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Build a Team Guidebook for Parents

Create It With the New NICA Team Family Guidebook Template

Stop answering the same parent questions over and over. A Team Family Guidebook gives families one easy place to find everything they need to navigate the season, while helping coaches keep everyone informed and on the same page.

Photo by New Mexico Cycling League

Think for a moment about all the information that you need to share about your team with the parents of your student-athletes.

You want to communicate what gear is required, what happens when practices are cancelled, how to order team jerseys, what your attendance policies are, where to find league-related info, and so on and so on.

For many teams, this information is scattered throughout emails, websites, apps, and handouts. Parents may have seen it at some point, but within days it becomes frustrating or impossible to track down. Sometimes, the information isn’t published publicly at all. It lives in a team director’s brain or personal hard drive, only to get warped when passed verbally from person to person, like a game of telephone.

For both coaches and families, it becomes hard to navigate the season. Parents struggle to remember everything they’ve been told. Coaches find themselves repeatedly answering the same questions.

The solution: create a single source of truth.

NICA’s Coach Ed team has created a new Team Family Guidebook Template for head coaches and team directors wanting to organize and present team details to parents easily and effectively. Mature teams will find it useful in consolidating years’ worth of information into one stop. For newer teams, the guidebook can serve as a prompt for things you haven’t thought about or put down in writing yet.

To create your team’s own family guidebook, make a copy of the template and fill in each section according to your specifics. In some cases, example language has been provided. Links to useful NICA resources are there, too.

Tips

  • A shared Google Doc or Microsoft Word document is easy to link to and can be updated easily each year or when you discover something needs to be added or edited. You can change what you need to change, yet the link always stays the same.
  • Put links to your guidebook prominently in other places that families often visit—your team comms app, on your team website, via QR code taped to your pit zone tent’s whiteboard. Remind families often that the guidebook is available to them and how they can access it.
  • Save time and energy and avoid your guidebook being out of date. Instead of retyping regularly changing resources managed by others, such as each season’s league race schedule, link directly to those resources. Examples: league race schedule, NICA Coach Resource documents targeted at parents, how-to pages for your team comm app. Think of this guidebook as containing information specific to **your** team. No need to retype stuff common to all/most teams and readily available through NICA or your league.
  • When getting questions from parents about topics that are in the guidebook, answer them, but also gently remind them of the guidebook. If you get questions that aren’t answered in the guidebook, think about whether it’s something you might want to add.
  • Be comprehensive/detailed, but also be brief. The goal is to make it easy and quick for families to find the information and get questions answered. Use the guidebook as a map by adding links to longer documents when you need to be more in-depth.
  • No need to print out hard copies for every family, but suggest that they can do so themselves if it would make the guidebook more useful for them.

Remember, the NICA Team Family Guidebook TEMPLATE is just that—a template. Go ahead and add or remove sections according to your team and family needs. Make it your own!

To create your own copy of the NICA Team Family Guidebook Template, log into Pit Zone, click the Education Center Link button, and search Coach Resources for “team family guidebook”.

Special thanks to SPECIALIZED, a NICA platinum level partner.

NICA partners help kids gain access to a thriving and engaged cycling community.

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