Technology in Community Sport: 10 Australian Examples Changing Pools, Clubs and Leisure Centres
Not long ago, booking a lane at your local pool meant ringing the front desk, hoping someone picked up, and having your name written into a paper diary. Swim meets needed dozens of volunteers with stopwatches and clipboards. Club registrars spent their Sunday nights chasing forms and bank transfers.
That world is changing fast. Technology in sport is usually discussed in terms of elite athletes, broadcast replays and million-dollar wearables, but some of the most useful change is happening at council pools, community leisure centres and local clubs. Australia is leading in several areas, including a world first in swimming video officiating that started at Victorian championships and is now being trialed at a public aquatic centre in Adelaide.
Below are ten Australian examples, each outlining their maturity (available now, in trials or proposed), followed by who is being left behind and what comes next.
Disclosure: At the time of writing this post I'm the Chief Information Officer at YMCA Victoria. SA Aquatic and Leisure Centre (SAALC), which features in several examples, which is managed by YMCA Aquatic on behalf of the South Australian Government. This piece draws on public sources only, and no vendor or platform named here is endorsed by the Y and it's my own opinion.
Key Takeaways
Australia is leading in pool technology: Swimming Victoria and Hawk-Eye Innovations launched the world's first swimming video review system in 2022, and SAALC hosted a Hawk-Eye pilot at the 2025 SA State Age Championships.
AI is already helping lifeguards: Lynxight drowning detection has been piloted at Australian pools since 2022, alerting lifeguards to swimmers in distress through smartwatches.
Club admin has gone national: PlayHQ, used by the AFL, Cricket Australia, Netball Australia and Basketball Australia, supports more than 11 million registrations.
Australians want flexible, informal activity: AusPlay 2025 data shows 85% of adults are active but only 26% play organised sport, which makes easy self-booking essential.
Clubs are under strain: The Australian Sports Foundation's survey of nearly 3,000 clubs found 68% faced rising running costs and one in four small clubs had considered closing.
AI program planning is still proposed: AI is appearing in back-office tasks and member apps, but AI-designed programs at community level aren't available now.
Table of Contents
Quick Facts
85% of Australian adults are active, and 26% (nearly six million people) play organised sport.
Australians make more than 421 million visits to public pools each year.
Nearly 500 Australian public pools are approaching the end of their working life.
Swimming video review technology is designed to reduce the need for around 50 officials at an event.
68% of community sports clubs reported higher running costs in 2023, an average increase of $20,529 per club.
PlayHQ supports more than 11 million registrations across cricket, netball, Australian football, hockey and basketball.
Sources: AusPlay 2025 (Australian Sports Commission), Royal Life Saving State of Aquatic Facilities 2025, Swimming Victoria, Australian Sports Foundation, Clubs Under Pressure, PlayHQ
What Is Technology in Sport?
Technology in sport is any equipment, software or digital service that changes how sport is played, officiated, organised, watched or accessed. The Australian Sports Commission describes new technologies as digital tools that let people connect online, receive services, find information and make transactions, and lists wearables, fitness apps like Strava and Zwift, social media groups, esports and stadium apps among them.
At the elite end, that means GPS vests, ball-tracking and video referees. Our post to the future of sports technology covers those innovations. At community level, the use of technology in sport looks different. It's the app you book a swim lesson through, the platform your kid's footy club uses for registration, the cameras that let a state championship run with fewer volunteer officials, and the data that tells a council who isn't using its pool.
Why Community Facilities Needed a Rethink
Community sport and leisure centres juggle a difficult brief. They're expected to welcome everyone, from squad swimmers training at 5am to a parent bringing a nervous five year old to their first lesson on Saturday morning. Most run on tight budgets from a mix of council funding and membership revenue, and many are housed in ageing buildings. Royal Life Saving's 2025 report found nearly 500 Australian public pools are approaching the end of their life and that around one in four Australians has no local pool.
The problem with the old model wasn't the people running it. Many of them were excellent. The issue was that the systems couldn't keep up with the growing needs of their communities. Membership data lived in one system, bookings in another and finances somewhere else. Program decisions were often based on what had always been done rather than what was working.
In my experience, part of the problem is that most systems were built for one kind of venue. Software designed for 24/7 gyms handles door access and direct debits well but struggles with swim school lane bookings. Platforms built for boutique studios make class booking easy but aren't designed for court hire or multi-sport stadiums. A community centre often needs all of these at once, which is why many ended up running several systems side by side, with staff stitching the data together by hand.
