Within the same four-page hiring document, Tuna Swim Club asks its candidate to "stand for extended periods on pool decks" and to "lift up to 50 lbs of swim equipment." In another paragraph, the same candidate must "partner with the Board of Directors to prepare annual operational budgets, manage program-related expenses, monitor travel costs, and identify new revenue-generating initiatives." The two requirements sit a few bullet points apart. There is nothing in between to explain them.

I read the document three times and then did what I always do when handed a strange data set: I counted. There are 23 bullets describing primary duties, six covering qualifications and certifications, and a block of physical requirements at the end. Sorted by the nature of the work, fewer than one in four listed duties is actual coaching in the water.

Five bullets are technical: leading the Senior and Elite groups, building a unified technical progression from novice to national level, setting and mentoring individual goals, running the dryland and conditioning program, and delivering skill clinics on underwater mechanics, starts, turns and race strategy. The remaining thirteen are administrative and operational: budgets, board reporting, hiring and evaluating staff, negotiating pool contracts, safety compliance, and external relations with school districts and municipal government.

The title is Head Coach & Program Director. The ratio of the work calls it something else.

The foundation: a club that owns no pool

Tuna Swim Club operates inside the USA Swimming club system, in the state of Minnesota. That system's structure differs fundamentally from how Australians organise swimming, and most of what appears in the job description follows from the difference.

In the United States, most swim clubs are non-profits with a parent-elected board of directors, and the head coach reports directly to that board. The club owns no pool. It rents lane hours by the hour from school districts, from municipal parks departments, or from private aquatic centres. Revenue comes from member dues, meet fees and fundraising drives. That is the entire financial model.

The first consequence sits in the facilities requirement, where the candidate must "negotiate, secure, and manage pool contracts and lane allocations across all facilities in coordination with school districts, municipal personnel, and aquatics directors." For a club with no fixed assets, lane hours are the only asset, and the person who negotiates them is the head coach.

In Brisbane, where I live and work, clubs also rent lanes from councils and schools. But the top of the Australian swimming pyramid sits in state institutes of sport and national training centres, where athletes are moved up once they hit a standard. St Peters Western in Brisbane is the clearest case: a school-linked club program under a purely technical coach that produced Ariarne Titmus and Mollie O'Callaghan, two of the fastest freestyle swimmers on the planet. There, the administration is separated from the coaching. This is a difference in funding structure and facility ownership, not a difference in national character. Every time a comparison gets explained by culture, I usually find the data missing somewhere behind it.

The document also uses one term worth pausing on: LTAD, or Long-Term Athlete Development, a Canadian-origin framework adopted by many American clubs. The posting requires candidates to establish "personalised long-term athlete development pathways" for every Senior and Elite swimmer. The framework has clear organisational value: it forces a coach to think in multi-year cycles rather than one meet at a time. But it is also a theoretical framework not fully validated against long-term outcome data, and I will come back to that point.

Classifying 23 duties: a raw data table

Here is how I grouped the entire list of primary duties from the source document. The classification is my judgement, and I say so plainly.

| Duty category | Bullets | Share | |---|---|---| | Technical coaching in the water | 5 | 22% | | Governance, finance, board | 3 | 13% | | Staff management and coach development | 3 | 13% | | Meet operations and databases | 3 | 13% | | Compliance, safety, certifications | 3 | 13% | | Parent communication and external relations | 2 | 9% | | Facilities and pool contracts | 1 | 4% | | Athlete policy | 1 | 4% | | Leadership presence | 1 | 4% | | Team management platform | 1 | 4% | | Total | 23 | 99% |

Rounding keeps the total from reaching 100 percent. I left it as is rather than tidying it, because that is how a real data set behaves.

Reading this table, one thing becomes clearer than any paragraph in the source. Governance, finance, human resources, compliance and facilities account for 13 of the 23 duties, or 57 percent. Add the two communication duties and the figure passes 65 percent. Pure technical coaching sits at 22 percent.

This does not mean the club wrote the document wrong. It means the deck time the successful candidate actually gets will be determined by those thirteen other bullets. A coach who spends the morning negotiating lane contracts with a school district, the afternoon building a budget for the board, and the evening on deck leading the Elite group will coach with whatever energy is left. Not with the best energy. With the remainder.

I have watched sessions at clubs across Brisbane and Melbourne for five years. What I learned is not in any timing sheet: the quality of a morning practice depends heavily on how much sleep the coach got, and on how many parent phone calls they had to settle beforehand. That is a different kind of data, and it does not measure in milliseconds.

Certifications: a screening tool measuring the wrong thing

The qualifications section requires a minimum of five years as a head coach, ASCA Level 3 or higher with Level 4 preferred, current USA Swimming membership, Safe Sport, CPR, first aid, Safety Training for Swim Coaches, and a background clearance. On systems, the candidate must know Hy-Tek, TeamUnify or SportsEngine Motion.

ASCA is the American Swimming Coaches Association, with levels running from 1 to 5. The Level 3 and Level 4 curricula centre on stroke technique, training physiology, periodisation and program management. These are real and necessary competencies.

But look back at the table. The largest risks in this position sit in finance and in athlete retention, not in turn mechanics. A technical certification does not predict the ability to read a balance sheet, and it does not predict the ability to keep a thirteen-year-old in the water. The hiring filter measures one skill set while the job demands another. This kind of mismatch is common in elite sport, and it is not solved by adding a bullet about emotional intelligence.

On systems, the names Hy-Tek and TeamUnify/SportsEngine Motion show the club manages through databases. Hy-Tek Meet Manager handles meet entries and results. TeamUnify handles membership rolls, billing and parent communication. That is good infrastructure, and it also points to a paradox I will unpack later: clubs manage very well the things that already have a database.

