Context
Skerries RFC runs rugby from U5 to U18 across Minis, Youths and Girls. Each age group has its own coaches, and each had its own way of keeping session plans, games and guidance: PDFs, slide decks, and messages in group chats. The club wanted one place a coach, a parent or a player could go for their age group.
Challenge
The site was the easy part. The hard part was the content and the people around it.
The same fact lived in several documents that did not agree. Coaching material written for one age group had to line up with the club’s philosophy, the IRFU’s age-grade regulations and the club’s safeguarding rules. The people who knew the answers were volunteers with a training session to run, spread across four sub-committees, and none of them were going to learn Git to fix a typo. And a wiki that only I could update would be out of date within a season.
Approach
Start from how the club is organised. The site follows the club’s own structure: Minis, Youths, Girls and Coaching, with club-wide pages for the pathway, codes of conduct and safeguarding. Every age group gets the same set of pages, so a coach who moves up a year finds everything in the same place, and each coordinator can see their whole section at once.
Give every fact one home. I gathered what the club already had, which was its coaching philosophy, the existing session plans, the development plan and the IRFU regulations, and worked out where each piece belonged. Regulations for a grade are written once and appear on every page that needs them. Contacts live in one file. Training times stay on the main club website, and the wiki links to them instead of copying them.
Surface the disagreements and get them decided. Putting everything side by side showed where pages contradicted each other: whether U8 is a tag or a contact year, and from which age a gum shield is required. I listed each one with the pages it touched, took it to the people who own the answer, and fixed every place at once when it was settled. Where an answer was still open, the page said so and named who would confirm it.
Make ownership visible. Every page carries an owner, the lead coach for that age group, and the date it was last reviewed. A feedback form on every page lets any coach or parent flag something that is wrong without knowing who to ask.
Fit the editor to the editors. The first editor needed a GitHub account, which was a barrier for most coaches. I moved to one where a coach is invited by email, signs in with an emailed code, and edits in a rich-text form. Each change is saved under their own name, so the history shows who changed what. An editing guide on the site covers the rest.
Build what coaches use on the pitch. The games library has about 140 games, each tagged by age and skill, with set-up diagrams and videos. Coaches can filter it, save games, and share a list to their group on WhatsApp. There are 89 session plans built from those games, a player development page for each age group, and a page that matches common problems to games that fix them. The site installs to a phone and works offline at the side of a pitch.
The site is Astro and Starlight on Vercel, with all content as Markdown in one repo and no database. The build checks the content against itself: if a session plan uses a game that is not tagged for that age, the build fails.
Outcome
The wiki is live and in use by the club’s coaches. It is kept out of search engines on purpose, so there is no public link here.
Lead coaches now edit their own sections, and the club has one answer to questions that used to have several. The structure was chosen so it can grow into the main club website later.