The pandemic pushed even the most paper-reliant operators online almost overnight, and many found their members had been ready for self-service for years. The question now is how far each organisation has come, and who is being left behind.
10 Examples of Technology in Australian Community Sport
1. Hawk-Eye Video Officiating at Public Pools
[Available now; expanding through state pilots]
Hawk-Eye is best known for line calls in tennis, but Australian swimming has taken it somewhere new. In 2022, Swimming Victoria and Hawk-Eye Innovations launched what they described as the world's first swimming video review technology, a permanent nine-camera setup (four underwater, five above water) feeding a review booth. The aim was to reduce the need for around 50 officials per event, particularly inspectors of turns and timekeepers. By the 2025 Victorian Age Long Course Championships, Victorian technical officials were using live video inspection of turns, the first in the world outside World Aquatics events to do so.
South Australia followed. Swimming SA and SAALC piloted Hawk-Eye at the 2025 SA State Age Championships, with plans to add underwater cameras and connect race data to a live broadcast system feeding videoboards and streaming.
This is important for community sport because volunteer officials are getting harder to find. Technology that lets a state age championship run fairly with fewer people on pool deck keeps those events viable. Our piece on robot officials looks at the same trend across other sports.
2. AI Drowning Detection
[Available now; privacy rules still settling]
AI drowning detection systems use cameras and software to recognise patterns of distress in the water and alert lifeguards. When the City of Stirling reopened its Terry Tyzack Aquatic Centre in 2024, it became the first pool in Western Australia to install Lynxight, which sends alerts to lifeguards' smartwatches and pinpoints the swimmer in difficulty.
The technology is yet to be considered standard practice in Australia. It supports lifeguards rather than replacing them, and its spread will depend on cost, evidence and how it fits with existing pool safety guidelines.
Privacy is a question that's still yet to be settled, with these systems being challenged recently. In August 2026, a Sydney lawyer questioned whether Liverpool City Council's $120,000 system at Whitlam Leisure Centre complies with the NSW Surveillance Devices Act, arguing a standard CCTV sign isn't enough for swimmers to consent to AI tracking. No breach has been found, and the council plans to extend the system. Venues usually say the technology tracks movement rather than identity, but Lynxight's Australian privacy policy notes footage may at times identify people, keeps alert clips for up to 30 days and retains a training subset for up to five years. Guidance from drowning detection supplier SET recommends clear notice before entry rather than generic CCTV signs, and Royal Life Saving's drowning detection training covers privacy and legal compliance.
3. Online Member Portals and Swim Lesson Tracking
[Available now]
Self-service portals let members book classes, manage memberships and buy casual entry without visiting a counter. SAALC's online customer portal, live since August 2023, goes further for families. Parents can check and change swim lesson times, review progression reports with their child's assessments, register absences and book make-up lessons.
In my opinion, the last set of features is where the value lies. Learn to swim is one of the most important programs any Australian pool runs, and giving parents visibility of their child's progress between lessons turns a weekly drop-off into something they can follow and support at home.
4. Smart Strength Equipment and Member Training Apps
[Available now; early adoption in Australia]
Smart strength machines recognise each member and set themselves up. With EGYM, members log in with a wristband or key tag, the machine adjusts to their body measurements and strength level, and resistance changes as they progress, with visual feedback during each set and results synced to an app. That's how the Geauga Family YMCA in Ohio described its EGYM launch in November 2025. The video below, from the YMCA of Rock River Valley, shows a member session.
EGYM launched in Australia in July 2024 through distributor NovoFit, including its Genius software, which builds automated training plans from strength assessments. The first full Australian EGYM site opened in 2025 at The Vitality Village on the Sunshine Coast, where Comlink Australia uses eight machines and a fitness hub to assess grip strength, muscle strength, flexibility, reaction time and cardiovascular health, with a focus on older adults and everyday functional capacity.
This is one area where Australia is following rather than leading, as YMCAs in North America already offer EGYM to members. The community benefit is clear, though. A machine that sets itself up removes much of the intimidation a first-time or older member feels on the gym floor, and the strength data gives staff something concrete to talk through at each review.
5. National Club Registration Platforms
[Available now]
If leisure centres have member portals, community clubs have PlayHQ. The Melbourne-based platform was developed over five years with feedback from sporting organisations and its partners include the AFL, Cricket Australia, Netball Australia and Basketball Australia. For community football, the AFL describes PlayHQ as its registration and administration platform, bringing leagues, clubs, players and venues together from the 2022 season.
