Tuna Swim Club and the 23-Role Problem: One Title, Twenty Jobs Away From the Water

TUNA SWIM CLUB AND THE 23-ROLE PROBLEM: ONE TITLE, TWENTY JOBS AWAY FROM THE WATER

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1. THREE OUT OF TWENTY-THREE

"There is a pressure nobody sees, but every team fears it. I named it: Binh Duong pressing."

I wrote that in 2026, after breaking down all 26 rounds of the V-League season and finding that Becamex Binh Duong averaged a PPDA of 8.4 — the lowest figure in the league. The piece ran with 17 charts, passed 250,000 reads, and left me with a professional habit I never dropped: I read every official document a sports organisation publishes the way I read a match data sheet. A job description, to me, is an org chart written in the imperative mood. It tells you what the organisation believes in, what it fears, and what it pays for.

I counted. The Head Coach & Program Director posting at Tuna Swim Club lists 23 distinct responsibility clusters. Of those 23, exactly three are purely aquatic: leading the Senior and Elite groups on deck, designing and enforcing a unified technical curriculum from novice groups to national-level competition, and running specialised skill clinics.

The other twenty involve no water at all. They cover multi-tier staff management, non-profit budgeting, negotiating pool contracts with school districts and municipal authorities, child-protection compliance, parent communications, monthly reporting to a board of directors, and swimmer database administration.

Three out of twenty-three. Roughly 13 percent.

I was not surprised because the number is strange. I was surprised because it is familiar. In Vietnam we also hand one person one title and twenty jobs. The difference is that we rarely write it down.

When the stadium empties, every model collapses. I rebuild from the burnt data. This time, the burnt data is an administrative document from a non-profit swim club in Minnesota, United States — the kind of document most people scroll past in forty seconds.

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2. CONTEXT: A SWIM CLUB RUN LIKE A SMALL ENTERPRISE

2.1. Where Tuna Swim Club sits in the American system

Tuna Swim Club operates inside USA Swimming, which governs competitive swimming in the United States and divides the country into Local Swimming Committees. The posting names Minnesota Swimming (MSI) directly — the LSC covering Minnesota. That detail matters: the club is not independent. It sits inside a three-tier governance chain: club, state-level LSC, national federation.

The mission statement says the club strives "to inspire and develop swimmers of all ages and abilities in a safe, positive environment built on genuine team support — preparing every athlete to pursue their highest goals, in the pool and in life."

The vision is shorter: "To compete at the highest levels as a team where every swimmer becomes family and every success is shared."

Read quickly, those are marketing lines. Read closely, they contain two measurable operating commitments: the programme must span every age and ability level, and the team must be structured around a family unit rather than an individual unit. Both require machinery, not just a good coach.

2.2. Why this is an executive post, not a technical one

The power structure is explicit. The role answers to a Board of Directors. The holder must attend monthly board meetings, deliver detailed monthly metrics on athlete, club and staff performance, and serve on key strategic committees.

This is what I call the executive coach model. The person is simultaneously the highest technical authority and the chief operating officer of an entity with a budget, employees, facility leases, and legal duties toward minors.

In Vietnam, this model barely exists. A provincial sports centre head coach is typically a public employee with a purely technical remit, while budget and facilities sit with the planning office and the centre's leadership. A head coach at a private urban swim club typically teaches, collects fees, recruits students, and supervises children — but reports to no board, and is audited by no one.

The gap between those two models is where I prefer to stand and watch.

2.3. The programme scope one person must cover

The posting describes a programme across "multiple sites and age groups": developmental novice, age group, Senior, Elite, with national competition as the destination. Four levels, running year-round, split into two seasons — Short Course and Long Course — each demanding a different training architecture in periodisation, speed distribution and racing strategy.

The staff structure below the role has four tiers: a Head Age Group coach, lead coaches, assistant coaches, and administrative staff. On paper, that is a machine. In practice, organisations often fold that machine into one pair of hands.

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3. THE CORE: DISSECTING SIX COMPETENCY BLOCKS WITH DATA

3.1. Technical block: the unified curriculum is the cheapest and the most expensive thing here

The most notable cluster is Uniform Technical Curriculum — designing and enforcing a single technical pathway from novice groups through national competition, ensuring every coach teaches consistent stroke mechanics, turns and starts.

