The First International Youth Coach Course in Bali: Where Pool Swimming and Open Water Swimming First Share One Curriculum

Opening

On the final morning of the course, on a beach in southern Bali, eighteen coaches from twelve countries lined up shoulder to shoulder at the water's edge. None of them was an athlete. None would swim ten kilometres under the sun. Yet they were asked to do exactly what an open water swimmer must do in a real race: dive in together, find the current, tuck in behind the person ahead, and hold their breathing while an entire mass of bodies churned around them. This is pack swimming. Watching from the shore, I saw the thing that has pulled at me through eighteen years of writing: people learning how to become someone else, not in order to win, but in order to teach others to win.

This was the first international youth coach course run by World Aquatics to combine pool swimming and open water swimming into a single programme. Eight days, from 3 to 10 August, in Bali. No medals, no records, no touch of the wall to be written into a table. And precisely for that reason, it is the hardest story to write — and the most overlooked story in the sport.

Context: a course that sits at the foundation of the pyramid

To understand this course, you have to place it at the right level. The competitive pyramid of swimming has the Olympics at its peak, then the World Championships, the World Cup, continental meets, national meets. The coach course in Bali sits at none of those levels. It sits at the foundation — the layer that produces the teachers, and those teachers are the ones who produce the athletes of ten years from now.

World Aquatics operates a tiered certification system: the Age Group Coach, the Youth Coach, and the Performance Coach. Delivery follows a blended model — online learning through the CORAL e-learning platform, followed by in-person practicals. This model is not new in sports education broadly, but it is the key to understanding why an eight-day course in Bali matters more than it appears to.

Of the eighteen participants in the first edition, seventeen received scholarships. That fact says more than any promotional line could. A scholarship, in the language of federations, is an instrument of access and equity. It means World Aquatics is trying to widen the geographic base of certified coaches, rather than serving only wealthy federations that can afford to send someone. Twelve countries in one room is a signal: the programme's target population lies in developing federations, where open water infrastructure is still young.

The person behind the open water certification is Mel Tantrum — the Australian Swimming Paralympic Programme National Head Coach, and the lead developer of World Aquatics' open water swimming coaches certification courses. One person holding two roles at once — performance peak and development foundation — is a detail worth pausing on. It shows the organisers deliberately seeding knowledge from the high-performance tier down into the development tier, rather than keeping the two worlds apart.

Core: what the curriculum teaches, and how

I have read many coach curricula. Most of them are alike in teaching arm technique, leg technique, and how to read a stopwatch. The Bali course does not follow that path. Its content revolves around things that are more abstract but more decisive: athlete-centred coaching, long-term athlete development, season planning, session design, communication skills, and building positive learning environments.

Reading this, I thought of the line I still remind myself of whenever I sit down before a match: "I don't read the results table. I read the racing line in their eyes." A good coach curriculum must also read the racing line in a student's eyes. Placing "long-term athlete development" and "positive learning environments" on the same level as technique shows the organisers understand that a good teacher is not the one who keeps the best stopwatch, but the one who knows how to keep a child on the lane long enough to grow.

But the part that truly sets the course apart lies in open water. Here, the curriculum teaches things that pool swimming simply does not have: pack swimming, drafting to exploit drag, feeding during the swim, beach or in-water start technique, and sighting with the head up. Each of these skills is a survival problem rather than a speed problem. In an open water race, the swimmer with the best arm technique can lose simply because they do not know how to draft. The one with the fastest sprint can lose everything simply by swimming off course.

Alongside this is the safety and risk management component — one of the most emphasised parts of the course. This is the detail I consider the most important, and also the one sports journalism most easily skips. Open water swimming is the sport whose arena — sea, lake, river — cannot be controlled. Teaching a coach how to take a group of children into open water safely is not teaching a sport; it is teaching responsibility. A pool coach who errs makes a student slower. An open water coach who errs can mean a student does not come back.

The course's teaching method follows a theory-then-application loop: classroom learning, then practicals in the water and on the ocean. This is standard practice in modern coach education, not a technical invention. Bali's novelty lies in combining two disciplines into one curriculum and taking participants into the real sea, not in its pedagogy.

Tantrum called the rapid growth of participants' confidence when running open water sessions the standout element. I believe that, but I also know that a teacher's confidence has never been the final measure. "I trust intuition, but I have learned to let intuition wait for data." Here, intuition says this course is heading in the right direction. The data is still waiting.