PlayHQ reports more than 11 million registrations and over 100,000 administrators and volunteers on the platform. The volunteer number is the one to watch. Every hour a club registrar doesn't spend chasing forms is an hour they can give to coaching, umpiring or simply staying involved without burning out.
6. AI Swim Timing
[Available now]
Stopwatch timekeeping is another volunteer-heavy job at swim meets. Olly Timing uses AI computer vision to record swimmers' times from video instead. Our post on how Olly Timing is replacing the poolside stopwatch explains what it does today and where AI timing could go next. Alongside Hawk-Eye, it points to a future where club and school carnivals need far fewer people with clipboards.
7. Participation and Access Data
[Mostly available now; advanced uses in development]
When members book online, every booking becomes data. Centres can see which sessions fill in minutes, which sit half empty and which parts of their community never turn up, then design programs for the people they're missing rather than running generic marketing campaigns.
The same thinking now shapes where facilities go. Royal Life Saving's 2025 State of Aquatic Facilities research used population-to-pool ratios and drive-time modelling to show around one in four Australians has no local pool, and named the 50 communities most disadvantaged by a lack of access, many of them in fast-growing outer suburbs.
At a national level, the Australian Sports Commission's AusPlay survey tracks how Australians are active, and its 2025 results show 61% of adults exercise outdoors and 28% use gyms, fitness clubs or sports centres. For facility planners, that's a clear signal to make casual, pay-as-you-go access as easy to book as a membership.
8. AI Coaching in Everyday Wearables
[Available now; features vary by device]
Recreational athletes no longer need a coach to get structured feedback. Wearables from WHOOP, Garmin, Oura and Apple now use AI to move from recording activity to recommending what to do next. Our post on wearables as coaches covers what these features do today. For people with disability, the picture is less even, as our post on adaptive fitness technology explains.
9. All-Electric Aquatic Centres
[In development]
Heating water is one of the biggest running costs a pool has, and energy technology is changing how new centres are built. In June 2025, the City of Boroondara switched its Kew Recreation Centre redevelopment to all-electric heating instead of gas boilers, with the centre now expected to open in mid-2027. With nearly 500 Australian pools approaching end of life, decisions like this will shape what community aquatic centres cost to run for decades.
10. AI Cameras That Stream Community Matches
[Available now; early rollout in Australia]
Filming a local match used to need a volunteer with a camera and a lot of patience. AI cameras now follow the play on their own and stream the game live with nobody behind the lens. In May 2025, Football Australia announced it would deploy AI cameras at key venues to produce automated 4K livestreams and collect match and player statistics. Darwin Football Stadium was first, with NorthZone Premier League games now produced without on-site camera operators. The rollout is linked to the Australia Cup, a national knockout competition involving more than 700 community clubs.
Other sports are moving the same way. AI camera providers have expanded their Australian operations to target grassroots associations, clubs and schools, with Hockey Australia among the early adopters.
For families who can't get to an away game, or a grandparent interstate, a free stream of a local match is a real connection to the club. Before switching cameras on, clubs need clear answers on consent, particularly for junior players, and on who owns and can reuse the footage. These will have the same privacy questions that will need to be answered as the AI Drowning technology.
How Australia Compares With the UK
The UK measures leisure sector technology more systematically than Australia does. I haven't found a published Australian equivalent of the ukactive and Sport England Digital Futures 2024 report, which surveyed 117 UK organisations representing around 1,600 sites and four million members. Its headline findings:
Cloud adoption: 68% use cloud-based leisure management systems, and all were considering updates within 12 months
Sector average: a digital maturity score of 51%, in the "Digital Experimenter" band (40–59%), up 4% from 2023
Digital Leaders: just four operators scored 80% or above
Repeat participants: organisations that had taken part in all four years averaged 66%
The UK's best-documented self-service result comes from Sport Wales, which became the first organisation in Wales to offer a fully bilingual Welsh and English booking system. Over 75% of membership joiners now sign up online, close to 90% of class and racquet bookings are self-served, and calls to the centre fell by around 50%.
On officiating and pool technology, Australia is ahead. On sector-wide measurement, the UK is. A local benchmark would help Australian operators see where they stand.
Who Gets Left Behind
Technology in community sport benefits some organisations well before others, and the larger, better-resourced ones usually go first.