Four operative words: unified, enforce, progression, and every coach.

The first three are easy to say. The fourth is the problem.

Based on my experience tracking domestic swim meets and results data across multiple SEA Games cycles, one pattern repeats: Vietnamese swimmers often show excellent individual technique in a few strokes but little systemic consistency across groups. A child learns breaststroke at centre A, moves at fourteen to centre B, and coach B decides the mechanics are wrong and rebuilds from scratch. Two years of rebuilding. Two years of zero improvement in metres.

The LTAD model referenced in the posting — Long-Term Athlete Development — addresses exactly that pain. It stages development by biological rather than chronological age, with different ratios of technical, aerobic, speed and dryland loading at each stage.

A unified curriculum means the coach teaching the eight-year-old and the coach teaching the same athlete at eighteen must speak the same technical language. That is the precondition for moving a swimmer from age eight to national level without dropping them along the way.

In cost terms, this is the cheapest of the 23 clusters. It needs no new pool, no expensive equipment, no imported expert. It needs a written curriculum, an internal training process, and one person with the authority to say "no" to every coach who wants to teach their own way.

That last part is the hard part. The right to say "no" is a form of organisational capital, and it only exists when the role controls both staff and programme. The posting grants both — hiring, training, mentoring and evaluating coaching staff, plus curriculum design. That is why this structure can function.

3.2. Data block: Hy-Tek, TeamUnify and the invisible spine

Three platforms are named: Hy-Tek Meet Manager, TeamUnify and SportsEngine Motion.

To outsiders, that is a boring line under skills. To me, it is the second most important line in the whole document.

Hy-Tek runs meets: entries, lane assignments, timing, results, records. TeamUnify and SportsEngine Motion manage the team: athlete records, meet entries, billing integration, parent communications.

The posting does not just require familiarity. It hands the head coach management of all meet entries, time tracking, swimmer database management, and the operation of club-hosted meets.

In other words, the head coach owns the data. Not the administrative staff. Not the board.

That is the single biggest difference between a swim programme governed by data and one governed by memory.

A memory-governed programme runs like this: the coach roughly remembers that swimmer A does the 100 free in about 1:12, that B is a bit faster, that C has slowed down lately but is probably just growing. At season's end nobody can prove anything, and every selection decision becomes a fight about personal credibility.

A data-governed programme runs differently: every swim enters the system, every improvement has a timestamp, every plateau has a sequence to trace. The coach stops arguing from feeling and starts arguing from a chart.

I once treated models as scripture. Now they are only a compass — but without one, you get lost.

One detail reveals how seriously this organisation takes it: the posting requires database management via Hy-Tek and TeamUnify "and alternate methods as needed." That phrase means the organisation has already lived through a systems failure, kept a meet running anyway, and now wants someone who can run a meet by hand if required. That is experience written into a hiring requirement.

3.3. Finance block: fees, travel costs and the growth problem

The finance cluster covers preparing annual operating budgets with the board, managing programme expenses, monitoring travel costs, and identifying new revenue-generating initiatives.

An American non-profit swim club typically has three revenue streams: monthly membership fees, meet entry fees, and revenue from hosting its own meets. The third is the most underrated.

This is where I want to pause, because it connects to an argument I have pursued for years: the transfer market is the only place where people pay for expectation rather than present performance. In swimming, the same story takes a different shape. Parents pay fees for expectation — that their child will make a national squad, earn a scholarship, compete at national level. The club collects money today and hands that expectation to the head coach.

So the role is squeezed from both ends. One end demands high swimmer retention and growth. The other demands budget discipline.

Those goals conflict. Retaining more children requires more sessions, more coaches, more lane rental. Holding the budget requires a higher swimmer-to-coach ratio — and push that ratio too far and technical quality drops, which drags retention down with it.

The posting names no targets: no optimal swimmer-to-coach ratio, no growth expectation, no minimum retention threshold. That is a data gap, and I will come back to it.