Core: why now, and why Australia

In eighteen years of watching swimming, I have noticed a pattern: sports only start investing in the coaching layer once they acquire enough commercial and Olympic value to need a stable supply of athletes. Open water swimming is at exactly that point. The 10km marathon event has been in the Olympics since 2026, and age-group open water events are drawing more and more participants. As the movement grows, demand rises for coaches capable of running open water sessions. That is the bottleneck the Bali course is trying to loosen.

That bottleneck is not in arm or leg technique. It is in coaches' confidence when they must take students into the sea. Many excellent pool coaches will not accept an open water session, simply because they were never taught how. The World Aquatics course aims straight at that gap.

Notably, there is Australia's role. In open water swimming, Australia is quietly becoming the world's de facto technical authority. When Australia's national Paralympic head coach is also the lead developer of World Aquatics' open water certification, Australian experience is being packaged into a global standard. This is an interesting reverse flow: rather than certification being imposed purely from the top down, it is exported from a nation with a seafaring tradition. For someone born in Vietnam and working in China, as I am, this story carries another layer of meaning: countries small in population but strong in system can shape standards for the entire world.

And there is a detail I consider the philosophical core of the whole course, embedded in the way the organisers describe themselves: "no single country or system has all the answers." It is a diplomatic line, but it is also a strategic statement. It means World Aquatics is deliberately decentralising open water knowledge, rather than anchoring it in one nation. Twelve countries in a first edition is the concrete expression of that philosophy.

Core: the scaling problem and the scholarship door

Looking only at Bali, you see a small course. Looking at the architecture behind it, you see a scaling strategy.

The blended online-and-in-person model, plus the CORAL platform, is a low-marginal-cost scaling tool. It is the only way a global organisation can reach coaches in federations whose local organisational capacity is limited. If every certification required an eight-day in-person course on an island, the pace of dissemination would be capped by budget and visas. But if the theory moves online and only the practical requires meeting in person, the cost of training a new coach drops significantly.

The scholarship mechanism — seventeen funded places in the first edition — is the other face of that strategy. It says the organisers do not want certification to become a privilege of those with money. But it also creates a dependency: if the funding comes from World Aquatics' budget, then scalability depends on whether that budget is sustained. This is a point every development programme faces, and one I will return to later.

On the participant side, post-course feedback showed a constructive signal: they asked for more open water practicals, more race simulations, more real-life coaching scenarios, and more discussion time. Reading that list, I see something very human: teachers who had just been handed theory immediately demanded more practice. They wanted more time in the sea, not more time in the classroom.

Core: placing Bali on swimming's movement map

In my profession I have an odd habit: I always try to read one sport in the language of another. I once decoded Luka Modric through the curve-running principle of track athletics, and once saw the starting technique of a 100m sprinter in Federico Chiesa's sudden changes of direction. The Bali course suggests a similar comparison to me.

A coach education course is a relay. "The World Cup turns out to be a ninety-minute relay." I wrote that years ago, and it still holds here. World Aquatics holds the baton, runs a leg through experts like Tantrum, then passes it to eighteen coaches in Bali. Those teachers will run the next leg, and pass the baton to their young athletes over the next two to eight years. The real race does not happen in Bali. It happens in pools and on beaches we have not yet seen.

On the global open water map, Bali is a drill bit at the foundation layer. The foundation does not produce medals, but without a foundation no medal is durable. And seen from Southeast Asia — where I was born — the choice of Bali over a European city is a signal worth noting. It shows the region is being viewed as soil that needs seeding, not merely as a market that consumes results.

The contrarian angle: 94% says nothing yet

Here I must state plainly what a public-relations piece would not.

The most cited figure about the course is 94%. Ninety-four percent of the eighteen participant evaluations said the course exceeded their expectations. On the surface, that is a perfect communications achievement. But on close inspection, I see three problems.

First, the sample is only eighteen people, and all are self-reported. A satisfaction survey with a small, self-selected sample is the weakest of all measurement tools.

Second, seventeen of the eighteen were funded by scholarships. When someone does not pay to attend a programme, the cost barrier — the most common cause of dissatisfaction — has been removed before the course even begins. This tends to lift satisfaction scores naturally. What researchers call courtesy bias — people tend to speak well of something free and run by a large organisation — may be contributing significantly to that number.

Third, and most importantly, those eighteen evaluations measure feeling, not outcome. The programme set its own ultimate measure: what coaches take back to their athletes and programmes. But the article provides no data on that at all. There is no assessment of whether coaches teach better after the course, whether they run more open water sessions, whether they keep more athletes on the lane.