Research by Stephen Burgess, Craig Parker and Scott Bingley into local clubs in Australia and the UK found higher-level clubs were more likely than lower-level clubs to have adopted websites and social media. A 2025 review by Australian researchers in Frontiers found the cost of children's community sport nearly doubled between 2018–19 and 2022–23, with clubs facing declining volunteer numbers and growing reliance on participant fees. The same review flags digital innovation as one possible way to ease those pressures.
The Australian Sports Foundation's Clubs Under Pressure survey puts numbers on the strain:
Rising costs: 68% of clubs reported higher running costs, averaging $20,529 per club
Closure risk: one in four small clubs had considered closing in the previous year
Cost of living: 52% said it was a barrier to members registering
Volunteers and admin: fewer volunteers and more administration was one of five key challenges
The practical barriers include subscription costs, volunteer time, digital literacy and the fear of losing the personal relationships that make small clubs what they are. National platforms like PlayHQ help, because a local club can use the system its national or state body has already chosen.
Digital access is also a barrier in its own right. Victorian figures compiled by the Parliamentary Library show non-participation is higher among people aged 65 and over and people with disability. Language matters too, and in a country as multilingual as ours, booking systems that only work in English leave people out. Good technology adds online channels while keeping human ones fully working.
What's Next for AI in Community Sport and Leisure
Back-office automation [available now in some platforms; in development elsewhere]
Deloitte's 2026 Global Sports Industry Outlook describes AI taking on repetitive tasks such as finance reconciliations and automated renewal outreach, and positions data as infrastructure that helps organisations break down internal silos. Our post to AI in sport covers how AI is used further up the sporting pyramid.
Final Thoughts
The best technology in community sport isn't the flashiest. It's the camera system that lets a state age championship run when there aren't enough volunteer officials, the alert on a lifeguard's wrist, the progress report a parent reads on the way home from swim lessons, and the data that shows a centre which neighbours have stopped coming.
Australia has a real claim to leadership here, especially in the water. Victorian and South Australian age championships are where swimming video officiating moved beyond World Aquatics events and into state-level competition.
Technology won't replace what makes a great leisure centre great. That's the swim teacher who notices when a kid's having a tough week, the aqua aerobics class that's become a social lifeline for an isolated older adult, and the junior footy program that runs on relationships built over years. What it can do is help more of those things reach more people, at more convenient times, with better evidence behind every decision.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: What is technology in sport?
A: Technology in sport is any equipment, software or digital service that changes how sport is played, officiated, organised, watched or accessed. It ranges from elite tools like ball-tracking and GPS vests to community tools like online booking, club registration apps and pool safety systems.
Q: What are some examples of technology in sport in Australia?
A: Australian examples include Hawk-Eye video officiating at swimming championships in Victoria and South Australia, AI drowning detection at public pools, the PlayHQ registration platform used by major national sports, smart strength equipment like EGYM, member portals with swim lesson progress reports, AI cameras that stream community matches, and national participation and pool-access data from the Australian Sports Commission and Royal Life Saving.
Q: How is technology used in community sport?
A: Mostly to save volunteer and staff time, make access easier and improve safety. Clubs use it for registrations, payments and fixtures. Leisure centres use it for bookings, memberships and member apps. Pools use it for officiating, timing and lifeguard support.
Q: Does technology in sport risk excluding people?
A: Yes. Self-service systems can create barriers for older adults, people on lower incomes without reliable smartphones, some people with disability and people who prefer to deal with a person. The best systems add digital channels without removing human ones.
Q: Do AI drowning detection systems record swimmers?
A: Camera-based systems capture video, but the aim is to track movement in the water rather than identify people, and venues using Lynxight generally say swimmers aren't identified. The company's Australian privacy policy says footage may at times allow identification, raw footage is deleted within seven days and alert clips within 30, and a subset is kept for up to five years to train the AI. If this matters to you, ask your pool for its privacy notice.
Q: How can a small volunteer-run club get started with technology on a small budget?
A: Start by asking your state or national sporting organisation which system it already uses. Many Australian sports, including Australian football, cricket, netball and basketball, run registrations through PlayHQ, so your club may already have access. Low-cost tools like a well-kept social media page, simple online forms and team apps such as TeamApp or Spond can cover communication and scheduling. In Victoria, eligible families can claim up to $200 per child towards registration, uniforms and equipment through the Get Active Kids Voucher Program.
Related Posts:
