By the time this lands in your inbox, the Italian National Championships will be almost over, probably the latest domestic Nationals on the European calendar this summer. For a large share of European swimmers, that meet marks the real end of the season. It is more scattered for those racing internationally: the European Aquatics Championships start in Paris next week, the Mediterranean Games close out the month, the World Para Swimming European Championships follow in September, and further afield there is still the Asian Games and the Pan American Championships to come. But for the majority of athletes, right now, in this window, the season is over: the last phase of training is behind the swimmers’ backs, the races are now over. It happened a few times that, at the right moment of driving back home on a Van from the last competition of the year, which in my early days was most of the times Rome, I had swimmers talking about what they wanted to do “next year” (which is usually a few weeks ahead) and having a rially informal discussion on their aspirations basically on the road.

I want to spend this article on that part: not on how to build a season, but on how we talk to athletes about where they are going, and on a few things I think we get wrong, or skip, in that conversation.

The transfer window is also open

For many swimmers, this moment is not just about reflection: it is about a decision. Some will be considering a new programme, a new coach, a new training environment. That is not a small thing; it touches where they live, who they see every day, their academic path, sometimes their entire support network. In Italy, senior swimmers over 14 cannot move clubs freely. There are negotiations to be had with the current club, timelines to respect, conversations that can get tense before they get resolved. For the swimmer and the family, this is often one of the more stressful periods of the year, layered right on top of the physical and emotional fatigue of a long season.

I want to be clear about where I stand on this, because I think it matters for how the rest of this article should be read. I am not against athletes moving on. For the vast majority of the people we coach, this sport is, at the end of the day, a hobby, even at a high performance level. Swimmers should do what they believe is right for them. I think one of our real responsibilities as coaches is to develop athletes who are capable of making that kind of decision for themselves: people who can weigh the bigger picture, consider the pros and cons, and choose the path that helps them progress, in the sport and in life more broadly.

That can mean, sometimes, that they choose something we would not have chosen for them. I think that is completely fine. When it happens, I am happy to talk it through, to give my opinion if asked, and then to let the athlete decide. It is their life, not mine.

What SMART goals get right, and where they stop being enough

Against that backdrop, most programmes now, or at the beginning of the season, run some version of a formal goal-setting process. I think this is a genuine improvement on where our sport was fifteen or twenty years ago. My concern is not that we set goals. It is that, in a lot of programmes, the exercise gets done once, filed away, and never looked at again. A goal-setting session that is never reviewed loses most of the value it could have had.

The dominant framework, and for good reason, is SMART: goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. There is solid evidence that goals built this way are more effective at driving performance than vague ones, and I will use this framework with my own athletes. I am not writing this to argue against it.

What I want to push back on gently is the idea that it should be the only lens we use. Human motivation is more nuanced than a single framework can always capture. I have had swimmers tell me, in all sincerity, that what drives them right now is “I want to train well” or “I want to be the best version of myself every day”. Neither of those is specific in the way SMART asks for. I have also, rarely, but not never, had a swimmer say their real goal is a specific Olympic Games two cycles away, while currently injured or out of the pool entirely. To an outside observer, that might not look realistic. But who am I to tell them that is not their true motivation? These stories are rare, but they happen, and they are real for the person living them.

I am not criticising the model. I am saying that when a swimmer expresses a goal that does not fit the SMART framework, I do not think our job is to correct it into shape. Our job might instead be to sit alongside that goal, and help the athlete also set other goals, sometimes smaller, more specific, lower down the chain, that do respect the framework and give them something concrete to work toward day to day. The big, non-SMART goal can stay exactly as it is. It does not need our permission.

From outcome, to performance, to process

When we ask a swimmer for their goal, the first answer is almost always an outcome goal, or a performance goal, a specific time, and often the two arrive together in the same sentence. That is completely normal, and I do not think we should discourage it. What I do think is valuable is the conversation that follows: helping the swimmer translate that outcome into what it actually means in swimming terms. What does that time require, physiologically, technically, tactically? That translation work builds perspective, and it is also the natural bridge into process goals, breaking the big goal down into what needs to happen month by month, in the pool and outside it.

I think this process is genuinely important, and I use it constantly. But I also think we need to be honest that a linear path from big goal to broken-down process to achieved outcome almost never happens in real life. We set the goal, we build the plan, month by month, area by area, and that plan is a good and necessary thing. It gives the rational mind of the coach and the swimmer something to hold on to.

There is another conversation, though, that I think we skip far too often: how will we react when the plan goes off the rails. Because it will, at some point, in some way. What support will be available to the athlete when it does? Are we open to revisiting the main goal, or do we push ahead regardless of what has changed? What is the coach’s role in that moment: do we try to rationalise everything that has happened, do we normalise it, or do we sit with the disruption honestly? I think we owe our athletes that conversation before the disruption happens, not only after.

The during, and the after

There is the question of how we handle the relationship while things are going up and down through the season, and there is a separate question of what happens after the goal is met, or missed, and I do not think one solution fits every athlete in either case.

Success needs its own conversation. How do we react when a goal is achieved, how do we help the athlete extract something they can learn from it, and how does that achievement shape what comes next. We have all seen swimmers reach the very top of the sport, an Olympic gold medal, and then choose to end a multi-year coaching relationship almost immediately afterwards. I think that can be a completely healthy transition, for both people, but only if it is built on honesty, trust, and open communication along the way. Without that foundation, the same transition can feel like a rupture instead of a natural next step.

And then there is the goal that was not achieved, which deserves at least as much care as the one that was. How we sit with a swimmer after a season that did not deliver what was planned says a great deal about what kind of environment we are actually building, underneath whatever the plan on paper said.

I believe, when we talk about process goals with swimmers, to acknowledge that even these are “hard” to achieve. We need to understand how a generic statement (“I want to improve the level of my nutrition, eat 5 solid meals a day at least 6 days a week”, or something along these lines) is an exceptional level of commitment and should not be taken lightly. It’s not just something we say; it should make us feel proud. It is a huge step forward that might need some sort of support and a clear pathway for when the goal is not met (because down the road at some point it will not be met, most likely).

Closing

The end of the season gives us a natural pause: a Nationals swum, a summer of major meets unfolding for others, and for most of our athletes, a real moment to look back and look forward. I think the goal-setting conversation we have in this window matters more than the document it produces. The document can be SMART, but the conversation underneath it needs room for what does not fit neatly into five letters, and for the harder question of what we do together when the plan does not survive contact with the season ahead.

For the coaches reading this: when a goal your athlete set did not survive the season, what did that conversation actually look like in your programme? I would like to hear it.

This past weekend, the Irish Age Group National Championships were on in Limerick. This is a relatively new competition, in the calendar for only the third time. It is the national end-of-season championship for swimmers aged 12 to 14.

I spent the first few years in Ireland working primarily with clubs and swimmers around this age, and I have years of experience at club level; I have structured my own philosophy on how to coach this age group, but I still ask myself if we really know what we are doing with these young swimmers. If you spend any time on social media, the answer appears to be yes. Everyone knows. The problem is they know opposite things, with equal confidence.

In my mind, it is quite clear how to approach the sport with swimmers who are younger than this age group, but it is these “ages of transition” that I find delicate, and in which I believe coaches receive mixed and sometimes opposite messages. At 14 years old, swimmers can potentially be selected to represent their country internationally in Europe; at the same time, you might work with developing 14-year-olds who are still far from international level, yet with immense potential ahead of them.

The seduction of the binary

The development of 12 to 14-year-old swimmers is almost always presented as a choice between two clean options. Specialisation or multi-sport approach. Competitiveness or playfulness. Structure or freedom. Pick your side, find your evidence, write your post.

The format rewards this: a take like “early specialisation is killing our sport” performs well. So does “kids today are soft, we trained 9 sessions a week at 13, and it made us.” Both get engagement and sound like solutions, but neither tells you what to do with the actual 13-year-old.

Development at this age is not a binary: it is a set of trade-offs that depend on the swimmer, the club, the family, the country, and the moment. Anyone selling you a universal answer is selling you something.

I tend naturally to trust the value of “wisdom”, what worked well in the past, but I still believe there is space for innovation, and maybe developing a system that allows everyone in it to exploit their individual potential, instead of a system of “excellent survivors”.

What the Dutch are trying

In June 2025 the Dutch swimming federation, the KNZB, published new guidelines for youth sport up to age 12. They are worth reading in full (Here the article, and Google Translate did a good enough job translating from Dutch for me), because they are radical by the standards of most federations. I read the article and it stayed with me, not without some considerations on what could go wrong.

Under these guidelines, for children under 12: results are published only in alphabetical order and are not stored in any public database. No heats and finals. No distinction by gender at competitions. No selection for national or representative teams. No national championships at all. Only personal records exist.

The reasoning is coherent. The KNZB points out that the label of “talent” at this age often reflects height, weight, or simply how long a child has been in the sport. Selection creates de-selection, and de-selection at 10 or 11 drives children out of swimming from both sides of the line. So they removed the selection.

Two things strike me about this. First, it is a serious, structural attempt to change incentives, not a slogan. They changed what gets measured and published, because they understood that parents and coaches respond to what gets measured and published.

Second, and this is the part most shares of that article miss: the guidelines stop at 12. The Dutch have not answered the question of what to do with the 12 to 14 year old. They have made a choice about what comes before, and in doing so they have made the 12 to 14 window even more important, because it now becomes the age where competition structure, ranking, and selection enter a young athlete’s life for the first time. Is that better? Possibly. Do we know? We will find out in ten years, if anyone is still paying attention by then.

I do not know in depth how this approach is working in the real world, if there are challenges, and overall, what the experience of the swimmers is.

After all, I am interested in performance swimming, so will this approach, if seriously implemented, promote the development of better swimmers? I guess only time can tell.

The Norwegian method, until Saturday

Football offers a useful parallel. For the past while, the conversation in Italy has been dominated by the Norwegian model of player development, presented as the modern answer to the “antiquated” Italian method that has produced so little in the last few years. When you miss the final stage of the World Cup for 3 consecutive editions, there must be a unique and simple explanation, after all. The articles wrote themselves: small nation, smart system, patient development, look at the players they are producing.

Then Norway lost the quarter-final match, and the tone changed almost overnight.

Nothing about Norwegian player development changed in those 90 minutes. The training methodology on Sunday morning was identical to the training methodology the previous Sunday. What changed was the scoreboard, and the scoreboard is what the narrative feeds on.

This is the core problem with how we discuss development systems. A youth development philosophy takes 10 to 15 years to show its results, and even then the signal is buried in noise: generational luck, economics, population trends, one exceptional athlete who would have emerged under any system. But the public conversation about these systems updates weekly, based on results produced by athletes who were developed under the previous philosophy. We praise and bury methodologies on a timescale that has nothing to do with how they actually work.

What the evidence says, which is less than you think

The research on this age group deserves the same honesty. It gets quoted a lot, usually one half of it.

The half that supports patience is real. Studies tracking World Championship participants found that the junior-to-senior transition rate among elite European sprinters was around 21 to 25 percent. Roughly two thirds of elite senior swimmers were not elite as juniors. Early specialisation is associated with higher rates of overuse injury, burnout, and dropout across youth sport. Research comparing world class and national-class performers found the world class group specialised later and spent more time in other sports. If you want to argue for patience, breadth, and late selection, the evidence is there.

But the other half exists too. A study of over 4,000 swimmers from junior and senior World Championships between 2006 and 2017 found that swimmers who had competed at junior Worlds went on to achieve better senior results in almost every event, with 1500 freestyle the exception. Early engagement with high-level competition was associated with better senior outcomes in that dataset, not worse.

How do both of these live in the same literature? Because they measure different things: being exposed to competition early is not the same as being an early star, and surviving a system is not the same as being produced by it. The honest reading is that the evidence supports caution about early selection and early narrowing, and supports very little else with confidence. It does not hand you a programme. It hands you probabilities, and probabilities are a poor fit for a 280-character post.

Italian and Irish swimming

Historically, specialisation in my own country tends to happen earlier, although things have changed in the last few years. The level of youth swimming is extremely competitive, I believe, in terms of density, higher than in similar countries, like swimming in Great Britain. It’s been a relatively successful system, in terms of the final product of performance swimming, but I still believe we are not offering our swimmers the best environment. It becomes a pretty much self-sustaining system, in which late developers have a clear barrier really early in the sport. We keep producing excellent 14-year-olds, but those who are not at the same level of performance just feel excluded and, in many cases, abandon the sport. Sure, a few “excellent survivors” go through the system and eventually make it.

On the other hand, swimming in Ireland is more inclusive at a young age, in terms of the level of competitions and expectations. The sport remains more accessible to multi-sport children; there is a big community sports culture in Ireland, and most of the kids have local opportunities to be involved in field sports. I found young teenagers in general more “athletic”, with a solid movement base in Ireland, and I am sure this exposure to many activities gives an advantage. This still comes with a few costs, though. All the “adult organised” sports have their own schedules and potentially their development pathway. Coaches tend to compete, most of the time for the same children who are good at everything. Families become committed pretty much full-time to bringing children around between the pitch and the pool. If I go further and focus on the performance aspect, besides the full experience of these young people, at a certain point, the barrier exists, and those who have not been exposed to some level of rigorous training will have very few opportunities to make it later on, I have seen multiple times young promising swimmers at their local club during school years, but not having opportunities to develop further after moving to college if not at a certain level yet.

I believe there must be a way to approach this age group that keeps together all the aspects, promoting sustainable development, giving opportunities to those who are “outside” the usual pathways, and giving the tools to develop everyone’s potential. But it is hard work, and simple solutions don’t work.

What I saw in Limerick

Back to the pool deck. This year is the first season I did not attend the competition in full: I watched some races from the sideline and I was not personally involved much.

I saw 13-year-olds with beautiful strokes finishing well down the field, and I saw physically mature 14-year-olds winning finals on strength that everyone in the building could see and nobody could rank for what it will mean at 20. I saw swimmers racing four events in a day and loving it, and swimmers racing two and looking exhausted by the weight of the occasion. The same competition, the same age group, and completely different developmental experiences happening in adjacent lanes.

In the past few years I have been involved in many discussions around this competition; which events for which age groups? Should we offer the 400 meters to the 12 years old? Should we award championship medals to all the age groups? These were usually animated discussions with coaches, where everyone were very joyous of their own point of view.

That is the point: I believe the question “is a national championship good for a 13 year old?” has no answer. The question “is this national championship, at this moment, good for this 13 year old?” does, and answering it is the actual job. It is slow and contextual.

The only position I am confident in

So where does that leave me? Distrusting anyone with a clear solution, including the version of me that is tempted to offer one here.

The Dutch experiment is interesting and I hope they hold their nerve long enough to learn from it. The Norwegian method was not proven by the winning streak of their football team and was not disproven by the loss. Early specialisation is neither the disease nor the cure. And the 12 to 14 year old swimmer remains what they have always been: an individual in the middle of the most turbulent biological and psychological period of their life, who deserves adults making decisions based on who they are rather than on which side of an argument is trending this month.

If someone presents you a simple solution to the development of 12 to 14 year olds, they are answering a different question, an easier one. The real question does not fit in a post. It barely fits in a career.

I watched the Sette Colli meet on TV last weekend. I haven’t attended since I moved to Ireland, and it always brings back memories: bittersweet, watching good swimming in Rome. I can’t say I don’t miss Italian swimming, or the country altogether, at least some parts of it.

However, I also remember the mental burden of club coaching in Italy, especially at a certain point in my life, and how maybe at that point I wasn’t well-equipped with the tools to deal with it.

Every swimming programme has a wellbeing plan for its athletes. Load monitoring, recovery protocols, sports psychology support, and someone checking in when a swimmer looks off. We’ve built entire systems around protecting the people in the water. We’ve built almost nothing around protecting the person on deck.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few years, because I’ve coached on both ends of the resourcing spectrum, and the mental load didn’t get lighter when the system around me got bigger. It just changed shape.

Juggling everything

I started out as a club coach in Italy, and if you’ve coached at club level you know exactly what that phase looks like. It is quite common in my own country to have clubs which are relatively big organisations, with a lot of stakeholders. Clubs sometimes manage the facilities they operate in, and many ckub coaches are “professionals”, compared to Ireland. That, for the most part, means you are supposed to have responsibilities in many aspects of the life of a club. Those who are in swimming as a second job receive pretty much the same expectations, just with far less time available.

As a coach, you’re not just writing programmes. You’re the one dealing with parents, managing pool time politics, doing your own admin; most of the time, you are looking after the revenue streams of the club, you might be responsible for all the organisation of the swimming pool in which you are operating, and still expected to show up on deck at 6am with energy and a plan. There’s no line between “coaching” and “everything else that makes coaching possible.” You are the whole operation.

Nobody tells you, when you start out, that this phase carries its own specific kind of wear. It’s not the dramatic burnout you read about in sport psychology literature, the kind with a clear before-and-after. It’s slower than that. It’s the accumulation of being permanently on, permanently responsible, with no one else positioned to catch what you drop. You don’t notice the cost in real time because you’re too busy paying it.

What changes when the system gets bigger

In 2022 I moved to Ireland to take up a role as a Regional Pathway Coach, a mixture of on-deck coaching and mostly coach and club support. It was a role I loved, and one that shaped my understanding of swimming in many ways. Eventually, I moved into a National Centre, working within Swim Ireland’s high-performance structure. On paper, this is the upgrade every club coach is working toward: clearer systems, a full staff, athletes who are there because they’ve chosen full-time performance sport, an actual organisational structure around you instead of just you.

And in real ways, it is easier. I’m not doing five jobs badly instead of one job well; I believe for most of my life I was a very good “generalist” of swimming and aquatics. I know pretty well so many aspects of what revolves around the sport. But what was really attracting me, was the opportunity to develop my coaching more vertically, on a specific demographic of athletes. I want to be honest about something that doesn’t get said enough in coaching circles: moving into a better-resourced environment doesn’t remove the mental load, it redistributes it. The stakes go up. The athletes are training at international level, many of them university students trying to hold together a degree and a full training programme at the same time, and the margin for error in how you support that balance is much smaller than it looks from outside. You’ve traded the chaos of doing everything yourself for the weight of being accountable for outcomes that matter more.

I don’t say this to complain about either environment. I say it because I think coaches, especially coaches earlier in their career, looking at “bigger” jobs as the fix, deserve a more honest picture. The pressure doesn’t disappear when the environment improves. It just gets more specific.

Coaching dual-career athletes while living a dual-career life

There’s a parallel here I think about often. A large part of my work now is with university-student athletes, swimmers trying to compete internationally while also completing degrees. We talk a lot, rightly, about how to support that balance: managing academic deadlines around competition blocks, protecting recovery time, helping them build the discipline to hold two demanding identities at once without either one collapsing. It’s also worth remembering, when we talk about training load and recovery, that these athletes are not professionals: they don’t have the recovery resources or the singular focus of a full-time athlete, and that has to shape how we manage their load.

What we don’t talk about is that most coaches are running a version of the same balancing act, just with less language for it and far less support built around it. Coaching is rarely one job. It’s programme design, athlete welfare, staff management, travel logistics, performance analysis, and for a lot of us building a career and a life across different countries and systems along the way. We ask our athletes to be intentional about managing competing demands. We rarely ask the same question of ourselves, and almost nobody in the system is asking it for us.

The pressure to look unaffected

Part of the reason coach wellbeing stays invisible is cultural, not just structural. High-performance environments run on an unspoken expectation that the coach is the steady point, the person who doesn’t waver, who has already processed whatever the athletes are going through so they can hold space for them to have their moment. That’s a legitimate part of the job. But it also means admitting strain can feel like it undermines the authority the role depends on.

I do believe the pressure to appear composed can be even higher on club coaches, or at least it was for me. At club level there’s often no one above you to absorb the weight when things go wrong: you’re the final point of contact for parents, swimmers and the club committee, all at once, with nobody else to share the load with.

I’ve felt this directly. There’s a difference between being calm under pressure, which is a skill, and having quietly decided that showing any pressure at all isn’t an option, which is a habit that erodes you over time without announcing itself. The second one gets mistaken for professionalism far too often in our sport.

What actually helps

If I look back at the different phases of my career , the club years in Italy, the first move to Ireland, and then into a national-centre environment, a few things stand out as genuinely useful, not just well-intentioned:

Having someone outside the immediate programme to talk to, who understands coaching but isn’t inside your specific pressures, made more of a difference than any formal wellbeing session I’ve sat through. Peer relationships with other coaches, or just friends I could talk to about swimming, where you can say “this week was hard” without it becoming a performance review, matter more than most federations currently plan for.

Naming the workload transitions explicitly (to myself and to whoever I report to) rather than absorbing each new demand silently changed how sustainable the job felt. The moves that hurt most weren’t the big obvious ones; they were the accumulation of small additions nobody flagged as additions.

And separating identity from role helped more than I expected. When the job is your whole schedule and a large part of your social world, a bad results week or a difficult athlete relationship stops being a work problem and starts being a personal one. That’s a slow way to burn out, and it’s common in a sport where coaching often is the whole life.

What the sport should build

None of this is really about individual coping strategies, though those matter. It’s about what our sport chooses to build structurally. Federations and clubs invest heavily in athlete-facing sports psychology and welfare support. Very little of that infrastructure extends to coaches, even though coaches are the ones absorbing pressure from every direction: administrators, parents, athletes, results, their own expectations, with the fewest formal outlets to process any of it.

A start would be normalising peer supervision for coaches the way we already normalise it for other high-pressure professions. Formal check-ins that aren’t tied to a performance review. Succession and workload planning that accounts for the accumulation of responsibility over the years, not just the headline job title. And a cultural shift, slow as it will be, away from treating a coach’s composure as evidence that nothing needs to change.

I’ve coached across three very different phases now, and the lesson I keep coming back to is the same each time: the mental load of this job doesn’t scale down with better resourcing, and it doesn’t apply only to coaches who look like they’re struggling. It applies to all of us, quietly, the whole time. The sport is good at watching its athletes. It’s time we got as good at watching each other.

We are at the end of final school exams in Ireland, and in most of the European countries I know. In Italy, this exam brings stress and pressure, but in practical terms, it has relatively little impact on the future of young students (entrance to University follows a separate pathway). One wants to perform well and demonstrate the work they have done in the previous 5 years, but as long as they pass the exams, the carryover into their college life is minimal. In Ireland, instead, it is a completely different story, and the students need to achieve specific scores to access the courses they want. Indirectly, this impacts their choices for their future in sports, for those who have a dual career.

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss online the subject of managing transitions of athletes in a high-performance environment. Challenges, opportunities, and I was asked what supports coaches can offer. Basically, how I believe we should shape the first few months.

It’s a good question. And my honest answer is: it depends entirely on who the swimmer is and where they’re coming from. Which is precisely the problem with the way we often approach it.

Transitions come in different shapes in our sport. There’s the move into a high-performance environment. There’s the shift between clubs, which club coaches deal with regularly and rarely get much guidance on. And there’s the end of a career, which almost nobody talks about. All three deserve more attention than they typically get.

I reflected on this as part of my Final Project for my Master’s in Applied Sports Coaching at the University of Limerick last year and then expanded on some personal experience and my opinions on the subject during this season.

Entering a Performance Environment: The Gap is Rarely What You Think

In Ireland, it is quite common that swimmers enter a National Centre when they start their college career, and is even more common for my own environment, as we are based inside a University, coinciding with the Leaving Cert and the start of college. For the swimmers involved, this is rarely just a sporting transition. It’s often the first time they’ve lived away from home, the first time they’ve managed their own schedule, and the first time they’ve been held to the standards of a senior programme.

What makes this particularly difficult to manage is the range of backgrounds athletes bring with them. Some swimmers arrive having done structured double sessions for two or three years, with solid aerobic bases and clear training habits. They slot in relatively smoothly. Others come from smaller clubs where they were the standout performer, maybe doing four or five sessions a week, coached by someone who invested heavily in them personally. For them, the gap isn’t just physical. It’s cultural.

One swimmer I interviewed described it well: “You’re going from the big fish small pond to a small fish in the big pond.” That shift in identity is significant. Another told me they were “exhausted all the time... struggling to drive home at the weekends.” That level of fatigue doesn’t just affect training. It affects everything else: focus in college, relationships with housemates, motivation.

I believe the first impact can make or break a successful transition: the first semester, roughly August to Christmas, is the critical window. Relationships with coaches and peers get established during this period. Training habits form. The athlete either starts to belong, or they don’t. A negative experience in those first weeks, whether from illness, excessive load, or simply feeling invisible to the coaching staff, can set a pattern that lasts much longer than it should. This is a delicate moment, and from my experience, those who don’t live it positively, can find it hard to recover. I have heard the stories of swimmers getting frequently ill or injured during the beginning of the first season, and then considering their experience altogether negative.

What this means practically for coaches:

The entry into a performance environment needs to be individualised. Not as an aspiration, but as a non-negotiable. The swimmer who did nine sessions a week at a well-resourced programme needs a different first month than the swimmer who was doing five sessions with their parent as their coach. Treating them the same isn’t efficient. It’s just lazy, and it costs you athletes.

In practice, a gradual build into full training across the first eight to ten weeks makes a real difference. Athletes who experience that tend to describe it in similar terms: “they built us in nicely.” Those thrown straight into full load are more likely to get sick, lose motivation, or question whether the environment is right for them.

On top of training load, proactive communication is something coaches need to take ownership of, not leave to the athlete. Sometimes I perceive that swimmers are reluctant to “bother” the coach, or don’t want to appear weak or lazy. If you’re waiting for first-year athletes to come to you with problems, you’ll often be waiting until it’s too late. A simple regular check-in in the first weeks, not about times or technique, but about how they’re settling in, how college is going, what they need, is worth more than most people give it credit for.

Club-to-Club Transitions: The Unwritten Playbook

Club coaches deal with this constantly. A swimmer decides to move to your club. Or one of your best athletes decides to leave. Both situations are sensitive, and most coaches navigate them on instinct alone.

When a swimmer joins your club from another programme, there are a few things worth being deliberate about.

First, resist the temptation to immediately “fix” everything about their training. Every programme does things differently, and arriving swimmers will have built habits, technical and physical, around their previous environment. Immediately dismantling that sends a message: everything you did before was wrong. Even if there are things you want to change, the first few weeks should be primarily about building trust and understanding the athlete, not about asserting your approach.

Second, the relationship they had with their previous coach matters more than you might think. From my experience, athletes who had strong, close coach-athlete relationships at club level arrived at a National Centre with a very specific expectation: that the new coaching relationship would eventually feel similar. When it didn’t, it affected their sense of belonging. When you receive a swimmer from another programme, ask them about that relationship. What worked? What didn’t? It tells you a lot about what they need.

Third, the team dynamic into which a new swimmer is arriving is as important as the training environment. Swimmers who joined a group with a healthy, inclusive culture integrated more quickly and had a better experience. Those who encountered established hierarchies, where senior athletes treated newer ones as inferior, struggled significantly. This is something head coaches can and should manage actively, not by dictating behaviour, but by setting clear expectations around how the group operates and who it’s for.

When one of your swimmers leaves for another programme, that’s a different kind of challenge. It can feel personal, and sometimes it is. But the way you handle it matters, for the athlete, for the club, and for your own reputation as a coach. A swimmer who leaves and is treated with respect will speak well of your programme. One who leaves and feels managed out, or ignored, won’t.

Preparing robust athletes

Coaches of younger swimmers can do more than they often realise to equip athletes for the transitions ahead. Those who enter a new environment with some level of autonomy and self-direction tend to adapt more quickly and with less disruption.

If we create space for our swimmers to communicate directly with us, to ask for help when they need it and to have open conversations when they want them, they become more confident at speaking and offering feedback to their future coaches. If we give them opportunities to experience different training environments, different coaching styles, different levels of competition, we help them build robustness and, ultimately, the capacity to cope with the stress of change.

Not everything is in a coach’s hands. Family background and life experience play a role too. But as club coaches, we can keep in mind what swimmers will need when they leave our environment, and be deliberate about building those tools while they’re still with us.

End of Career: The Transition Nobody Plans For

Elite swimmers retire earlier than most people appreciate. Peak performance in the sport sits around 22 to 24 years old for women and 24 to 26 for men, with a lot of individual variance. That means a swimmer who started a National Centre programme at 18 might be looking at retirement before they turn 30, often while their peers in other professions are just hitting their stride.

We don’t prepare athletes for this well. And to be fair, athletes often don’t want to hear it, because it requires confronting an identity that is extremely hard to let go of.

What we know from the research on athletic retirement is that the athletes who transition out of sport most successfully are those who developed a strong sense of identity outside of their athletic role. This is actually something we can build into the culture of a high-performance environment throughout an athlete’s career. Not by downplaying the importance of swimming, but by actively supporting athletes in developing life skills, pursuing their education seriously, and building relationships that exist outside the sport.

Conversations about identity, about what kind of person the swimmer wants to become, about education and life beyond the pool, don’t undermine athletic ambition. They support it. And they lay the groundwork for a healthier exit when the time comes.

The Common Thread

Whether you’re managing entry into a high-performance programme, a club transfer, or a retirement, the core challenge is the same: the athlete in front of you is navigating a change that is bigger than just the swimming. Their identity, their relationships, their sense of self-worth are all involved.

The coaches who do this well are the ones who see that. Who take the time to understand where the swimmer is coming from, what they’re carrying into the new environment, and what they actually need to settle in and perform.

The specifics look different depending on the situation: a first-year at a National Centre, a swimmer joining mid-season from another club, or an athlete facing the end of their career. But the starting point is always the same: treat the transition as belonging to a person, not just a programme slot.

A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work here. It never did.

Last week, I flew south as Assistant Coach with a large group of swimmers for a training camp in Canet en Roussillon, France. We competed at the Mare Nostrum stop there, then stayed on for a full week of training. I had been there the year before with a much smaller group. We liked the venue, we liked the training environment, and we thought it was worth bringing the whole squad this time.

It was. But not simply because the pool is good or the weather is warm.

Timing is everything

Our group is made up largely of university students. April and May are hard months. Academic pressure builds with exams and assignments, and on top of that, the competition season gets intense. The Irish Trials were at the beginning of April, and swimmers then start going their separate ways: different national or international competitions, different schedules, different motivations. The collective identity that you spend months building starts to fragment a little, and that is natural. But it does not have to be permanent.

A training camp at that point in the season serves a specific purpose beyond the training itself. It gives the group something to work toward together. It is a point on the calendar that belongs to everyone, and that shared anticipation matters more than coaches often acknowledge.

For the club coaches: what we tend to miss

I spent years working with club coaches, and I was a club coach myself for most of my career. I have a lot of respect for that work. But I have also seen a pattern that I think is worth naming.

I have seen clubs that train six, eight, maybe ten hours a week in their home environment go on camp and suddenly shift to doubles every day, two hours a session. The logic seems to be that a camp should mean more training. More time, more opportunity, more work.

I believe a camp can be an opportunity to manipulate training variables, but it still should be planned in the context of the training plan; a moderate increment of training load could be a good tool to use in certain moments, considering the more controlled training environment; we just need to consider the objective, and honestly reflect if we just want to make the training harder for the sake of it or if we have a strategy behind.

So, for example, if we believe our swimmers can benefit from exposure to an increased training frequency or volume, we should manage carefully other variables, like intensity. Personally, I do believe in the benefit of increasing the frequency of training (to a degree), so I believe in the benefits of exposing swimmers to more training sessions in a camp. Adding training sessions in your own training environment (where that is doable, of course) comes with a cost: added travel time to the pool, time commitment. The context of a camp is different, and there is a value in planning, for example, two 80 minute sessions, instead of a single two-hour session.

If the volume and intensity are not consistent with what your athletes are conditioned to handle, you are not creating adaptation. You are creating fatigue, increasing injury risk, and quite possibly getting sick. If your goal is to make the most of the camp environment, the first question you should ask is: what do we actually want to achieve here? And the second: does our programme honestly reflect that?

A camp should fit within your overall training plan, not sit outside it. If you are in a base phase, train base. If you are in a competition phase, race and recover. The change of environment does not change the physiology.

Communication is a coaching tool, not a formality

During a training camp, communication becomes more critical than usual. Athletes are in a new environment, routines are disrupted, and the usual informal checkpoints that happen in a normal training week do not exist in the same way.

I do believe that formal monitoring systems can be useful, however I do not believe these are an absolute necessity. What you need is coaches who check in consistently, who read the room, and who create space for athletes to say something is not right. Frequent, open, reliable communication between coaches and athletes is what protects the week from unravelling when something goes wrong, and something always goes wrong.

Group dynamics: it depends who is in the room

The social dimension of a camp is an opportunity, but it is not a free one. What you get out of it depends heavily on who you are working with.

With younger athletes, Under 12s or Under 14s, the social environment mostly takes care of itself. Put young teenagers together in a new place and they will form connections. Your job is largely to facilitate that and manage behaviours when needed. The upside is relatively easy to access.

With young adults, it can be more complex. A camp can strengthen a strong group or expose the fractures in a fragile one. I do not believe in micromanaging interpersonal dynamics. Swimmers have their own relationships, their own tensions, and their own ways of working things out. That should be respected.

What I do think requires deliberate attention is the athlete-coach relationship, the relationship between coaching staff, and the overall sense of group identity. Those are not things that maintain themselves. If there are tensions between coaches, athletes will feel it. If an athlete has been struggling quietly, the intensity of a camp week will bring that to the surface faster.

A change of environment is a coaching opportunity

Even in a well-functioning group, you will have individuals who are carrying something into the week. A missed selection, a result that did not reflect the work they put in, or a phase where motivation has been harder to find. These things are normal, and they are present in every squad at any point in the season.

What a camp offers those athletes is something simple and underrated: a reason to leave it behind for a week.

The routine changes. The pool is different. The sky is different. The conversations at dinner are different. And in that shift, there is an invitation to reset. It does not fix underlying issues, and it should not be expected to. But it creates a moment of discontinuity from whatever pattern an athlete has been stuck in, and that moment is worth something if you recognise it and use it well.

That is, I think, the real value of a training camp at the right moment of the season. Not the extra kilometres. Not the double sessions. The opportunity to bring a group back together, give them a different context to work in, and let them rediscover what it feels like to train alongside people who are working toward the same thing.

We got that this past week in Canet. It was worth every flight.

In their very recent article, Conor Ferguson (Conor is an Olympic swimmer himself, and will represent Ireland and Northern Ireland this summer again) and Carolynne Mason interviewed fifteen Olympic swimmers, fifteen people who have devoted most of their lives to this sport, and asked them how they want to be led. The answers were not revolutionary, and I probably was expecting the tone, but they were clear. These athletes want dialogue; they want to understand the why behind what they are doing. They want to be seen as contributors to the process, not passengers in it. Reading the article, I was reminded that these are already successful athletes, people who have been to the Olympics, with real experience and years of seniority in the sport.

One quote stayed with me: ”At the beginning of my career, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. I just did what I was told. But now I want to know why we’re doing something, what the purpose is.”

That shift from passive execution to active co-construction is what I want to think about here. Not the preference itself, which makes sense, but the question it opens. If senior swimmers increasingly expect and need this kind of dialogue to perform and stay healthy, how are we preparing the teenagers who will eventually become those seniors?

Two systems

I grew up in Italian swimming, and I believe there are some real cultural differences; I might be wrong in generalising here, but from my experience, Italian swimmers expect a more directive authority from their coaches. The structure was clear, and clarity was mostly not offered as a gift: it was held at the top of the hierarchy and released selectively. You did the work because the coach had a plan, and the plan was supposed to be good. There were great coaches in that system, people who cared deeply about their athletes (there still are), but the architecture of the relationship was more vertical. You respected the coach, you executed the programme, and if you had doubts, you raised them carefully and privately, if at all.

This paradigm is probably shifting even over there. The cultural environment matters, and as coaches, we need to understand where we are: what people expect from us, how young athletes are experiencing leadership in school or at home. Italy in 2026 is not Italy in 2016, and it is not the UK. The environment changes quickly, and we need to be able to adapt, or maybe to anticipate the change a little.

When I moved into the Irish coaching environment, the contrast was real. More visible room for the athlete to express themselves. The “why” was often given before you needed to ask for it. Athletes spoke in team meetings, feedback was explicitly invited, coaches would sometimes revise sessions based on how the squad felt that morning.

I did not find one system better than the other across the board. But I did find one thing in the more collaborative culture that I had underestimated: athletes trained inside it had, in many cases, developed a better intuition for managing themselves. They had been given small decisions for years. The skill had compounded.

That is not universal; I have seen Irish programmes where athlete input is performative rather than real. But the cultural default was different, and the outcomes sometimes reflected it.

Two ways to get it wrong

The autocratic model, at its best, produces athletes who can execute precisely. The risk is that athletes cannot navigate ambiguity on their own. When the coach is not there, when the programme changes without explanation, when something in their body does not match what is on paper, they stall. They have been trained to receive decisions more than to make them.

The collaborative model, at its worst, produces athletes who are articulate about their preferences and cannot prioritise. They want ownership but are not experienced enough to carry it without drifting. They negotiate instead of committing. They confuse being heard with being right.

Both patterns are recognisable to anyone who has coached for long enough.

The question is how to deliberately produce something that neither extreme tends to generate: a swimmer who can make a good decision under uncertainty, who can absorb a hard instruction when it is warranted, and who is resilient enough to get something wrong and not fall apart. This might be my own directive mentality talking, but I do believe coaches need to provide guidance and direction. The question is not whether to develop decision-making capacity in young athletes, because it clearly matters, but how, at what level, and at what stage. And what we are willing to call a mistake worth allowing, versus one we have a genuine responsibility to prevent.

Small mistakes, big mistakes

Nassim Taleb writes about antifragility, the property of systems that do not just survive stress but become stronger because of it. Fragile systems break under load, robust systems absorb it. Antifragile systems adapt upward. His argument is that we often confuse protecting something with strengthening it, and in doing so we deny it the small stressors it needs to grow. A jump from 30 metres is not the same as 100 jumps from 0.3. Big mistakes can stop a career. Small mistakes, navigated well, can build one.

I am not applying the concept rigorously here, but it is a useful lens for thinking about young athletes and decision-making. If a swimmer is never exposed to decisions, never asked to choose, never trusted with a small problem to solve, never left to interpret what a session means without a verbal instruction, then when the day comes where they need that capacity, it is not there. You cannot develop the ability to make good decisions without making decisions. Some of them will be wrong.

The developmental question is not whether young swimmers should make mistakes. It is which mistakes, in which order, at what scale.

A teenager choosing the wrong split at a time trial is a recoverable mistake. It is data. It is a conversation. A teenager who has never had to think about pacing, and then goes into a senior championship alone, gets it badly wrong at a moment that matters and has no mental framework for what just happened, that is a different kind of wrong. It is the wrong that comes from protection, not from exposure.

The graduated transfer

This is where the practical challenge lives. Late teenagers (I am thinking of fifteen-to nineteen-year-olds in a development or junior national programme) are often in a complicated position. They are old enough to have opinions and to feel the need for those opinions to be respected. They are not yet experienced enough to consistently distinguish between preferences and needs, between short-term comfort and long-term development.

A teenager who pushes back on a hard aerobic set may be doing so because they understand something about their fatigue that the coach cannot fully see, or they may be doing so because the set looks unpleasant and they want to avoid it. The skill the coach needs is the ability to tell the difference. The skill the athlete needs is the ability to say something accurate about what is happening in their body, and to accept the answer even when it is not the one they wanted.

Neither of those skills develops by accident. What I have found useful, and this comes partly from my own evolution as a coach, partly from observing other environments work and fail, is a graduated exposure model. Not full autonomy too early, which overwhelms. Not full prescription indefinitely, which atrophies. A progressive transfer of decision-making load.

Simple things first: let an athlete decide the order of a dry-land circuit, or whether they want a longer warm-up before a quality set, or the entries for their next meet. Then harder: ask them to write a proposed pacing strategy for a race simulation, and debrief it afterward — not to evaluate whether they were right, but to develop their reasoning. Then harder still: include them in a genuine conversation about how a training block is going. Not feedback theatre. A real conversation where their assessment of the training load can influence what happens next.

I once heard Gianni Leoni — who coached dozens of young swimmers to international level, and in recent years Olympians Arianna Castiglioni and Matteo Rivolta — say that he asked his athletes to write all the main sets for the final two weeks before a major competition, and then he let them do them “unless it is something completely stupid”. The guardrails exist. But the experience of deciding is real, and it compounds. There will be moments where we want to step in and take back some authority, and we need to honestly reflect on whether that is the right thing to do in that moment, or whether we are just uncomfortable watching someone find their own way.

The direction of travel

Ferguson and Mason note, briefly, that their sample was predominantly British and acknowledge that this limits international transferability. I noticed that, and they are right to flag it. But I think the direction of travel is clear, regardless of the starting point. These athletes grew up in various systems and converged on the same preference. We are working with young swimmers today who will be seniors in a cultural environment that they may not even fully comprehend, 5 or more years from now.

The swimmers being produced now, across cultures, will arrive at the senior level carrying this expectation. The coaches who will serve them best are the ones who can run both modes (directive when it is warranted, collaborative when it has been built for) and who have thought in advance about how to earn the second.

The paper is useful for describing what senior athletes want. The question it leaves open, and the one I am sitting with, is how to cultivate the capacity for that dialogue in the athletes who will need it in five or eight years.

A question I cannot answer

How do we know when a young swimmer is ready to carry more of the decision-making load, and when giving them more room will cost them something? The Ferguson and Mason paper does not address this, and I do not think I can find a definitive answer in the literature.

But I suspect the answer has less to do with age than with how we have designed their experience up to that point. A seventeen-year-old who has been given genuine small decisions for three years is not the same as a seventeen-year-old who has only ever executed. The first one can handle a conversation. The second one needs more time, and more time means more deliberate design, not just patience.

If you have worked with late teenagers and found something that worked (a specific practice, a moment, a threshold you watched an athlete cross) I would genuinely like to hear it.

The Paper: Ferguson, C., & Mason, C. (2026). "Olympic swimmers' perspectives on how they want to be led." International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 1–13. Open access — read it in full at https://doi.org/10.1177/17479541261446432

A memory, and a paper

I have a strong memory of a young me attending a camp years ago. Some of the best talents of Italian swimming were present; a few of them eventually became Olympians. Great coaches were leading the camp. And yet, something was off. The sessions were well planned: there is no doubt that the coaching team had the capacity to design effective training. What was not working was the flow on deck. I was there as an assistant, and we didn’t really know what we were supposed to do. I had a swimmer in the team, so I ended up paying attention to him and exchanging some conversations with him for the first couple of days.

That episode came back to me last Monday, as we had a conversation on deck about how we coach. It pulled me back to a six-year ethnography of a rugby academy's coaching staff I read recently. The concept that stayed with me was the description of the session as the front stage of an act, while the back stage was the coaches’ office, the WhatsApp group, and the car park where the coaches met before the sessions. Coaches were described as actors playing a role — the “team” protecting itself from being publicly contradicted by staying in role and planning for contingencies. The WhatsApp group title was *Singing from the Same Sheet*, which says a lot. There was a long preparation phase before the delivery of the session, carefully deciding how the physical space was organised, and how the actors (the coaches) were supposed to occupy the space, move, and control it.

Why swimming is different

Swimming is a different sport. In a club or a performance environment, we plan six, eight, or ten sessions a week. The planning-per-session ratio is much lower, but the cumulative weight is much higher. A lot of work goes into the planning of the cycle and the design of the content of the session; there is no way coaches can spend hours preparing the actual delivery of each session.

In a swim session, there is pretty much no back stage. Rugby coaches retreat to the touchline, the huddle, the booth. We are visible the whole time. Our backstage is built into the deck itself: the walk between lanes, the gap between sets. We have to construct it from nothing. Swimmers spend most of a session staring at the coach at the wall. The intimacy of that is unlike rugby, and the cost of an unmeant gesture, the eye-roll, the sigh, the “I disagree” body language between coaches is paid immediately, every sixty seconds.

Solo, or in a team

A swim coach often delivers a session on their own, like a solo player. The audience is variable: one-to-one, a small group, or sometimes a relatively big group. As a single coach, you have full dramaturgical control. There is no alignment cost. Even when I was in a club environment, I worked in a team most of the time, but for a good percentage of the sessions — even now, in a high-performance role — I am by myself. The risk in that scenario is isolation,

fatigue, and a lack of an external eye. We tend to drift toward personality-led sessions. Even here, some planning helps. Some of the interactions with the swimmers can be deliberately planned in advance — how we want to present a set, how we intend to move. Play our part.

In a team-delivered session, things can become messy easily. Just think of the “two coaches, two corrections” problem. A team-delivered session requires *directive dominance* (someone owns the session overall) and *dramaturgical dominance* (whoever is leading the moment is the only voice for that moment). The head coach can be directive without being dramaturgically present at every cue. A team-delivered session poorly run is, in my experience, always worse than a solo session. Swimmers feel the wobble even if they cannot name it. In swimming, we often default to “two coaches, two lanes” — which isn’t team coaching, it’s parallel solo coaching, and it is sometimes an easier solution when alignment is not possible.

Which sessions deserve more

There are a few sessions where coaches can be more effective by spending more time in preparation. Remember, we tend to spend a lot of time preparing the content — but what goes into the delivery?

A few candidates from my own context:

- Camp sessions, or when the staff does not work together on a day-to-day basis

- Race-pace and quality sets. Tone matters more than content. Decide in advance how to frame it, who speaks directly to the swimmers in a group setting, what the flow on deck looks like, and how we react after a failed effort.

- The first session after a big competition. The emotional load on the squad is high. Don’t improvise the posture.

- The first session of a new training block, or after a break. The defaults you establish here will run for months.

- Visits by national coaches, external observers. The audience has changed; the show needs to be tighter.

Some minutes of agreement in a team, or a short personal reflection before going on stage. That is often all it takes.

The default scene

For the rest — the everyday Tuesday morning — we can fall back on the default scene. A set of protocols that a coaching team has agreed on once, that the squad reads as consistent without anyone needing to think about them. None of them is novel. The work is agreeing on them, writing them down, and treating them as defaults rather than aspirations.

Dancing on deck

I have never read much about how we move on deck, but I believe this is an under-discussed skill, for age group and senior coaches alike. When I was in my early twenties I worked with a coach who had simple rules. No standing with your arms crossed. No sitting on the block. Pretty directive and top-down, but it worked, in some ways.

When coaches move “on stage”, the position itself communicates. Are we close to the pool, engaged with the set? Or on the side, observing and letting the session flow? When should we be at the top of the lanes, to direct? Great coaches can be distant from the session without being disengaged — swimmers perceive the presence or the lack of it. When we work in a team, our position sends a message even more strongly, and there is no doubt that swimmers of any age are good observers. There will be moments where coaches are moving together. There will be moments where they are communicating without speaking. There are silent eye contacts across the pool.

I do believe that there is space for improvisation, not everything must be planned in advance. In a group

The backstage, we do have

In the performance centre where I am an assistant coach, our backstage is mainly a weekly staff meeting. That is where discussions should take place, before stepping on stage and appearing like we are singing from the same sheet. A weekly meeting on its own won’t do enough work. The backstage keeps running in less formal meetings around the week, in pre-session interactions, in post-session feedback and debriefing. A lot happens on deck. Teams can use many tools and many physical or non-physical spaces — the office, the group chat, the walk to the car park.

The backstage should be planned carefully, and it should follow a flow toward a clear outcome. The first step, I think, is to implement post-session debriefs. Not for every session — we should be able to discriminate which sessions deserve more attention and offer more learning. Even five minutes in the office before parting is enough. The rugby paper makes a strong case for a confessional culture: *”I missed that, I should have caught that.”* Hard to do in swimming, because we tend to leave the deck and run. Worth building in.

My personal journey

Two practices keep me honest.

The first is reflection. I have learned the power of self-reflection and I keep going back to it regularly. I keep a personal journal using self-directed voice notes. I can do that in the 200 metres from the pool to the car park. If I had meaningful interactions with the swimmers I was working with, if there is a conversation I would replay, I record it. It can be a small reflection, but it can help me in a future scenario.

The second is that I plan harder when I lead solo. As a team, our roles are well established. We go on scene, and we can do well without much preparation. I have been in the role for more than two years now, with a fairly stable staff structure. The sessions flow, even though we are far from perfect. As the article says, *”We don’t want them to see the cogs turning; just to feel that the engine’s running smoothly when they do pay attention to us.”* I believe we are capable of that. But it is not unusual for me to deliver sessions on my own when the head coach is travelling, and those are the sessions I prepare hardest. I know swimmers observe, and small changes in my behaviour have an impact on how they feel through the session, and ultimately, on how they respond.

Designing it

The article I read last week suggests that the politics of teamwork is often misread as dysfunction. In swimming we tend to treat “how coaches work together” as a personality issue. It isn’t. It’s a design problem. We can design it. We mostly don’t.

The paper Hall, E. T., Nichol, A. J., Morgan, C. T., McCutcheon, M., & Potrac, P. (2024). "Understanding workplace collaboration in professional rugby coaching: a dramaturgical analysis." Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 16(4), 352–367. Open access — read it in full at https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2024.2304736

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with two emerging Italian swimmers who told me, plainly, that they’ve had to step away from their academic ambitions. The reason is that if they want to be ready for LA28, the maths of training, recovery, and study no longer add up. That’s not an unusual story in our sport; it’s the version of the student-athlete trade-off that gets resolved by removing one half of the equation.

Of course, there are notable exceptions to the rule, but this still seems to be the “system” for the majority of our young athletes back at home, and it is frustrating. Good support is available for performance swimmers in my home country. Still, those who aspire to continue studying at the university level have to rely on their own resilience and on the support of a Club and a Coach capable of providing it.

I work mostly with University students in Ireland, and the setup we have is quite unique: student-athletes are facilitated and supported in their dual career as full-time students at the University, and swimmers with international aspirations for the most part. But this doesn’t erase the challenge; it just changes the shape of it.

I genuinely believe it can be a big part of my role as an Assistant Coach to support swimmers with their individual schedules in this period and help them to organise their training, keeping track of everyone’s needs; what I see at this time of year isn’t athletes failing to prepare. It’s athletes carrying two loads at once, and the second one, the cognitive and emotional load of exams, sits in places we don’t always measure.

The fear of missing training

The stress our swimmers feel during exam week isn’t only about the exams; for some, a surprising amount of it is about training. The fear of missing training time, of the work not being done, that adds a layer on top of an already heavy week.

In the programme I am coaching, we try to take pressure off. The Head Coach promotes flexibility in the approach to training in these weeks. We move sessions around when timetables clash. We reduce volume in the pool and in the gym during exam week, and that reduction is tailored to the individual: where they are in the season, how they’re handling the load, and what their event group needs. Our first-years tend to need more guidance through this; they haven’t yet learned what their own version of “manageable” looks like.

What I’ve stopped trying to do

I used to be more reluctant about giving athletes that space.

Earlier in my career, including in the years I spent working with school-age swimmers, I worried that if I created too much room during intense academic periods, I’d lose something in terms of control, culture, and “the standard”. I wanted to reinforce the idea that if you’re organised, you can do both. And I still believe that athletes who learn to handle dual demands early become better-equipped competitors and better-equipped adults.

But my perspective has shifted. There are plenty of moments in a season to teach that lesson, and exam weeks are not one of them. When pressure is already high, the right move is usually to let them take ownership of their own time and not to add another voice telling them what they should be doing.

That’s a coaching choice, not a softening of standards. It assumes the work has been done in the months before, and it trusts the athlete to be honest about what they can handle. With our more experienced swimmers, that trust is rarely misplaced. With the first-years, we stay closer.

Stress is stress

There’s a piece of physiology that has stayed with me since I attended coaches’ conferences in Italy in the early 2000s. The work being shared then was clear: the markers we use to monitor an athlete’s readiness (the performance indicators we track) are suppressed in similar ways regardless of the source of the stress. Training stress, cognitive stress, and external life stress. The body responds without much regard for the label we put on it. I saw this reinforced and confirmed in more recent research.

That idea stuck with me, but for years, I was still reluctant to act on it fully. If I felt a block of work “had to be done” in the pool, I’d push for it, even when the athlete was carrying a week of exams on the other side. The data was telling me one thing, my instinct as a coach was telling me another.

I think I’ve made my peace with that now. If the body reads cognitive stress as stress, then planning around exam periods isn’t a concession; it’s good coaching. The week’s training shouldn’t fight the exam load; it should accommodate it, the same way we’d accommodate any other significant stressor in an athlete’s life.

Planning more, controlling less

The work for us as coaches is upstream. Look at the academic calendar at the start of the season. Build the cycle around it where you can. Communicate early with the school or the Universities, if it is possible to create this channel of communication. Decide in advance — not in the moment — where exam weeks will sit in the training plan. Have the conversation with each athlete about what their version of “reduced” looks like.

From a purely coaching point of view, I believe in combining stress-monitoring tools with frequent, open communication with the swimmers. We can use questionnaires, apps, and forms, which are, in general, good tools to keep track of the big picture, and honest conversations to make sure we are connected; one can’t replace the other, and vice versa. As Coaches, we can’t completely control all the variables, but we can do our best to keep everyone safe, injury-free, and basically ready to train hard when it counts.

Then, when the week arrives, do less. Talk less. Trust the planning.

The two Italian swimmers I spoke with have made a difficult call, and they may be right for their own circumstances. But the version of our sport I want to keep coaching is one where that call doesn’t have to be made — where athletes don’t have to choose between an education and the Olympic Games because the system around them couldn’t hold both.

That work starts long before exam week. It just becomes visible during it.

Cam McEvoy is the fastest swimmer in the world, and he is generous about it. He speaks openly about his training, his thinking, and the principles he and his coach have built together. For anyone working in the sport, the recent run of podcasts and YouTube videos is a small gift, a chance to sit, listen, and try to learn something.

Listening has been my main reaction. There is a lot in his approach that looks innovative, and some of it is, but several of the ideas have been floating around the coaching world for the last twenty or thirty years. The focus on neuromuscular performance. The interference effect between high-volume aerobic work and pure speed. The use of technology to break down a race. The transfer of power into the water. None of these is a new question; what is new, and what is worth sitting with, is the way McEvoy and his coach have built a plan around them in his specific context. The art is not in the ingredients. The art is in how the plan was put together, for one athlete, at one stage of one career.

That distinction is the part that is hardest to talk about online.

Social media rewards extremes. When a top athlete describes a method that sits outside what the algorithm calls “traditional”, the conversation tends to collapse into a love-it-or-hate-it argument very quickly. There is rarely room for the slower work of trying to understand what is actually being said, what is transferable, what is unique to one swimmer in one context. So the discussion becomes branded content. Suddenly there are programmes for sale aimed at “teenage specialised sprinters” who are apparently not supported by their “traditional coach”, and I find myself wondering whether I am traditional, or not. It is genuinely difficult to know, because the labels are doing more work than the ideas underneath them.

I would rather ask a different question. What can a coach working with a young swimmer actually take from all of this?

Renato Canova, one of the fathers of modern Italian endurance coaching, has a phrase that has stayed with me through every group I have coached. Alleni la persona, non la specialità. You train the person, not the event. He was talking about senior world-class runners, athletes who are already deep into the demands of their event, and yet I tend to use it as a general guide. Specialisation is a powerful tool, and at a certain point in a career it becomes inevitable. For an athlete pushing toward the top of the world, performance does revolve around understanding the key demands of a race and working unilaterally to deliver them at the highest level. Cam McEvoy is doing this beautifully. But the principle behind it is not new. It is being done better than other experiments, in a specific context.

With younger athletes, I believe the question is not whether specialisation is right or wrong. The question is when and how. And the “how” is where I think the discourse online really fails us, we can still teach young people. We can educate them on the reward of patience, on the connection between training and self-knowledge, on the slow process of becoming the best version of themselves, I still believe we can “meet them where they are”, understand them, and genuenly work to develop their skills and capacities, respecting them and without destroying them. That work is not in tension with developing speed or sprint ability, I believe it is the foundation of it.

Energy system work (in a certain sense, volume, or volume progression) is part of the toolbox a young swimmer needs, the same way neuromuscular work is, the same way technical efficiency and speed development are. The real question is which energy system works, in what dose, for the person in front of us. Not the category, the person. When that question gets answered badly, when a programme is dropped on a teenager because the spreadsheet says so, the cost is rarely a slow time at a national meet. The cost is a frustrated young swimmer who quietly stops believing in the process, and a coach who blames the athlete instead of the plan.

Claudio Rossetto, one of the great Italian coaches of 50 and 100 freestyle, made this point clearly. In my early years of coaching courses, I heard him say repeatedly that we, as a profession, have ruined full generations of sprinters by forcing them onto pre-conceived plans of hard endurance work, under the logic of “if you break, you fail”, and that was 20 years ago! So it hurts to see “factions” of coaches who stand behind their beliefs now, instead of trying to understand how we can keep all this together, long-term development, personal progression, and individualisation.

My reaction is more nuanced, and I found myself reflecting on how we support the development of young swimmers who show attitude and natural talent for “sprint” swimming; what I take from Cam McEvoy's ”method”, or what I can understand of it, is the reminder that the planning is downstream of the relationship. The art of coaching is primarily an act of understanding people, of being curious about who they are, where they came from, what they believe, what they can tolerate, what they want; the training plan is a hypothesis built from that understanding, and the hypothesis gets tested and rewritten.

That is a slower conversation than the one happening on Instagram, and it is a more interesting one.

I would like this Substack to be a place for that slower conversation, so I will end with a question rather than a conclusion. For the coaches reading this, what was the moment in your career when you realised the plan was not the thing, when understanding the athlete in front of you changed how you wrote the next session? I would like to hear it.