Rowing Software for New Zealand Schools

For NZSSRA school programmes chasing the Maadi Cup

Rowing software for New Zealand school rowing

From the first January row at the lake to Maadi Cup week, Row HQ keeps a Kiwi school programme in one place: welfare records the school can stand behind, schedules parents actually see, and a teacher in charge who gets weekends back.

Book a demo Set up your club free

No card. Set up inside a day. Roster brought over free from the school list.

Coach dashboard on a phone with tiles for squads, crews, members and safety trends for a New Zealand school rowing squad

Why school rowing needs its own software

Everything a New Zealand school programme runs on lives in one platform with Row HQ: session scheduling around terms and NCEA, crew selection from novice eights to the senior boats, welfare and emergency contact records, parent communication, entries for regattas on the road to the Maadi Cup, billing through the bursary, and an audit trail the Board of Trustees can rely on.

Kiwi school rowing points at one week in late March. The season opens in January, builds through regional regattas, and finishes with around 2,200 rowers at the New Zealand Secondary Schools championships, alternating between Lake Karapiro and Lake Ruataniwha. Between those dates the teacher in charge of rowing juggles NCEA windows, term boundaries, camps and a fleet, usually armed with a spreadsheet and several WhatsApp groups. Tools written for adult club rowing carry no parent layer and no welfare workflow, and a school cannot operate juniors safely without both. Row HQ was built with them at the core.

School programmes and Kiwi clubs run identical machinery: the rowing club software for New Zealand clubs underneath gains the parent and welfare layer automatically when a school signs up.

Three groups, one source of truth

The TICR runs the rowing, families follow the calendar, and the school holds oversight - nobody needs another meeting for it.

Teacher in charge of rowing

The TICR and coaches can:

Lay out training for novice through senior squads
Pick crews with everyone's availability on screen
Tick off attendance rower by rower in seconds
Watch erg results build across the season
Put an announcement in front of one squad or all of them

Bursar / school admin

The bursary and office get:

Attendance, roster and welfare history on an audit trail
Programme fees through Stripe or the school invoice run
Consent captured before any camp or trip departs
The fleet register and its maintenance record
Reports the Board of Trustees can read year against year

Parents

From the app, parents get:

Session times, lake and boathouse locations, pickup plans
The crew their child sits in at the next regatta
Camp lists plus the consent forms that go with them
A direct channel to coaches
Programme news right through Maadi week

The same programme through three windows

Coaches, the bursary and families each get their own view of one shared data set. Tap through the tabs to compare them.

Sort the week, seat the boats, see who made it to the water.

Placing rowers into crews before a regatta

Fees, fleet and attendance ready for the Board of Trustees.

The fleet register and maintenance record

Their child's season on their phone, always current.

The announcement history parents receive

Built around the Kiwi school season

Novice to senior in one structure

Each squad - novice, intermediate, senior - holds its own roster, coaches and calendar, and the TICR reads the whole programme at once.

Families see plenty, touch nothing

A parent login shows their child's schedule, crew and travel and stops there. Coaches update every family through one channel rather than juggling group chats.

A calendar that knows the NZ year

Terms, NCEA blackouts, January camps and the regatta ladder to Maadi at Karapiro or Ruataniwha are native concepts in the scheduler.

Billing the bursary recognises

Fees go out via Stripe or bursary invoice; concessions, payments and stragglers are visible at a glance.

Board-ready reporting

Attendance, welfare and end-of-season summaries export in the shape a Board of Trustees expects.

Coaching changes without data loss

A departing coach hands over roles, not files. History remains with the programme instead of a personal laptop.

Welfare and privacy

Under-18 care as the foundation

Consent forms, medical notes, emergency contacts and travel plans for juniors all live inside a school programme. Row HQ manages them in line with what your bursar, welfare officer and insurer expect under the Privacy Act 2020 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.

