PB Coach · for UK swimming clubs
The coaching workspace that already knows your swimmers' times
Write the session, take the register, analyse the race, plan the meet. Built on PB Pathway, so a swimmer's race history and their gap to a county, regional or national time is already there once their account holder approves the connection.
Every plan includes the 14-day trial and a personal setup walkthrough over video. PB Coach is invitation only while we work with our first clubs.
A sample PB Coach workspace showing today’s programme, swimmer performance history, a structured workout, Race Lab analysis and programme reports. All club and swimmer data shown is synthetic.
A sample coaching workspace. All club and swimmer data shown is synthetic.
One week, one workspace
Monday
Write the session
Type it the way you already write it. Distances, duration and zone totals add themselves as you go.
Tuesday
Take the register
One tap per swimmer on the poolside. Open registers stay at the top of the list until they are done.
Saturday
Analyse the race
Tag breaths, strokes, fly kicks and walls against the video already on your device. Nothing uploads.
Sunday
Plan what is next
Entries against qualifying times, phases against the meet calendar, and what the swimmer sees of it.
Race Lab
The numbers you currently count from the stands
Breaths, stroke counts and underwater fly kicks, per length, timestamped and totalled. Not a coach's tally on the back of a heat sheet, and not a number somebody typed in afterwards.
- Four controls, arranged how you want them, with the shortcut legend always on screen
- A live stroke rate that says so when it cannot measure one
- Front-half and back-half drop-off computed, not left for you to subtract
- Every measurement labelled with where it came from
- Works with no connection, and syncs when there is one
The video never leaves your device
You choose a file already on the device and the browser plays it locally. PB Coach does not upload it, transcode it, store it or generate a link to it. The only thing about the video that reaches a server is how long it was.
Ava Renshaw · County championships
1:02.45
- First 50
- 30.86
- Second 50
- 31.59
- Drop-off
- +0.73
| Length | Split | Breaths | Strokes | Fly kicks | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 14.82 | 3 | 14 | 5 | 45.1 |
| 2 | 16.04 | 4 | 16 | 4 | 43.2 |
| 3 | 16.31 | 5 | 16 | 3 | 41.8 |
| 4 | 15.28 | 6 | 16 | 2 | 44 |
| Race | 1:02.45 | 18 | 62 | 14 | 43.5 |
Splits and counts: tagged by the coach. Stroke rate: derived. The video stayed on the device.
Training
Written the way you write it, counted the way you need it counted
A session is a document, not a form. Type the sets in swimming shorthand and the distance, the duration and the energy-zone split come out of it. One session can carry a different main set per lane or squad without being written twice.
Distance
3,200m
Duration
68 min
Pool
25m
Warm-up
1 × 400 Choice
8 × 50 Freestyle on 50s
Main set
3 rounds of 4 × 100 Freestyle on 1:30
4 × 50 Butterfly on 1:00
Cooldown
1 × 200 Choice
Energy zones
- A1 Easy aerobic1,200m38%
- A2 Aerobic1,000m31%
- AT Threshold600m19%
- VO2 Maximum oxygen300m9%
- SP Race pace100m3%
Strokes
- Freestyle1,800m56%
- Butterfly500m16%
- Backstroke450m14%
- Breaststroke300m9%
- Individual medley150m5%
Eight weeks of planned and completed distance. Week three planned 46 kilometres and completed 39; week six planned 52 and completed 44. Every other week landed within two kilometres of plan.
2 weeks finished more than two kilometres under plan.
Attendance is its own list
Sessions first, registers behind them, and the ones nobody has started stay at the top until they are done.
Planned against completed
Turning up and doing the prescribed work are different things with different answers.
Ava Renshaw · 100m Freestyle
Short course · 6 races · county time 1:03.08
6 recorded times falling from 1:07.42 to 1:02.45, finishing inside the county qualifying time of 1:03.08 at the last race.
Inside the county time at the last race, by 0.63s.
- Leo Marchetti800m Freestyle-4.10s
- Ava Renshaw100m Freestyle-0.63s
- Priya Anand50m Freestyle-0.41s
- Rhys Dalgleish100m Breaststroke+1.10s
- Noah Whitcombe100m Butterfly+1.21s
- Maya Halloran200m Freestyle+1.95s
Left of the line is inside the qualifying time. Real Swim England Standards, matched by event, age and course.
Athlete 360
Built on the qualifying times, not bolted onto them
PB Pathway holds 10,660 county, regional and national qualifying rows. PB Coach reads them, matched to the event, the age and the course a swimmer actually swam, so “how far away is she” is a number on the page rather than a spreadsheet somebody maintains.
A time is never silently converted between short and long course. A converted time is a number nobody swam.
PB Coach is independent. Swim England, Aquatics GB and the other home-nation governing bodies have no involvement in it and no relationship with it. The qualifying times are published standards that PB Pathway holds and matches; they are not a data feed from anybody.