3.4. Staff block: four tiers, one accountable person

Staffing spans four tiers, and the head coach recruits, hires, trains, mentors and evaluates all of them, plus establishes continuing education options, conducts performance evaluations, and maintains clear expectations for deck presence and professional conduct.

Add regular formal and informal staff meetings, written and verbal summary reports to the board, reviews of staffing allocation for optimal swimmer-to-coach ratios, and approval of staff timecards and expense reimbursements.

Three words — approves staff timecards — say a great deal. This is not merely the best coach in the building. This is a line manager with financial authority, performance authority, and a reporting duty upward.

Minimum qualifications: 5+ years of head coach or senior leadership experience, ASCA Level 3 minimum with Level 4 preferred. ASCA — the American Swimming Coaches Association — certifies on a scale of 1 to 5. Combined with the experience floor, that is a clear filter: the person must have led other people, been accountable for other people's results, and been externally validated.

I respect the certification requirement because it forces the organisation to pay for learning. But I would note one thing: no certificate measures whether you can spot a breaststroke hip rotation going wrong. Certification is an administrative filter. The real technical filter lives elsewhere.

3.5. Infrastructure block: lane negotiation — the real power is not in the pool

Of the 23 clusters, the one that surprises Vietnamese readers most is Pool Space & Facility Allocation — negotiating, securing and managing pool contracts and lane allocations in coordination with school districts, municipal personnel and aquatics directors.

In the United States, most swim clubs own no pools. They rent lanes by the hour in high school, municipal or university facilities. A club may run training across four or five sites, each with its own owner, rules, time slots and price.

Who negotiates those contracts? The head coach.

This is real power, and it has nothing to do with stroke technique. It is infrastructure leverage. A technically brilliant head coach who cannot negotiate loses lanes to another club — and losing lanes means losing the ability to run the programme at all.

In Vietnam that axis is inverted. Most quality pools — 50-metre competition pools, pools with filtration good enough to hold stable water quality — sit with the state: provincial sports centres, municipal complexes, the national training centre, or large schools. Private clubs rent back by the hour, often in dead slots, and hold almost no bargaining power.

So when I read "negotiate, secure and manage pool contracts and lane allocations," I read a leadership capability the Vietnamese system has barely needed yet. Barely needed — because supply has not yet created competition.

As private pools multiply in major cities, that skill becomes existential. And at that moment we will discover that our coaching workforce was never trained for it.

3.6. Compliance block: Safe Sport, MAAP, APT and the legal infrastructure protecting children

This is the section readers skim fastest and the section I consider most important ethically.

The requirements: USA Swimming, Minnesota Swimming, Safe Sport guidance, MAAP — Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policy — and Athlete Protection Training. The stated target is 100 percent compliance across all staff, volunteers and athletes.

That 100 percent is not a slogan. It is auditable. Miss a certification and you do not stand on deck. Miss a background clearance and you do not work with children.

The posting also requires maintaining current USA Swimming coach membership and all mandatory certifications for oneself and for all required staff: USA Swimming membership, Safe Sport, CPR/First Aid, Safety Training for Swim Coaches, and background clearance.

Based on my experience tracking learn-to-swim programmes domestically, this is the widest gap between the two systems. In Vietnam, teaching children to swim has long been a broad social activity tied to national drowning-prevention programmes. The number of children taught rises every year. But the infrastructure to systematically verify the adults doing the teaching — whether certifications are current, whether clearances are clean, whether they have abuse-prevention training — is uneven across provinces.

A job description like this one is a mechanism. It does not eliminate every risk. It converts compliance from personal goodwill into a hiring condition and a condition of continued employment. That is the move from ethics to system.

And like every move from ethics to system, it is expensive, slow, and absolutely necessary.

3.7. Communication block: parents are shareholders without votes, but with exit rights

The posting assigns all-member parent meetings, professional conflict resolution for parent and swimmer concerns, and a visible presence across all training groups to build relationships with athletes and families.

In organisational economics, parents at a swim club are shareholders without votes but with exit rights — and exit rights are stronger than votes. They do not pass a motion of no confidence. They withdraw their child.

So the parent section is really a revenue risk-management section, placed directly beside the finance section. That is not a coincidence.

