Ask a Director of Sport what their job is, and they’ll describe something like: developing students’ love of sport, building competitive teams, running a programme that gives every student a chance to participate, working with coaches, representing the school at fixtures.
Ask them what they actually spend their time on in a given week, and the answer is usually different.
A typical week, honestly described
The specifics vary by school, but the broad shape of a Director of Sport’s week tends to look something like this:
Monday: Catch up on emails from Friday. Chase three parents who haven’t responded to the consent form for Wednesday’s away fixture. Update the fixture list because the opposing school changed their venue. Email the PE team to let them know.
Tuesday: Select the team for Thursday’s match. Work out who’s available — check against the list of students who said they had conflicts, remember that one student mentioned something last week but didn’t put it in writing. Send the team list. Get two replies asking about kit. Reply to those.
Wednesday: The away fixture. Travel, match, return. Get back at 6pm. Update the result somewhere. Realise the results page on the website hasn’t been updated in three weeks.
Thursday: Clubs today. Check the register. One club has eight students on the waiting list and a parent has emailed asking when a place will come up. Look at the waiting list, which is a spreadsheet. Not sure if it’s the current version. Reply to the parent saying you’ll look into it.
Friday: Write the sports section of the weekly newsletter. Prepare for next week’s fixtures — confirm venues, check transport, make sure consent forms are out. Realise one fixture clashes with an internal exam. Email the opposing school to reschedule.
The coaching, the development, the strategic thinking about how the programme should evolve — these happen in the gaps. Or they get pushed to the holidays.
Where the time actually goes
If you map the tasks above onto categories, a pattern emerges:
Communication admin — sending and chasing consent forms, notifying parents and students of changes, responding to individual enquiries — probably takes eight to ten hours a week during busy periods. Most of it is reactive: something changes, someone needs to know, someone has to tell them.
Data admin — maintaining fixture lists, team sheets, results, waiting lists, registers — takes another four to six hours. Most of it is manual entry that could, in theory, happen automatically.
Coordination — confirming venues with opposing schools, arranging transport, managing kit — takes another two to three hours. Some of this is genuinely relational work that needs a human. Some of it is chasing information that should already be available.
Add it up and you get somewhere between fifteen and twenty hours a week during peak periods. In a role that’s supposed to be primarily about coaching and development.
What could realistically be automated
Not everything on that list can be automated, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. Rescheduling a fixture with an opposing school requires a conversation. Selecting a team involves judgement. Managing a difficult parent situation needs a human being.
But a significant portion of the communication admin is genuinely automatable. When a fixture is entered into a system, consent requests can go out automatically. When a student is added to a squad, they and their parents can be notified automatically. When a result is recorded, it can be published automatically. When a fixture changes, everyone affected can find out without anyone having to write and send a message.
The same is true for a lot of the data admin. If the system knows who’s in each squad, it can maintain the registers. If it knows the fixture list, it can keep the results page current. If it manages the clubs waiting list, it can notify the next person when a place opens.
The realistic estimate from schools that have moved to a properly integrated system is that communication and data admin drops by around sixty to seventy percent. The tasks that remain are the ones that genuinely require human involvement.
What that time could be used for instead
This is worth dwelling on, because it’s easy to frame the automation question as being about efficiency — doing the same things faster. The more interesting question is what you’d do with the recovered time.
More time watching students train and giving individual feedback. More time developing coaches and supporting the PE team. More time thinking about which students aren’t participating and why. More time building relationships with other schools. More time on the strategic questions about what the programme should look like in three years.
These are the things that a Director of Sport was hired to do. They’re also the things that are hardest to carve out time for when the inbox is full and the consent forms aren’t back yet.
A practical question to ask
If you want to get a rough sense of how much of your time goes on automatable admin, try this: for one week, keep a rough log of every task you do and mark each one as either “requires my judgement” or “could theoretically be done by a system.” Most people find the second category is larger than expected.
That’s not a criticism of how the job is currently being done. It’s a description of how most schools have always managed sport — with tools that were designed for different purposes, held together by the effort of committed people. The question is whether that’s still the best use of those people.