The War on Private Triathlon Swim Coaching
If you've ever looked for someone to help you improve your swimming, you've probably noticed that there are plenty of group swim clinics and structured training programs available, but finding someone who can work with you individually is considerably more difficult.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, partly because I've run into some of these challenges myself as an independent triathlon coach here in Ottawa. And while my own experience has been a little frustrating, I think it points toward a much larger issue with the way swimming facilities, independent coaches, and athletes interact.
Let me explain.
My Professional Blunder
I recently found myself on the wrong side of a local health club's policy regarding outside coaching services. Without getting too deep into the specifics, I had been participating in a Facebook group for members of the club, where I occasionally kept up with what was happening because several of my athletes train there. Someone posted about wanting to organize a small training group for an upcoming triathlon, and I responded by introducing myself as a triathlon coach and offering to answer questions about swimming or triathlon.
In retrospect, I recognize that this was close enough to soliciting members for my private coaching services that it crossed a line. The club has a policy against outside professionals doing exactly that, and I understand why the policy exists. I acknowledged the mistake and accepted the consequences, although I thought the resulting indefinite site ban was a somewhat disproportionate response.
But the experience got me thinking about something beyond my particular situation. Why is it so difficult for independent coaches to find legitimate ways to provide individualized instruction at existing swimming facilities? And is there an arrangement that could actually benefit everyone involved?
Why Gyms Restrict Outside Coaches
There are really two reasons why most gyms and health clubs don't particularly like having independent coaches working with their members.
The first is liability. If an outside professional is providing instruction on the premises and something goes wrong, the facility could potentially find itself involved in a liability dispute. The gym has little control over that person's qualifications, insurance coverage, coaching practices, or interactions with its members. From a business perspective, it's understandable that they would want to avoid that exposure.
The second reason is financial. If a member wants coaching, the facility would generally prefer that person purchase its own personal training or instructional services rather than pay an outside professional. That's also perfectly reasonable. A gym has invested in its facilities, equipment, staff, and programming, and naturally wants to generate revenue from those resources.
I don't have any particular disagreement with either of these considerations. They're legitimate business concerns, and I don't think independent coaches should simply expect to walk into somebody else's facility and start running a business without some kind of arrangement.
What I do think is worth considering, though, is whether the demand for outside coaching services might be telling facilities something about what their customers actually want.
If members are repeatedly seeking services from independent professionals that the facility itself isn't providing, perhaps there's an opportunity there. Looking at you, Altea and Movati…
The Problem With Group Swim Instruction
Swimming is an interesting example because it's such a technically demanding sport. There are plenty of group swim clinics available to triathletes, and I think they serve an important purpose, particularly for beginners who need to develop basic skills, confidence, and familiarity with structured swimming.
But there's a pretty fundamental limitation to group instruction: swimming deficiencies are highly individual.
Take three athletes who are all struggling to swim efficiently. One might have poor body position and balance, another might have an dropped catch, and a third might be overrotating during the recovery phase. Even though all three might be swimming at roughly the same pace and have similar goals, the things they need to work on are quite different.
The drills, technical cues, and feedback that will help one athlete might be completely irrelevant to another. In fact, giving everyone the same instruction simply because they're participating in the same clinic can sometimes be a fairly inefficient way of addressing the actual problems that are holding them back.
This is where I think private coaching has a particularly important role to play. Working with an athlete individually allows a coach to observe their swimming, identify specific technical deficiencies, prescribe targeted interventions, and continually adjust the approach based on how the athlete responds. It's a much more direct way of addressing the things that are actually limiting their performance.
I've written previously about why I think individualized swim coaching can offer a better return on training investment for athletes who are ready to work on the finer details of their technique. But there's a bit of a catch: the infrastructure required to deliver that kind of coaching isn't particularly accessible.
The Catch-22 of Being an Independent Swim Coach
Imagine you're an independent swim coach who wants to provide one-on-one instruction. You need access to a pool, but most private health clubs aren't interested in having outside professionals provide paid services to their members. So you start looking at municipal pools or dedicated swimming facilities, where you can potentially rent lane space.
