Tuna Swim Club's Four-Page Job Description and the Lesson Vietnamese Swimming Has Never Written Down

At eleven o'clock at night on 12 November 2026 I sat on the balcony of an apartment on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street in Nha Trang, reading a four-page recruitment document. Below me the sea pushed against the embankment, steady and endless. On my screen was the job description for Head Coach & Program Director at Tuna Swim Club, a swim club in Minnesota, United States. I read it once. Then I read it again, more slowly. By the third pass I picked up the phone and called a friend who coaches swimming in Binh Dinh, a man who has spent more than twenty years standing in the sun on the deck of a 25-metre pool, teaching children between the ages of six and eighteen. I asked him: do you have a job description? He laughed. A description of what, he said. I am the coach, I am the security guard, I am the treasurer, I am the person who fixes the filtration pump, I am the person who calls parents to apologise. If I wrote it down it would run to three pages, but nobody pays me to write it. The call lasted forty minutes. When I hung up I understood something: the gap between Vietnamese swimming and swimming in well-organised sporting nations is not in the pools, not in the talent, and not in the money. It is in a piece of paper. A piece of paper that states who is responsible for what, and what the organisation owes the person standing in the sun. Tuna Swim Club is a year-round non-profit swim club in Minnesota, affiliated with USA Swimming through Minnesota Swimming (MSI) — one of roughly sixty Local Swimming Committees that govern the sport at regional level in the United States. The club operates across multiple sites and multiple age groups, from learn-to-swim squads to an Elite group. Its stated mission is 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. The role being advertised is not that of a coach. It is that of an executive. The successful candidate must simultaneously serve as head coach for the Senior and Elite groups, manage a multi-tiered staff, prepare budgets, negotiate lane-hire contracts with school districts and municipal authorities, own regulatory compliance, and act as the club's public ambassador. This is a year-round position. The document states plainly that the holder must be available on deck in the mornings and evenings, travel to regional and national meets, stand for extended periods on pool decks, lift up to 50 pounds of swim equipment, and hold a valid driver's licence. Those lines rarely appear in Vietnamese recruitment notices. Here they appear because the organisation wants to state the truth in advance. I began writing about swimming in 2026, as a swimming reporter for Thanh Nien newspaper. Based on my experience covering swim meets over more than two decades, from junior competitions in Quy Nhon and Da Nang to SEA Games and Olympic Games, I can say that the greatest problem in Vietnamese swimming has never been the water in the pool. Vietnamese swimming has three tiers. At the top sit the national team and national training centres. In the middle are provincial and municipal training centres, where swimmers such as Nguyen Thi Anh Vien — winner of more than twenty SEA Games gold medals and a two-time Olympian — and Nguyen Huy Hoang, who competed at Tokyo 2026 and Paris 2026, came through. At the bottom are school and private learn-to-swim classes, where most Vietnamese children first enter the water. Between those three tiers there is almost no fourth tier: a professionally run swim club with legal status, a board of directors, a standardised technical pathway, a competition database, and a child-protection system subject to periodic audit. That fourth tier is precisely what the Tuna Swim Club document describes. A few terms are needed to read the paper properly. ASCA is the American Swimming Coaches Association, which operates a five-level certification ladder; Level 3 is generally regarded as the professional standard for a head coach, and Level 4 is reserved for coaches with sustained national-level experience. Safe Sport is the abuse-prevention framework in American sport, institutionalised when the US Center for SafeSport was established in 2026 under federal legislation. MAAP refers to the Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies. Hy-Tek Meet Manager and TeamUnify are the two software platforms used for meet management and membership administration. Turning technique into collective property rather than personal secrets The most striking clause in the document sits under the technical curriculum heading: design and enforce a unified technical progression pathway from developmental novice groups through national competition, ensuring all coaches teach consistent stroke mechanics, turns and starts. It sounds dry, but it carries enormous weight. It means that swimming technique does not belong to an individual coach. It belongs to the club. When a child moves from one training group to another, the new coach does not start them from zero. And when a coach leaves, the knowledge does not leave with him. In Vietnam the opposite situation is close to universal. A child trains at pool A for three years, moves to pool B, meets a new coach. The new coach watches, shakes his head, and re-teaches the arm stroke according to his own experience. Then the child moves to pool C. Every transfer is a reformatting. Nobody is held accountable for the contradiction, and the price is paid by the child, in lost time and in shoulder injuries. The concept of LTAD — long-term athlete development — is used in the document to mean an individualised pathway built around biological development rather than the date on a birth certificate. A twelve-year-old who has entered puberty early and a twelve-year-old who has not cannot carry the same training load. The fact that the club writes this into the head coach's responsibilities shows something important: in developed sporting systems, coaching science has moved into governance documents. It no longer lives only inside the heads of a few specialists. The leader still has to be on deck The Senior On-Deck Leadership clause