Deep enough to run a season on
The things a club needs in week six, when the novelty has worn off and the register still has to be taken.
8 × 100 Freestyle on 1:40
Short course, push start, average of the eight. Same set every six weeks.
- Priya Anand1:06.8-1.4s
- Ava Renshaw1:07.2-0.9s
- Noah Whitcombe1:07.9-0.2s
- Maya Halloran1:08.4+0.3s
- Amara Nwosu1:09.1-1.1s
- Leo Marchetti1:09.6-0.4s
Coach-only. A child is never shown ranked against their squad.
41 of 52 checked in
Of 41 swimmers checked in, 4 are below their own normal, 7 slightly below, 26 as usual and 4 above.
Two swimmers have reported below their own normal three days running.
- Squads and staff
- Owner, head coach, squad coach, assistant and race analyst. A squad coach reaches their own squad and nobody else's.
- Competitions and entries
- Paste the programme the host sent you. Entries carry each swimmer's best beside the qualifying time, and the checks are advisory: entering a swimmer outside a time is a coaching decision.
- Relays
- Draft an order, estimate it, change it. Club-owned and staff-only, because a child reading a draft they were dropped from is a harm we would have created.
- Season planning
- Dated phases per squad against the meets and sessions that belong to them, with a warning when two blocks collide.
- Test sets
- A protocol is required, because a test set swum differently is a different test. The board is private to your staff.
- Verification
- A swimmer or account holder asks the club to confirm a result, a test number or a register correction. Every decision is kept, including a refusal.
- Club updates
- A pool closure or an arrival time, to the club, a squad or one meet's entrants. One way, and every one is attributable.
- Reports
- A print-first squad report that names no swimmer and ranks nothing. Every figure is a squad total.
- Five languages
- English, Spanish, French, German and Polish, throughout. Your own content is never machine translated.
- Your club's units
- Metres or yards, your week start, your date order. A unit is a label and never a conversion.
It sits beside your club system, not on top of it
PB Coach does not run your membership, your subscriptions, your billing, your website or your governing-body administration. If your club uses GoMotion or something like it for those, keep using it. What those systems do not do is the coaching, and that is the layer PB Coach is.
What PB Coach does
- Race analysis, with the video staying on your device
- Sessions, registers and completed load
- Competition planning, entry tracking and relays
- Season phases, test sets and squad reporting
- Controlled sharing into a swimmer's own account
What it does not
- Membership, subscriptions or billing
- Your club website or its content
- Submitting entries to a meet host
- Governing-body registration or affiliation
- Any public profile, ranking or feed for a child
Built for clubs working with children
These are architecture, not settings. There is no configuration that turns any of them off.
No public swimmer profiles
Nothing about a swimmer is published anywhere. There is no public page to find.
No public rankings
PB Coach never places a child on a public leaderboard, and never on a cross-club one.
No swimmer search
A coach cannot search PB Pathway for a child, and cannot learn whether an email has an account.
Approval, then access
A connection starts with the account holder, and they can revoke it whenever they like.
One-way updates only
No private coach-to-child messaging, no attachments, no disappearing messages.
Never a full date of birth
A coach sees an age group. The date of birth stays with the account.
Priced by the size of your programme
The coaching is the same in every plan. What changes is how many swimmers, staff and squads you are running.
Solo Coach
An individual coach, or one squad.
Trial and walkthrough included
Club
A competitive club with several squads and staff.
Trial and walkthrough included
Performance
A larger club or a performance programme.
Trial and walkthrough included
Questions coaches ask
- Does the video upload anywhere?
- No. You pick a file already on the device, the browser plays it locally, and the analysis is what gets saved. The filename never leaves the browser either.
- Do we need every swimmer to have a PB Pathway account?
- No. You can add a club record for any swimmer and analyse their races straight away. Connecting to a PB Pathway account is what lets you see their official results and share feedback back.
- Does a family have to pay to connect to us?
- No. Shared feedback and assigned sessions are visible on a free PB Pathway account.
- Does this replace our club management system?
- No, and it is not trying to. PB Coach does not handle membership, subscriptions, billing, your website or your governing-body administration, and a club running GoMotion or something like it should carry on running it. PB Coach is the coaching layer beside that.
- What happens to our existing data?
- Nothing is imported automatically and nothing is scraped. You paste a meet programme from what the host sent you, and you add swimmers yourself or from a pasted list. If moving something across would help, say so when you book a walkthrough and we will do it with you on the call.
- Can we submit meet entries through PB Coach?
- No. PB Coach plans and tracks entries. You still submit them through your usual route.
- Who can see our coaching notes?
- Your staff. A note marked staff-only has no representation in a swimmer's account at all, whatever else you choose to share.
See it with a full club in it
The demo is a complete synthetic club: six squads, a season under way, race analyses, registers, a test-set board and a competition with entries. Nothing in it is real, and nothing in it can be changed.