The problem is that you're now purchasing access to the facility at a full retail rate. You have to account for that expense alongside your own time, expertise, and the administrative overhead of running a coaching business. Depending on the cost of the lane, the economics of providing an hour of instruction to a single athlete can become pretty challenging.
And this is where things start to snowball.
Rather than coaching one person at a time, you bring in two athletes to help justify the cost of the lane. Maybe you bring in three or four. Eventually, you've got yourself a group swim clinic, and the economics start making a lot more sense.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Group coaching has its place, and plenty of athletes benefit from it. But I do wonder how much of the prevalence of group swim instruction is driven by actual coaching preference, and how much of it is simply a consequence of the difficulty of accessing facilities as an independent professional.
In other words, perhaps there are more coaches who would like to offer private instruction than there are coaches who can realistically make it work.
What If Pools Offered Dedicated Hours for Independent Coaches?
Here's an idea that I think is worth exploring.
What if swimming facilities designated certain blocks of time specifically for independent coaches to work with their own athletes?
For example, imagine a pool offering a two-hour block every Tuesday afternoon that is reserved for private and semi-private coaching. During that time, independent coaches could reserve individual lanes, pay an agreed-upon rental fee, and work with their athletes under a set of facility rules.
Each coach would be responsible for their own qualifications, insurance, and coaching practices, while the facility would retain control over who is permitted to operate on the premises and under what conditions.
You could have six coaches, each working with an individual athlete in their own lane. Or perhaps a couple of coaches are working with two or three athletes each. The important thing is that there's now a legitimate mechanism for independent professionals to access the facility and provide the kind of instruction that their athletes are looking for.
The facility generates revenue from lane rentals, the coaches have access to the resources they need to operate their businesses, and athletes get another option for improving their swimming.
I don't see why this couldn't work.
There are also a few different ways the financial arrangement could be structured. The facility could charge a flat rental fee, negotiate a revenue-sharing arrangement, or establish some kind of formal independent-provider program with approved coaches. Personally, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea of sharing revenue with a facility that provides me with the resources to deliver my services. That's just a reasonable business arrangement.
And I don't think this needs to be limited to dedicated swimming academies. Certainly, a facility whose primary business is teaching swimming might be particularly well equipped to facilitate something like this, but municipal pools and traditional health clubs could potentially do the same thing.
In fact, I think there's an opportunity for facilities to recognize that allowing independent professionals to operate within their spaces doesn't necessarily mean competing with their own services. It might simply mean offering members access to something they otherwise wouldn't have.
An Opportunity for Everyone
Ultimately, I think this conversation extends beyond swimming. Independent personal trainers, strength coaches, and other professionals all encounter similar challenges when trying to provide services within facilities they don't own. There's often a fairly rigid distinction between what a facility offers internally and what an outside professional is allowed to do, even when there's an opportunity for the two to work together.
I'd like to see a little more flexibility in how these relationships are structured.
For pools specifically, I think there's an opportunity to create a model where independent coaches can access dedicated lane space, operate under an agreed set of rules, and provide individualized instruction without having to work around existing facility policies or resort to arrangements that exist in a bit of a gray area.
The athletes get access to the kind of coaching they want, independent coaches get the resources they need to do their jobs, and facilities generate additional revenue from infrastructure they're already operating.
I don't think this is about trying to convince every gym or swimming facility to offer the exact services that I happen to provide. It's more about recognizing that there might be demand for services that fall outside of a facility's existing business model, and that there could be mutually beneficial ways of accommodating that demand.
I'm particularly interested in exploring this with swimming facilities here in Ottawa. If you're involved in operating a pool, a swimming academy, or a health club, I'd genuinely be interested in hearing your thoughts on whether something like this could work.
It seems to me that there's some new ground to be forged here, and I'd rather see independent coaches and facilities working together to make that happen than continuing to operate in separate corners of the same industry.