Season Rollover Checklist for Volunteer Coordinators

The two weeks after the last game are when volunteer programs quietly lose things: deposit refunds that never went out, hour records that vanish with a retiring coordinator, and goodwill burned by a forfeiture email that arrived before the thank-you did. Rollover is a sequence, and the order matters. Here it is.

Phase 1 — Close the books (week of the last event)

1. Enter the final events’ hours immediately, while attendance is still fresh and disputable memories haven’t hardened. Late entry is where end-of-season disputes are born.
2. Open a short correction window. Tell families: “Balances are final on [date] — check yours now.” A week is plenty. This converts December arguments into November emails.
3. Chase pending approvals to zero. Every self-reported or unconfirmed hour gets approved or rejected before anything downstream happens. Money decisions built on a queue of pending entries get remade twice.

Phase 2 — Settle the money (only after balances are final)

1. Send the thank-you before anything financial. The season-close email leads with what families accomplished (hours contributed, events run), not with forfeiture warnings.
2. Refund completed families first, fast. Every day between “requirement met” and “money back” costs trust you’ll want at re-registration. Refund by the original payment method.
3. Final notice to incomplete families: two weeks, stating the exact shortfall and any remaining options (final work parties, buy-out). No new rules at this stage; just the policy as written.
4. Forfeit on the published date, all at once, per the policy families accepted at registration. Log each forfeiture and its reason; next year’s board will ask.

Phase 3 — Preserve the record

1. Archive, don’t delete. Hour histories answer next year’s questions: who actually volunteers, which events eat the most labor, and every “but we did our hours in 2025” appeal. Students will also come back asking for service documentation long after the season ends, often at college-application time.
2. Export a snapshot (families, balances, outcomes) to wherever the league keeps permanent records. Systems change; the archive shouldn’t depend on any one subscription or spreadsheet owner.
3. Write the two-paragraph handoff note: what the requirement was, what got waived and why, which families have carryover obligations. Coordinator turnover is when programs lose their memory.

Phase 4 — Reset for next season

1. Review the numbers before re-registration opens: shifts filled vs. unfilled, no-show rate, refunds vs. forfeitures. This is the evidence for adjusting the hour requirement — or defending it.
2. Decide carryover policy for incomplete families (owe the shortfall next season? registration hold until resolved?) and publish it with re-registration, not after.
3. Rebuild the recurring structure. Clone last season’s events and roles rather than recreating from memory; the roles you forget are the ones that go unstaffed in April.
4. Update the policy text with anything the season taught you, and put the new version in the registration flow.