, so anyone on the team can pick up a relationship
- Deals per service per school, supporting revenue forecasting across the academic year
Compliance
Proof that the right people have read the right version of every policy.
- Policy library and risk assessments with dated read-acknowledgement from staff
- Acknowledgements reset automatically whenever a document is updated
- Separate restricted stores for insurance, contracts and forms
- Review-date reminders, so nothing lapses unnoticed
Safer for children. Clearer for the business.
- The screenshot and WhatsApp register routine has been eliminated completely.
- Sensitive child data now stays inside one access-controlled system. When someone leaves, their access is removed centrally and immediately.
- Every handover and every incident now leaves a permanent, searchable record.
- The 50 to 60 paper incident reports each summer have been replaced by a digital process that cannot skip a step.
- More than 750 registers have been generated automatically in monday.com so far.
Scheduling moved in too
Scheduling now runs in the new system as well, so Deputy has been retired. The money it cost is freed up, and covers almost the entire running cost of the new system.
Map your business
before you build.
Run a sports coaching business, holiday camps or school programmes? Every project starts with The Blueprint Day: one day, in person, mapping how your business really runs. As a Worcester-based, certified monday.com partner delivering in person across the UK, we then build the system around it.