From a job posting in Pennsylvania: lessons for Vietnamese swimming on building coaching systems from the grassroots

A routine job posting from Norwin Aqua Club (NAC) in Pennsylvania, USA, recently crossed my desk. No records, no medals, no big names. But it was that very ordinariness that made me stop. Because it exposes a truth that Vietnamese swimming has been avoiding: we lack a system to turn people who love swimming into competent coaches, in a methodical and sustainable way. The NAC posting is nothing special. They need to add multiple part-time assistant swim coaches for the 2026-27 season. This club serves children from approximately age 6 through high school. The job involves leading practices, teaching proper stroke technique, developing racing skills, and building a lifelong love for the sport. What caught my attention wasn't the pay or the hours, but three key requirements: candidates must be energetic, dependable, love swimming; former competitive swimmers are strongly encouraged to apply; and notably, the club is willing to help candidates complete required USA Swimming certifications if they don't have them. Immediately, I saw a stark contrast with how we still do things in Vietnam. Here, swimming clubs, especially in provinces, usually recruit coaches in two ways: either retired athletes who haven't had systematic pedagogical training, or general physical education teachers who lack in-depth knowledge of swimming technique. Rarely does a club build a standardized process to train a complete novice into a truly competent assistant coach, with clear certification and a long-term development path. Look at the bigger picture. American swimming isn't strong just because they have many pools or lots of money. They are strong because they have a talent supply chain operated like a machine. Each local club like NAC is a link in that chain. They don't aim to produce Olympic champions immediately. Their goal is simple: develop strong swimmers while building confidence, sportsmanship, teamwork, and a lifelong connection to the sport. When you have hundreds, thousands of such clubs, you have a solid foundation from which exceptional talents can emerge. As for us, we are still searching for medals somewhere far away, forgetting that medals are just the top of a tree whose roots are being neglected. This leads me to an important point. In my years of sports data analysis, I've been obsessed with finding anomalies in numbers. But there is one number I cannot find in any official report of Vietnam's sports industry: the actual number of nationally certified swimming coaches working at local clubs. Without that number, we are building a house on sand. Because the truth is, to have a strong swimming nation, you need good coaches at every level, from grassroots to the national team. A national team with only twenty good athletes is not enough if you lack a hundred good coaches below them to train those twenty athletes. Let me clarify the difference in training philosophy. NAC doesn't require candidates to have prior coaching experience. They just want someone who loves swimming, has energy, is dependable, and is willing to learn to work within the club's coaching philosophy. This is a completely different approach from seeking someone with existing experience. Instead of demanding a finished product, they accept raw material and create the product themselves. They invest in people. And to do that, they are also flexible with time: assistants can work at least two evenings per week, some weekends for swim meets, and potentially more hours in summer mornings or evenings. They are happy to work around school, work, and other reasonable scheduling commitments. This means a college student or a high school student can start a coaching career very young. Imagine if a swimming club in Vietnam, for example in Binh Duong or Dong Nai, adopted a similar model. They could tap into a huge underutilized resource: physical education students, former provincial athletes, even high school students who love swimming. They would create a path for these young people to enter the profession systematically, with certification support and guidance from a clear coaching philosophy. This would not only solve the human resource shortage but also create a professional coaching culture at the grassroots level. Another point that made me think is the requirement for certifications and background clearances. USA Swimming, America's governing body for swimming, requires all coaches to complete safety and athlete protection certifications. NAC doesn't require candidates to have these before applying, but they make a clear commitment: they will help candidates through the process. This is a small detail with enormous significance. It shows their system treats training and certification as part of the job, not as a barrier at the start. It removes an entry barrier to the profession. And it sets a standard for safety and professional ethics that anyone working with children must follow. Looking back at Vietnam, I see a paradox. We have national sports training centers, youth teams that are invested in, athletes achieving high results at SEA Games. But we lack an effective network of community swimming clubs where children can learn to swim and have their talent discovered early. National training centers often focus only on a small group of already selected athletes. For the vast majority of children, swimming is just a life skill, not a path to professional sports. We are missing a huge number of potential talents simply because we don't have a grassroots club system to nurture them. So what's the solution? I don't think we should copy the American model wholesale. Our cultural, economic, and social contexts are different. But the core spirit is worth learning: trust in human development. Instead of just looking for finished coaches, build programs to create them. Instead of focusing only on the national team with fifteen or twenty athletes, invest in creating hundreds of well-run local swimming clubs where any child has access to a qualified coach and a safe, healthy training environment. This is a story about patience. In a world where everything is urgent, we often want to see immediate results. But to build a strong swimming nation, we need a long-term vision. We must accept that the seeds we plant today may take ten, twenty years to become big trees. We must measure success not only by medal counts at major tournaments, but by the number of children who can swim safely, the number of young coaches systematically trained, and the number of functioning community clubs. I, like NAC, believe we are building something special. But that special thing is not a secret plan at a national training center. It lies in the understanding that the strength of a sports nation comes from its roots. It comes from the regular practices of six-year-olds at a local pool, under the guidance of a newly graduated assistant coach, mentored by a leader with vision. When we have enough of those links, success at the highest level will be a matter of time. The question for us is not why Vietnamese swimming doesn't have an Olympic medal. The more precise question is: how many clubs like NAC do we have operating effectively? How many coaches do we have who are properly trained, certified, and have a clear career path? How many former athletes are encouraged to give back to the movement instead of leaving the profession for lack of opportunity? When we can answer these questions positively, I believe medals will find their way to us. For now, perhaps we should learn to look at ordinary job postings in a distant place like Pennsylvania and see in them a mirror reflecting what we are still missing.