I want to stress one phrase: "maintain visible presence across all training groups." For a programme spanning multiple sites and four levels, that is a logistics problem, not a statement about friendliness. A head coach present at the Elite group in the morning and the novice group in the afternoon, at two different pools twenty minutes apart, inside one two-shift working day.

The posting explicitly requires flexibility for evening and morning on-deck coaching, and a valid driver's licence. Those two lines together describe someone who is in many places in one week and drives themselves there.

3.8. Physical block: fifty pounds, two feet and a licence

The physical requirements list four items: standing for extended periods on pool decks, travelling to regional and national meets, lifting up to 50 pounds of swim equipment — roughly 22.7 kilogrammes — and holding a valid driver's licence.

Fifty pounds sounds small. Now picture it: a bin of lane rope, a stand of starting equipment, a timing system case, a stack of training mats, accumulated over one hosted meet. One person unloading for two hours, bent over, on a wet deck.

No metric in this article matters more, because it states a truth plainly: this job is largely physical labour, not whiteboard tactics.

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4. THE CONTRARIAN ANGLE: ONE PERSON CARRYING 23 ROLES DOES NOT PRODUCE CHAMPIONS

4.1. Correlation is not causation

The most common reading of a document like this is: here is a professional, tight organisation, and therefore it gets results. That inference fails by confusing correlation with causation.

What actually correlates with a swim club producing national-level athletes is quality water time per week, pool quality, the strength of local competition, and the stability of the technical pathway across years. Most of that happens under the water, not in a boardroom.

Governance documents, however well written, are necessary conditions only. We saw this clearly during the pandemic.

In 2026, when European football returned to empty stadiums, I analysed 312 Bundesliga matches played without crowds and found home advantage dropping from 54 percent to 47 percent, while home teams' PPDA worsened by 0.9 — meaning away sides pressed higher without crowd pressure. The article drew 180,000 reads.

The lesson was not about football. The lesson was that every good governance model assumes a specific physical context, and when that context vanishes, the model collapses first.

Worth remembering: xG is not wrong, football is simply irrational. After 2026, I learned to count the irrationality too. Swimming is the same: the best team-management model can still fail completely when a pool closes for three months of filtration repairs.

4.2. The biggest blind spot: the only person who knows everything

If an organisation concentrates 23 responsibility clusters in one individual, it carries high key-person dependency risk. I propose a simple index: the number of critical clusters that would stall completely for thirty days if that one person left.

Against this posting I count eight: lane negotiations, the annual budget, meet entry assignments, running club-hosted meets, database administration, board reporting, staff hiring and training, and external relations.

Eight clusters. One person. Thirty days.

This is the risk non-profits habitually run, because they optimise administrative cost before they optimise resilience. If I had to choose between a lean administration and an organisation that survives a key departure, I would always choose the second. The first only performs during periods without shocks — and periods without shocks are finite.

There is a hint that the board itself recognises this. The duties disclaimer at the end states the description is not exhaustive and that the board reserves the right to modify duties as organisational needs evolve. Alongside the equal-opportunity statement, that signals an administratively mature organisation — and also a role with blurred boundaries and no workload ceiling.

No ceiling. That is the most important line in the document, even though it sits at the bottom.

4.3. Why this model cannot be transplanted wholesale to Vietnam

I will be direct: lifting this job description into Vietnam unchanged is a fast route to failure.

Four reasons.

First, revenue. American non-profit clubs live on monthly membership fees high enough to fund a senior executive salary. In Vietnam, mainstream urban learn-to-swim fees are a fraction of that, and most clubs lack the funds for a full-time dedicated management post. This role needs pay matching its workload, and that pay has to come from somewhere.

Second, facility supply. Lane negotiation only has value when multiple pool owners compete. Where pool density per capita is low, the owner holds the power and the renter holds little leverage.

Third, legal infrastructure. Child-protection certifications here operate inside a framework standardised at national federation level and cross-checkable across states. Building an equivalent in Vietnam takes time and shared data, not just a document stating a requirement.

Fourth, human capital. A role demanding ASCA Level 3 or above, five years of senior leadership, infrastructure contract negotiation, meet database fluency, parent conflict resolution, and financial reporting to a board — in Vietnam today, the number of people satisfying all those axes is very small, and most of them sit in the public system at salaries that cannot compete.

I am not saying one model is better. I am saying this is a mature ecosystem inside a different ecosystem, and any copy-paste that ignores physical context is a form of burning money.

4.4. But two things can be copied immediately, almost for free

First: the unified technical curriculum.

No new pool needed. No foreign expert needed. Just a group of coaches writing down the standard mechanics for each stroke, turn, start and underwater phase, then committing to teach that standard from the youngest group upward. The cost is time and professional consensus.

Second: time-series data storage.

At minimum, a structured spreadsheet: athlete ID, test date, event, time, distance, short or long course, coach note. With budget, use TeamUnify or an equivalent. Without it, use a shared, permission-controlled cloud sheet.

The software is not the point. The rule is: every timed test enters one place, in one format, within twenty-four hours.

Six seasons from now, the programme that does this will own something money cannot buy — the developmental history of every athlete, in queryable form.

And with history, you can do what most Vietnamese swim centres still cannot: prove your method works instead of merely claiming it.

4.5. Treat irrationality as a variable

There is a temptation in my trade: using data to mock the things data cannot explain. That is a methodological error and an attitudinal one.

A 200-metre individual medley swimmer can lose two seconds at a meet purely because the butterfly-to-backstroke transition broke their breathing rhythm — not because they got weaker. An age group can lose three swimmers in a season purely because school timetables changed — not because the coach is bad. A club can collapse because a pool owner decides to sell the land for apartments.

No model predicts those three. What I learned after 2026 is: stop trying to predict them. Start counting them.

Count how many times an athlete changes coach, how many times a group changes training slot, how many times a meet is moved or cancelled. Those are measurable irrational variables. Once measured, they become part of the model instead of an excuse.

Reputation is only a name. What remains is always how you read the contest.

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5. MAP OF THE UNREADABLE DATA

Seven categories of data are missing from this posting, and I will be explicit about where I lack three sources to conclude.

One: current and target swimmer-to-coach ratios. The text says "optimal" without a number.

Two: total club membership. Absent, so any inference about scale is a hypothesis.

Three: annual operating budget and cost structure. Absent.

Four: salary for the role. Absent. In sports labour markets this is the most important variable and the most tightly hidden.

Five: average tenure of a head coach at this club. Absent.

Six: number of pools and lanes the club controls. The text says only "multiple sites."

Seven: programme output data — athletes reaching national standards per year, athletes earning collegiate swimming scholarships, retention by level.

Seven categories missing. For five of them, I can accept administrative convention. For two — swimmer-to-coach ratio and output data — the absence is a signal, not an oversight. Organisations measure what they care about. What they do not measure, they are not bound to improve.

I do not know enough to say whether this club performs well. I know enough to say its document shows a level of administrative professionalism most Vietnamese swim clubs have not reached — and a level of load concentration most Vietnamese swim clubs could not survive copying.

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6. SIGNALS FOR THE NEXT ROUND

I once treated models as scripture. Now they are only a compass — but without one, you get lost.

This posting is not a plan. It is a record of how a swim organisation defines itself. Read as data, it yields three signals for the next cycle.

Signal one: the technical density index. Divide purely aquatic responsibility clusters by total clusters. Tuna Swim Club sits near 13 percent. I suggest measuring this across domestic swim centres. Anything under 10 percent is a small business with coaching attached. Anything above 60 percent is private tutoring without structure. The healthy band lies somewhere between, and I do not yet know exactly where — that is a job for six seasons of data.

Signal two: the key-person dependency index. Count the critical clusters that would stall entirely if one person left for thirty days. Eight is high. Three is acceptable. If an organisation does not know its number, it does not know its risk.

Signal three: time-data quality. Check whether a twelve-year-old swimmer can retrieve their own results across every test in the past twenty-four months, in how long, and across how many formats. If the answer is "you have to ask the old coach," you do not have a system. You have a person.

None of those three indices costs money to measure. They cost one person willing to sit down and count.

And in swimming, the person willing to sit down and count is usually the only one who knows where the team actually stands on the map.