requires the programme director to remain the lead coach of the Senior and Elite groups: writing daily workouts, planning competition strategy, tracking each athlete's development. In Australia, where I was born, and in the United States, the belief is that a programme loses credibility within three months if its leader leaves the deck. Reputation does not rest on a title. It rests on whether parents see that person standing beside their child on a Saturday morning. In Vietnam this also happens, but for a different reason: the best person is always on deck because there is nobody to hand over to. A head coach in Vietnam coaches, administers, and defends himself against tasks that nobody in the system was ever trained to perform. Dryland conditioning and the phrase about overuse injury The Integrated Dryland & Conditioning clause requires the successful candidate to design and implement age-appropriate strength and conditioning programmes, in coordination with qualified specialists, to optimise performance and prevent overuse injuries. I stop at the phrase overuse injuries. In age-group swimming this is the signature injury: shoulders, backs, knees, every season. The cause is not one heavy session. It is two thousand unheavy sessions, repeated over years, with no rest weeks and no workload ceiling. But the document does not mention a workload ceiling. It mentions coordination with specialists. Those are different things. Injury prevention is not only about adding the right weight exercises or stretching. It is also about having the courage to tell a fourteen-year-old that this week she will train less, not more. In Vietnam this concept barely exists on paper. Many swim schools set training volume according to the number of sessions a parent has purchased, not according to the physiological state of the child. And because coach income is proportional to student numbers, any advice to train less automatically becomes a refusal of the adviser's own income. Hy-Tek, TeamUnify: the database as competitive advantage Two short lines in the responsibilities list stand out: oversee meet entries, time tracking and swimmer database management using Hy-Tek Meet Manager and TeamUnify/SportsEngine Motion; and manage team administration, roster movement, billing integration and parent communications on the same platform. When a nine-year-old's times are stored, parents can see a line. That line may be very slow, but it exists. Parental trust is built with data, not slogans. And once trust is sufficient, the club does not have to persuade anyone to stay. People stay on their own. In Vietnam, many clubs and centres still record times in notebooks or in a private spreadsheet on a coach's personal laptop. The consequence is concrete: when that coach changes jobs, the history of dozens of children disappears. Parents lose the data, the club loses an asset, and the child starts competing from scratch. Reading a balance sheet is a technical skill Financial responsibility in the document covers four areas: partnering with the board to prepare the annual operating budget, monitoring programme expenses, tracking travel costs, and identifying new revenue-generating initiatives. The holder must also report monthly metrics on athlete, club and staff performance. In Vietnam this is a structural weakness. People who are strong technically are rarely trained in management, and managers rarely understand the technical side. The result is that good clubs survive on the founder's personal money or on a short-term sponsor, and when the sponsor leaves, the programme leaves with it. A multi-tiered staff structure and the swimmer-to-coach ratio The club's staffing model is tiered: a head age-group coach, lead coaches, assistant coaches and administrative staff. The successful candidate must recruit, train, mentor and evaluate that entire structure, and review staffing allocations to achieve optimal swimmer-to-coach ratios. That ratio is a technical indicator, not an administrative number. A coach responsible for twelve children in a technique group and a coach responsible for thirty-five are in two different professions. The second is not teaching swimming; he is supervising children in water. But there is a point more important than the ratio. A multi-tiered structure creates a career pathway. A twenty-two-year-old graduate can begin as an assistant, rise to age-group coach, then lead coach, then head coach. In Vietnam that pathway barely exists. It explains why so many young swim coaches leave the profession after three to five years: they cannot see the next rung. Real power lies in the lanes One of the least discussed but most existential responsibilities of the role is negotiating, securing and managing pool contracts and lane allocations across all facilities, in coordination with school districts, municipal personnel and aquatics directors. This is where the document touches the most naked reality of the profession. No lanes, no programme. A head coach in the United States spends a significant part of each year simply protecting good hours: weekday evenings, Saturday mornings, a few lanes in a 50-metre pool before championship season. In Vietnam, pool time is usually allocated through verbal agreements with pool management. Young clubs without connections are pushed into dead hours: midday sun, or nine o'clock at night. Children must choose between sleep and training. That injustice has never been written into any document, and so it has never been challenged. Safe Sport is not paperwork Compliance occupies a block of its own: ensure 100 percent compliance across all staff, volunteers and athletes with USA Swimming, Minnesota Swimming, Safe Sport guidelines, MAAP and Athlete Protection Training. The holder must maintain current USA Swimming coach membership and all required certifications for himself and for staff. The word 100 percent matters. It turns child safety from a promise into an auditable condition of employment. Fail the training, and you do not get on deck. Behind the dressing-room door there are stories that have never been told. I have written that sentence many times over eight years, and I write it with a simple truth attached: in sport, the