A welfare officer role that can audit everything
Trip and camp consent recorded with timestamps
Cloud hosting with encryption throughout
A permanent log of coach and rower contact
No third-party trackers anywhere in the rower portal; encryption at rest and in transit

Privacy Act 2020 aligned

Hosted in the cloud

Encrypted both directions

Audit trail

Consent records

HSWA 2015 aware

No charge up to 20 members. No card either.

Rowing software the bursary will approve

Your roster arrives free, nothing is locked, and someone real helps with setup. A day is usually enough to go live.

Set up your club free Book a 20-min walkthrough

Three weekly chores, handled

Every week from January to Easter throws up the same three jobs. This is how each one changes on Row HQ.

Training scheduling

The week's training built in five minutes

Templated sessions repeat per squad, overrides cover the odd week, and NCEA blackouts apply themselves. A changed session reaches every rower straight away, and the WhatsApp group finally goes quiet.

Per-squad session templates
NCEA and term dates applied automatically
Rowers notified the moment anything moves

See the scheduling tools

Bursar reporting

Term reports in a couple of clicks

Fees, concessions, attendance and welfare events gather themselves into exports the bursary can hand straight to the Board of Trustees. No more five-spreadsheet evenings.

Stripe and invoice tracking together
Welfare and attendance history for each rower
Exports in the formats NZ boards ask for

See the admin dashboard

Parent communication

Pickup questions answered before they are asked

Sessions, regattas and Maadi travel details flow into the parent app and update themselves when plans shift. Coaches stop spending evenings on group chats and forwarded mail.

One child per parent view
Push updates on every change
Camp paperwork and consent in a single place

See the member portal

With Row HQ and without it

The task

WhatsApp + spreadsheet

Row HQ

Session attendance

Head count and a message to parents

One tap and families are told

Naming crews for the weekend

Whiteboard in the boat bay

Published live with availability built in

An emergency contact at the lake

A document on someone's laptop

Encrypted, on the platform, bursary-visible

Fee collection

Spreadsheet and chasing emails

Stripe plus invoices on the bursary dashboard

The Board of Trustees year report

A weekend of compiling

One export

When a coach moves on

Data leaves on their laptop

Roles pass over; history stays

Count what actually runs a Kiwi school programme: WhatsApp groups, Excel, a paper sign-on sheet, and a teacher in charge reconciling them every weekend. Add Maadi week and the paperwork multiplies - crew sheets, consents, entries. Row HQ carries all of it in one place.

How NZ school rowing runs on Row HQ

NZSSRA-affiliated programmes, novice squads to senior eights

See pricing

NZ school rowing software FAQs

Schools only, or clubs too?

Both share one platform. NZ school programmes, university crews and Kiwi community clubs run the same product, and each school chooses at setup which billing, parent, welfare and reporting features to switch on.

How is junior welfare covered?

A rower record holds as many guardian contacts as needed. Coach-rower contact is logged, the welfare officer sees everything, camps and trips need recorded consent before travel is confirmed, and every channel stays auditable.

Where is the data held?

In a UK data centre on hardened enterprise cloud infrastructure, encrypted at rest and in transit. Operating under comparable safeguards to the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and its 13 Information Privacy Principles, we share hosting documentation and the sub-processor list whenever a school asks.

And the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015?

Row HQ carries the operational record your safety system needs: welfare officer access, an audit trail of on-water sessions, consent records, retention rules and role-scoped visibility. It feeds your safety management system rather than replacing it.

Can the bursary watch without managing?

A read-only window covers roster, attendance, welfare, money and fleet. The office stays informed with no extra meetings, and year-end output matches what NZ boards request.

What can a parent see?

Only their own child: schedule, crew, entries, travel. Finance, other rowers and the coaching back office are all out of view, with in-app updates doing the informing.

Does it work beside our school system?

Yes. CSV brings the roster in each term, attendance and finance reports flow back to the school, and direct integrations sit on the roadmap.

Is it free?

Up to 20 active members, entirely - full features, no card, no expiry. Past 20 the price is a flat monthly band by member count, and no band withholds a feature.