Pool and Open Water Meet in Bali: What Is Actually Being Passed Down to the Next Generation of Coaches

On the fourth morning in Bali, the water was still grey. Eighteen coaches stood in a circle on the sand, each from a different nationality, and the lesson in front of them was not in any pool-swimming curriculum: teach a twelve-year-old to swim inside a crowd without panicking. That child did not exist. But every adult in the circle had to imagine him, had to place themselves in the position of a child pulled by current, kicked in the face by others, losing all orientation among waves with no lane rope to hold on to.

That was the third day of the first International Youth Coach Course combining pool swimming and open water swimming, held from 3 to 10 August in Bali. World Aquatics calls it the first time it has brought two worlds into one programme: a pool with painted lines, and open water with nothing but the horizon. Twelve countries sent participants. Seventeen of the eighteen participants received scholarships.

People look at the results board; I look at what is passed down behind it. In Bali, what was passed down is a professional capability that almost nobody was teaching ten years ago.

I have followed swimming for more than thirty years, from mornings sitting in the back rows of a pool at home to world championships in Budapest and Fukuoka. Over that time I learned one thing: the result on the electronic board is the easiest thing to read and the least informative. What produces the result lives one layer lower — in the coach, in how a training session is designed, in the question a teacher asks a ten-year-old on an October afternoon. The Bali course is about that layer, and that is why it deserves a closer read than its appearance as an administrative bulletin.

To understand why an eight-day course in Bali matters, you have to place it in the right layer of the pyramid. At the top is the Olympic Games, then the world championships, then the World Cup, then continental meets, then national ones. Every one of those layers lives on a lower layer the audience never sees: the layer that produces coaches. Without properly trained coaches at the base, the pyramid eats its own foot within a decade. World Aquatics operates at this layer through a tiered certification architecture: Age Group Coach, Youth Coach, and Performance Coach. Delivery is split in two — online learning through the CORAL platform and in-person practical work. This is a model with low marginal cost, one that can be replicated into federations whose budgets cannot fly in experts every year.

What makes the Bali course different is not stroke technique. No arm pull was improved here. The difference is the merging of two disciplines into one curriculum. Over the past fifteen years, open water swimming has moved from a fringe event in the swimming world to an Olympic medal event, with the 10km marathon swim added to the official programme. That rise created a new demand: coaches who can teach both in the pool and in the sea. And this is where the system is running short of breath.

The bottleneck is not technique but confidence. By World Aquatics' own account after the course, the most striking change organisers observed was the speed at which participants' confidence grew when they ran a session in the sea themselves. In other words, the problem to solve is not how to make a coach teach the correct arm pull, but how to make that person dare to take a group of children into open water and know what they are responsible for.

The curriculum follows a blended model: classroom theory followed by in-water application. Classroom topics included athlete-centred coaching, long-term athlete development, season planning, session design, communication skills, and building positive learning environments. The practical work in the sea focused on skills no pool can teach: pack swimming, drafting, feeding, and beach or in-water starts. Attached to this is a component I consider the most important and least discussed — safety and risk management.

Eighteen participants evaluated the course. Of the responses collected, 94% said the course exceeded their expectations. Satisfaction with the lecturer and with classroom sessions was equal. Read on the surface, those numbers are a fine piece of communications. But I have learned to read them as an analyst rather than as a public relations officer.

A satisfaction rate that is almost flat and very high, drawn from a small, self-selected, fully funded sample, is the most easily inflated kind of data in all survey data. Eighteen responses, a single edition, no control group, no longitudinal follow-up. Seventeen of eighteen people did not pay to be there. When someone does not pay, the barrier to saying something positive becomes far lower than when they have to reach into their own pocket. This is something anyone who has done survey research knows: the goodwill of a recipient is often recorded as the quality of the gift.

There is another signal far more valuable than the 94% figure, and it lies in the improvement requests. Participants asked for more practical sessions in the water, more race simulations, more real-life coaching scenarios, and more discussion time. This is constructive data because it shows the gap between supply and demand: the practical component was highly valued but supplied in less quantity than demanded. A first-run blended course tends to lean towards theory, and participant feedback is precisely the pilot evaluation tool for the next edition.

The data vortex of 2026 changed how I read a race, and changed how I see people. That year, when I began building a performance prediction model for a club in Melbourne, I learned that a number only means something when you know the conditions under which it was born. The same ratio, placed in a funded sample, says something very different from the same ratio in a sample that pays its own way. That is the lesson I carried from football analysis into the analysis of a coach-education course.

The person behind World Aquatics' open water coaching certification is Mel Tantrum, currently the Australian Swimming Paralympic Programme National Head Coach and lead developer of the world federation's open water coaching certification courses. This overlap of two roles is worth pausing on. Someone who both leads the high-performance disability programme of a swimming powerhouse and designs certification for grassroots coaches worldwide is a model of top-down knowledge transfer. The certification carries a layer of inclusive coaching principles that the curriculum itself may not list — because its designer lives in an environment where individual adaptation is a condition of survival. In Paralympic sport, no single template applies to every athlete. Someone designing certification from that foundation would struggle to write a rigid curriculum.

The course's geography also carries a message. Bali hosted twelve nationalities. Scholarships went to seventeen of eighteen people. This mechanism is a deliberate access instrument: it widens the geographic base of qualified coaches rather than serving only wealthy federations. A small federation in Asia or Africa, where open water has no infrastructure, could not send anyone if it had to cover the cost. When World Aquatics pays instead, the organisation is buying something specific: the presence of open water swimming in places where it does not yet exist.

The CORAL online learning platform is the most notable scaling lever in the whole story. Flying an expert to a country to teach in person is expensive and cannot be replicated. Putting content on an online platform makes the marginal cost nearly zero. The blended model — online for theory, in-person for practice — is the only way a world federation can reach thousands of coaches in places with no experts. At a time when sports federations are wrestling with costs, this is a structural solution rather than a slogan.

There is one line in the course materials I keep: no single country or system has all the answers. This is a diplomatic sentence, and its diplomacy is real. It says World Aquatics is actively decentralising open water expertise rather than anchoring it in one nation. If one powerhouse held a technical monopoly, other federations would forever remain students. If expertise is distributed, every country becomes a node in the net. I have seen the opposite in many sports: expertise held back as a competitive advantage, and the result is an entire system that grows slowly.

World Cup 2026 was the first time I heard my own voice inside the choir. I sat in Russia, heard every commentator around me blame the attack, and stayed silent while I went back over the passing data. I found that most of a central midfielder's passes in the final thirty minutes were sideways or backward — a sign of a paralysed system, not of a blunt attack. I pointed to the gap between centre-back and full-back stretching to more than forty metres when the team was countered. Since then, when I write about a defeat, I no longer use words like spineless or unlucky. I use movement maps, space, and possession tempo in ten-minute blocks.

I applied exactly that principle to the Bali story. When a federation announces that a course has raised coaching standards globally, my question is not whether the announcement is true or false. My question is: by what measure, where, and when. And the answer is right there in the materials: the ultimate measure is what coaches take back to their athletes and programmes. That is a correct measure. But it has not been measured.

In 2026, when the pandemic stopped every competition, I fell into a state of disorientation because my habit of analysing thousands of matches had lost its basis. I spent six weeks watching old matches and developing a new index simulating psychological pressure when playing in empty stadiums. I worked with a sports psychologist to build a hypothetical dataset, and the result was an article predicting that home teams would lose about 0.42 goals per match of traditional advantage — a figure nobody had mentioned at the time. The lesson I drew was not whether that number was right or wrong, but this: when there is no foundational data, the only way not to judge blindly is to ask the right question.

Silence in the stands is not a loss of data — it is a new kind of data. By the same logic, a course with no performance data is not a course with nothing to analyse. It simply demands that we read with a different toolkit: the toolkit of a system builder, not of a scoreboard reader.

In 2026, in Qatar, I pursued a transfer from inside the egg. While the big papers reported on a young Portuguese striker, I spent a month building a relationship with his agent, providing free tactical analysis of how he fit his parent club. When the hat-trick against Switzerland in the round of sixteen happened, I was the only one with detailed information on the release clause: 120 million euros. My piece was not a rumour but a feasibility analysis based on financial data and contract context. I retell this not to boast, but to say: I am used to reading the number behind the number. And the 94% figure in Bali has a number behind it.

That number is risk. The first risk is the durability of a first-edition format. A course merging two disciplines, run for the first time, usually faces a go-or-no-go decision: scale it globally or not. The satisfaction survey is precisely the pilot evidence for that decision. If it is not strong enough, the format stops after a few editions.

The second risk is the gap between satisfaction and capability. A coach saying the course exceeded expectations does not mean that person will coach better in six months. To prove that, you need a follow-up assessment of the programmes participants run after returning home. The materials provide no such data. The biggest gap in this story is not a lack of results, but a lack of measurement for the very thing it claims to create.

The third risk is funding sustainability. Seventeen scholarships depend on the World Aquatics budget. If that money flow changes, the reach shrinks immediately. And the fourth risk is the equity gap: only those who can get to Bali or be funded receive the training. The CORAL online platform is the answer to this risk, but only if it is scaled widely enough.

There is one more governance question the materials leave open: whether this certification is mutually recognised across national federations. Can a coach certified in Bali teach in another country without starting over. If not, the value of the certificate is capped at the border, and the scaling model loses part of its meaning.

Here I must say what an administrative bulletin would not. Australia's technical influence in open water swimming is outsized relative to its population and medal count. An Australian designed the global open water coaching certification. That is a fact worth pondering for a journalist living in Melbourne. But I do not read it as a national victory. I read it as a responsibility, and as a sign that expertise in this sport is distributed very unevenly.

I also have to talk about money. The transfer window is the season when noise drowns out signal, and in swimming the money story sits elsewhere than in football. It sits in certification, in scholarships, in the cost of running a transcontinental course, in the decision to allocate budget between feeding one high-performance training centre and training a thousand grassroots coaches. Those are decisions without glamour, but they decide which layer of the pyramid grows stronger eight years from now.

One layer lower still, open water has a benefit the pool does not: it can live in mass-participation events. A weekend sea swim attracts paying participants, attracts tourists, attracts local sponsorship. When more coaches are certified in safety and technique, the number of sea events that can be staged rises, and each event is a touchpoint with the public that the pool cannot create. That is the ripple effect a coach-education course creates at the market layer, even if nobody mentions it in the press release.

This is the point I find most counter-intuitive. People often think a coach-education course is an internal industry matter, an administrative cost, a line in the development budget. But a coach's safety capability is the thing that directly determines whether a federation is permitted to stage open water events. Federations increasingly require open water certification as a condition for sanctioning events. At that point, a coach-education course is no longer an administrative cost; it is a licence to operate for an entire market segment. I once wrote that people look at the result while I look at what produces it. Here, what produces it is a certificate most spectators will never see.

There is one trap I set for myself to avoid in writing this piece: using the prestige of an individual to replace data. Mel Tantrum has a résumé strong enough that anyone would want to cite it. But the designer's prestige does not prove the effectiveness of what they design. This is a mistake I have made before: letting a big name make a weak conclusion look strong. I write this line to remind myself, and to remind the reader.

So what is genuinely valuable in the Bali story. I think there are three things. First, a format merging two disciplines has been shown to be operationally feasible, something previously only a hypothesis. Second, a blended online and in-person model has shown it can reach twelve countries in a single edition. Third, and most important, a bottleneck has been named correctly: coaches' confidence in running open water sessions, not stroke technique, is the choke point.

What is not yet valuable is the claim that global coaching standards have been raised. That claim needs a measurement nobody has made. Until there is a follow-up of the programmes these eighteen participants run at home, all we have is a positive signal from a small sample. The positive signal is real. But it is a signal, not evidence.

This story has one more layer, belonging to how a world federation places itself in the world. Twelve nationalities in one course is not a random number. It is a soft political choice: to distribute expertise rather than concentrate it. In many sports, expertise is held back as a national competitive asset, and the result is a development system that stays uneven for decades. If World Aquatics holds this direction, its real value lies not in the first course, but in whether the tenth and the fiftieth are still run with the same philosophy.

I think about the eighteen people standing on Sanur beach. Most of them will return to a small pool, a club with few members, a country where open water is only a name on paper. In the next two years, none of them will appear on television. In eight years, a few of the athletes they teach may swim at a continental championship. That is a long, cold cycle that produces no headlines. But that is how a sport actually grows.

I once wrote that football without spectators is a missing piece in humanity's dataset. Likewise, a coach-education course without a scoreboard is a missing piece in how we read sport. We are used to measuring what happens in the final two minutes of a race. We are not used to measuring what happens in the eight days of a course, and in the eight years after it.

What I want to know now is not how successful the Bali course was. What I want to know is how many of those eighteen coaches will still be teaching open water five years from now, and how many of them will personally train another coach. If the answer is most, then an eight-day course in Bali has done something no medal can do. If the answer is very few, then we have one more piece of evidence that in sport, the hardest thing is not staging a first event, but sustaining it until it becomes ordinary.