Staff: one person as an entire HR department

Three bullets on staff management deserve a slow read. The candidate must recruit, hire, train, mentor and evaluate a multi-tiered staff including a Head Age Group coach, lead coaches, assistants and administrative staff. They must lead regular formal and informal staff meetings, submit written and verbal reports to the board, review staffing allocations to optimise swimmer-to-coach ratios, and approve timecards and expense reimbursements.

In a mid-sized club, that can mean ten to twenty people, mostly part-time, many of them students, former athletes or parents working a second role. It is a high-turnover workforce tied to school schedules and meet calendars, with no HR department behind it. Managing that group is a full-time job in its own right, and in this document it is bundled into the same title as teaching arm technique to the novice group.

Physical requirements: a filter written as an insurance clause

At the end comes the operational list: standing for extended periods on deck, travel to regional and national meets, lifting up to 50 lbs of equipment, a valid driver's licence, and year-round flexibility for early morning and evening sessions.

These lines exist to protect the club legally and to describe the job accurately. They also function as a quiet filter. A 55-year-old coach with 25 years of experience, four athletes sent to national championships and a back worn out from two decades on deck will screen themselves out before they ever submit an application. Nobody makes the decision to exclude them. The filter does not need to make a decision.

The counterintuitive angle: the gap called retention

I reread all 23 bullets looking for one keyword. It appears exactly once.

It sits in bullet eleven, on strategic planning: the candidate must formulate and adapt a strategic plan with the Board of Directors to "expand program offerings, maintain high swimmer retention and growth, and maximise club excellence benchmarks." Retention sits in a subordinate clause, between two commas, with no target, no threshold, no reporting line and no measurement system.

Compare that with what does have a system. Meet entries have Hy-Tek Meet Manager. Membership and payments have TeamUnify. Billing and parent communication have SportsEngine Motion. Swim times are recorded to the hundredth of a second. The budget has a monthly report to the board. What has a database gets managed. What has only a clause gets hoped for.

This is where I take the pen out of my pocket and write the hypothesis down before hunting for data, because I know my own professional habit: a critic who cites sources is very likely to go looking only for the numbers that confirm what they already believe.

My hypothesis: for a non-profit swim club, the metric that determines long-term health is not the count of national medals. It is the retention curve between ages 11 and 15. If that curve steepens downward, everything else — budget, meets, staffing — is just the cost of operating a shrinking facility.

Periodic youth surveys in the United States, including reports cited for years by the Aspen Institute's Project Play and the Women's Sports Foundation, generally show participation in organised sport peaking around ages 11 to 12 and falling sharply through ages 13 to 17, with a steeper decline among girls than boys. I use the phrase "generally show" because this is survey data, not direct measurement, and I will return to that in the limits section.

Right there in Minnesota, this story has a specific face. Regan Smith was born in 2026 in Lakeville, Minnesota, trained at Riptide Swim Team, and according to World Aquatics data set the 100m backstroke world record at 57.57 in 2026 at the age of 17, breaking Missy Franklin's 200m mark the same year, before moving to Arizona State to continue training. The decisive years of her development sit inside the age range I just described. Had she left the water at thirteen, the world would never have learned her name. And the mechanism that kept her there appears in none of the bullets in this job description.

Katie Ledecky came up through Nation's Capital Swim Club in Maryland before Stanford. Caeleb Dressel came up through the Bolles School program in Florida. Both are the product of an unbroken multi-year chain inside one club, at exactly the age range where dropout rates peak. Lane hours, pool contracts, timecards — all of it serves that age range. Only that age range has no target.

There is a counterargument, and it is strong enough that I have to state it. Maybe the single-leader model is correct, and clubs fail precisely because they appoint a great technician who cannot read an income statement. In that case, hiring one person with both technical and financial ability is the most sensible choice, rather than splitting the role and creating two power centres that argue in every board meeting. I have no data to reject that possibility. I have one observation: if the single-leader model is optimal, the labour market for the position must be very thin. And if it is thin, then every time a club hires wrong, the price is not paid by the board.

Kazan is the day I learned that a 99 percent probability can still die on the betting table. In Kazan in 2026, Germany held 74 percent of the ball and was eliminated. Every underlying metric pointed one way, and that way was wrong. I apply the lesson here like this: a club can complete all 23 bullets, hit 100 percent Safe Sport compliance, file every board report, sign the best lane contract in the city, and still lose its thirteen-year-olds. No bullet was skipped. There was simply a gap where nobody set a target.

Limits of the data

I do not have access to Tuna Swim Club's budget, roster size, site count or actual revenue, so every inference about organisational scale is an estimate drawn from the language of the source document. My classification of the 23 duties is a subjective judgement: a bullet like "athlete expectations" could reasonably sit under technical or under policy, and the percentages shift depending on where I draw the line. ASCA certification has not been validated as a predictor of athlete retention. Lane-hour economics vary widely by state, and Minnesota's long winters create indoor pool pressure I cannot quantify from this document. The retention data I cite is self-reported survey data, not direct measurement. And the entire emotional layer — a parent's trust, a twelve-year-old's fear of the starting block, the twenty extra minutes a coach stays after practice to fix one swimmer's turn — appears in none of the 23 bullets, and has no unit by which to price it.

What to watch in the next cycle

The first signal I will track next season is hiring structure. If non-profit clubs begin splitting the role into two positions — a technical director accountable for the water and an executive director accountable for finance, facilities and staff — that is a sign the labour market is correcting itself. The second signal is targets. The day a job description places the age-13 retention rate beside the budget line, with a specific number and a monthly reporting line, is the day that club accepts measuring the thing that determines whether it exists.

Numbers have no gender. The people reading them do. So do the people deciding which numbers make it into the job description.