The Weekly Logistics Behind Running a Country Swing Club

When I became president of the BYU Country Swing Club, I expected to spend a lot of time thinking about dancing. I did. I also learned how much planning it takes to make a club night work—and how hard it can be to make that planning fair for everyone involved.

We had more than 50 volunteers. Each week, we needed to fill 20 slots: four for the higher lesson, six for the lower lesson, three for line dances, and the remaining seven for door shifts. We also needed to plan demos and make sure people were assigned to lessons they were qualified to teach.

The challenge was bigger than answering, “Who can help this week?” We needed to keep track of what had happened over time. Who taught last week? What did they teach? How many times has someone taken a door shift or been a demo? Who is ready to teach beginner, intermediate, or technique?

Filling slots was only part of the job

I wanted people to have a fair chance to participate and grow their teaching skills. That meant we needed to look beyond the schedule for one night. If we did not remember who had taught recently or who had taken a door shift, we could not make thoughtful assignments across the weeks.

The lesson material also needed a plan. The beginner lesson was meant to teach the same material each week, so new dancers had a consistent place to start. Intermediate lessons needed to rotate through moves so the material stayed fresh and we could track what had already been taught. Technique lessons needed the same kind of history. For line dances, we wanted a mix of new material and dances people already knew, without repeating the same one every four weeks.

We also had multiple club officers helping assign people, manage the doors, and coordinate the night. Everyone needed to know where people were assigned, what was being taught, and what still needed attention. The information had to be shared across the officers, not held by one person.

The spreadsheet stopped being enough

We started with a spreadsheet. It gave us a place to write things down, but I wanted something that could connect the weekly event, the schedule, and the people taking part. A spreadsheet could list assignments. It was harder to use it as a process that started before the event and kept a reliable record afterward.

So I built that process into CountrySwing.dallinking.com.

How the scheduling system works

First, we create the weekly social as an event. That gives us a way to track the event and publicize it.

Then we create a schedule template. The template defines the roles and slots that generally need to be filled, such as teaching, line dance instruction, demos, and door shifts. We can reuse that structure instead of rebuilding the schedule from scratch every week.

For a specific week, we create an instance of the template. That is where the schedule becomes real: officers can assign people to roles, volunteers can pick up open slots, and staff can report what was taught. The weekly schedule keeps the plan and the event details together.

After the event, we lock it down. That final step records participation on staff profiles, including how many times someone taught or demoed. The profiles also hold information officers need when planning, such as a person's qualifications, whether they can take a lead or follow role, and other staff details.

That gives officers a better basis for planning and rotating opportunities. We can look at what people have done, what they are qualified to teach, and what material has already been covered. The system does not make the leadership decisions for us; it gives us shared information to make those decisions with.

That move also led into the next problem: once we could better coordinate who was teaching, how could we help those volunteers learn the many moves people wanted to learn? That question led me to build the move and line dance library.

What I learned

Volunteer scheduling is also about fairness, development, and continuity. A good plan helps the event run, but it should also help people take turns, teach at the right level, and grow into new responsibilities.

With 50-plus volunteers and 20 weekly slots, we needed more than a list of names. We needed a history of what had happened and a shared system that helped officers plan what came next. That was the first version of a much larger idea: use technology to make the work of running a dance community easier to coordinate.