most dangerous place is not the field of play but the corridor leading to the changing room. A system can only be called mature when it has a mechanism for its youngest member to say the most uncomfortable thing and be believed. In Vietnam we have safety regulations and codes of conduct in some federations, but there is almost no publicly documented abuse-prevention system at grassroots level, with mandatory periodic training and an individual held personally accountable for neglect. That gap cannot be filled with money for swimming pools. One job title, two different people Tuna Swim Club's recruitment criteria include: at least five years of head coach or senior leadership experience with proven athlete development across ages and abilities, from developmental swimmers to national level; ASCA Level 3 or higher, with Level 4 preferred; current USA Swimming coach membership in good standing; CPR, first aid and safety training for swim coaches; and background clearance. These are verifiable standards. In Vietnam there is no equivalent professional ladder for swim coaches. As a result, the same job title of swim coach may describe a person with twenty years of experience guiding SEA Games athletes, or a person three months out of a first-aid course. Parents have no way to tell the difference without doing their own research, and the market has no way to price the work properly. This is one reason the coaching profession is so hard to sustain in Vietnam: the excellent are not paid more than the novice, so the excellent move into other work or leave the country. Lines that speak plainly about the body One passage I read over and over: candidates must be able to stand for extended periods on pool decks, travel to regional and national meets, lift up to 50 pounds of swim equipment, and hold a valid driver's licence. This is the profession's rarely stated truth. A senior executive still lifts equipment. Still stands. Still drives athletes to competitions. It shows how thin the programme's staffing is, and it shows how hard the job is on the body: chlorine vapour, noise, wet decks, eight hours a day. Where are the women? I ask that question not to embarrass the document. I ask it because nowhere in the four pages is there a single line about recruiting and retaining women coaches, even though this is a club with both male and female swimmers. No parental leave provision, no pathway back onto the deck, no succession plan for women. That matters for Vietnam, where most junior swim coaches are women early in their careers, and most head coaches at major centres are men. If we want to talk about gender equality in sport, the starting point is not medals but shifts. Who gets the Saturday morning? Who is given the Elite group? Who is paid to go and earn certification? And here is where I must say what the document does not say. Read the four pages closely and a paradox appears: the more complete the description, the more clearly it shows one person carrying an entire system. Forty duties for one seat. No organisation designs a role that way unless it lacks the resources to split it into three. The document is both a charter and a liability shield. If the programme fails, the board knows exactly who must explain. This means the American model that many Vietnamese admire, with its professional structure and clear division of labour, still operates on the principle of one person playing many roles. The difference from Vietnam is not the number of people. It is which roles are written down and which are treated as automatic. Second, the overuse-injury prevention clause comes with no workload limit for underage athletes. Prevention is entrusted to individual professional conscience. In practice, when the meet calendar thickens and performance targets appear, individual conscience is the first thing left behind in the changing room. Third, throughout the text athletes appear as objects of management: athlete expectations, group requirements, attendance requirements, discipline policies. There is no line about athletes' rights: the right to ask, the right to refuse a training load, the right to leave a programme without being shamed for it. Voices from the changing room. That was the name of the interview series I ran when the pandemic closed every pitch and every pool from March 2026. I interviewed fifteen female athletes from eight clubs, and I asked each of them what they wanted the series to be called. When the spectators are gone, we finally listen to the athletes. Twenty years in this work have taught me that those conversations never appear in governance documents, because governance documents are written by adults, for adults. Fourth, money. Requiring the head coach to identify new revenue streams sounds reasonable in a non-profit sports setting. But import that model into Vietnam without control mechanisms and it turns coaches into salespeople — and in a market where parents already pay per session, the easiest new revenue stream is always a fee increase. In Nha Trang that year I did not merely open a channel; I opened a door. I learned that community is not built with grand statements but by remembering people's names and saying them correctly. A swim club in Minnesota wrote four pages, and those four pages told me that we in Vietnam can start with the smallest possible act: writing down the proper name of each other's work. What is worth learning from the Tuna Swim Club document is not ASCA Level 4, not TeamUnify, and not the lane system. It is the final line: this is not an exhaustive list, and the board reserves the right to modify duties as organisational needs evolve. An organisation willing to admit that its own document will be wrong and will need revision. That is something Vietnamese swimming can do today, without an extra dong of budget, without waiting for a single medal. Write it down. Make it public. Revise it when it is wrong. I went to Russia looking for answers and found only more questions. I think Vietnamese swimming is the same. The stands are empty, but the voices from the changing room have never stopped. Who will write the first page? And when it is written, will we have the courage to let it be revised?