In other words, the programme's central claim — raising global coaching standards — is running ahead of the evidence. The evidence available is enough to say the course was warmly received. It is not enough to say coaching standards have been raised. This is an optimistic expectation gap, but at a small scale and low stakes, so it does not deserve to be equated with the exaggerations of competitive sport. It is simply unproven.

There is one more thing that nags at me. Combining pool and open water into one programme is a good idea for access, but does it risk diluting the depth of both? A coach trained to teach both could become someone who knows a little about everything and not enough about anything. The organisers surely have an answer, but that answer will only come from a generation of coaches certified under the new model, years from now. This is a first-edition format, and its durability is unproven. "The hurdler doesn't ask how high the hurdle is. They only ask where the finish line is." The right question for the Bali course is not how good it is, but where it leads.

The contrarian angle: the real risk lies elsewhere

When I write about an event like this, I always ask myself: where is the real risk?

The risk of a coach course is not injury, not doping, not a controversial officiating decision. There is no athlete here to be harmed. The real risk lies in three places: the model's survivability, the ability to measure impact, and the ability to sustain resources.

On survivability, a first-time combined format always faces a decision about whether to scale. The Bali satisfaction survey, with all its limitations, is the evidence for the organisers' next step. If that number were low, the model could stop. That means the future of an entire development direction depends on the quality of a small survey.

On measurability, this is the biggest gap. A development programme without downstream impact assessment is like a training session without a stopwatch. You know you worked, but you do not know how much you improved. World Aquatics has the resources to do this — tracking graduates, measuring their programmes — but the article does not show it happening.

On sustaining resources, scholarships are a double-edged sword. They open doors for talent in poorer federations, but they also create a reach ceiling dependent on budget. To reach thousands of coaches rather than dozens, the only way is for the CORAL online platform to carry most of the training. And that raises a quality question: can a coach who learns open water through a screen teach open water safety in real life?

I do not have an answer to that last question. But I know that anyone who has stood on a beach watching a group of children walk into the water understands: some things are only learned with wet feet.

An overlooked blind spot: the silence of the number

In my profession, beautiful numbers often hide bad stories, and bad numbers often hide beautiful stories. In Bali, the beautiful number is 94%. But the real story lies where there is no number at all.

There is no number for how many attending coaches came from countries with real open water infrastructure. There is no number for how many of the eighteen participants ran their first open water session after the course. There is no number for how many young athletes will benefit. These are the hard numbers. They take time, money, and patience to track. They do not appear in a press release eight days after a course ends.

I write this not to diminish the course. I write it because I believe the most respectful way to treat a serious development programme is to measure it seriously. A course that teaches teachers to read the racing line in a student's eyes should also be read by that same measure.

And there is one more thing I want to add, as someone working between two cultures. A programme like this, scaled the right way, can be a bridge for countries that have never had a voice in open water swimming. But if it stops at generous scholarships for a small, selected group, it will become an honorary club rather than a system. The difference between those two outcomes lies in whether the programme dares to measure itself.

The most memorable thing: the teacher as a hurdler

Back to the beach in Bali, on that final morning. I watched eighteen adults wade into the water, clumsy at first, then gradually finding a rhythm. And I thought about something I have learned after many years: the best teacher is not the one who knows the most. It is the one who dares to step into the water ahead of their students, and knows that they too are learning.

"A crisis takes away the arena, not the trajectory." I wrote that in 2026, when every competition was postponed and stadiums stood empty. It still holds in Bali. A course with no grandstand, no medals, no one cheering. But its trajectory — if it runs true — will reach lanes we have never seen.

Conclusion: a seed does not bloom in eight days

If there is one thing I want readers to carry away from this piece, it is this: do not judge a coach course by its eight days. Judge it by eight years later.

People often praise the athletes who break records, and rightly so. But behind every record is a teacher who taught that child how to stand on the starting line for the first time. The Bali course is an attempt to seed that layer of soil — the layer no camera points at. It may fail to scale, may dilute its depth, may be a lovely pilot that is forgotten. But it may also be the start of a generation of open water coaches whom, ten years from now, someone will mention without knowing it began on a beach in Bali, in August of this year.

For me, the most admirable thing about an event like this is not the 94%, but the image of eighteen adults daring to jump into the sea to learn how to teach others to jump into the sea. It is an act of humility, and in sport, humility is often the most durable thing.

The only thing left I want to send to the organisers: will you measure your success by eighteen evaluations, or by the lanes those eighteen people will open in the next ten years?