The head coach has been up since 7am. By 8am she was answering parent emails before the school run. By 10am she was tracking down cover for an assistant who had called in sick. By 11am she was rebuilding the rota for the rest of the week. By 1pm she was rewriting a job description for a hire she hopes to make this month. By 3pm she was writing up a safeguarding note. She got on the gym floor at 4pm, two squads back-to-back. She will not leave the building before nine. When she's home she'll have a dozen parent and staff messages to catch up on, and onboarding notes to write for the assistant who joined six weeks ago and is already wavering.
Look at her day and what becomes visible is something most leaders in the sport feel but rarely name. A serious portion of leadership time - every day, every week, every month, every year - is being spent on the workforce. Not on coaching. Not on athletes. On finding, holding, and replacing the people who do the coaching. Recruitment is no longer a moment in the calendar. It is a permanent state.
What we are seeing across clubs
Every serious club in the sport is recruiting all the time. Not by choice - by structural necessity. Fewer young people are entering the profession than leaving it. The friction to qualify has risen. The lifestyle the previous generation accepted is not the lifestyle the next one is signing up for. Burnout, among the experienced coaches who built most clubs and among the head coaches now running them, has taken its own toll on the supply side. There are fewer people available, and the people who are available want different things from work than the model has historically offered.
In our 2026 Club Study - leadership submissions from clubs across the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and a dozen other countries - 63% of clubs reported that their most recent coaching role took more than a month to fill. 17% reported that it remains unfilled.
When clubs do hire, they tend to be hiring for the same profile: young, willing to relocate or commute, positive, no background issues, ambitious but compliant, experienced or mouldable, a team player, physically strong enough to spot [and competent too], a natural with people. The profile is reasonable on paper. In practice, the demand for that person across the sector is enormous, the supply is small, and the number of clubs chasing the same hire is still growing - new clubs open every year. Most clubs end up doing what they have to do: hiring whoever is willing and available. The compromises compound, and the cycle restarts faster than it used to.
But here is the part of the picture that most conversations in the sport skip. Even when a club finds someone reasonable to hire, the structure they are walking into is usually not built to hold them.
Inside most clubs, the bridge between hire and contribution is missing. The role is not written down clearly. The early months unfold without a plan. The new coach is on the floor running sessions within days and the structure they need around them to thrive has not been built. Many drift. Some leave inside six months. The cycle starts again.
In the same Club Study, the pattern across clubs is consistent: 58% offer no structured onboarding. 64% have no regular one-to-one rhythm between coaches and their head coach. 76% have no defined progression pathway. 79% have no documented performance review process. 36% have no written employment contracts for their coaching staff. 29% don't track their coach turnover at all. What a new coach walks into in most clubs isn't a choice - it's a default. The structures that would hold them exist informally, in people's heads and inherited habits, but rarely on paper or anywhere the new coach can find them. The hire finds their feet as best they can, and the club hopes they stay.
This is the layer of the workforce problem hardest to talk about, because it sits squarely on the structural side of the club. The labour market is hard, for everyone. The clubs that struggle most are the ones recruiting hard into a structure that hasn't been built to hold the people they're recruiting.
Three layers of the workforce challenge
There is not one workforce problem. There are three, stacked.
Supply. Fewer people are entering the profession than leaving it. The pool is shrinking - and the number of clubs competing for it is growing. New clubs open every year, all looking for the same kind of person. Geography compounds it. Clubs in larger or more attractive areas can sometimes attract talent willing to relocate. Clubs in smaller towns or less appealing markets usually cannot. They are forced to develop their workforce from within, often from their own gymnasts. But most gymnasts are young, transient, and don't yet see coaching as a long-term career. They want to study, travel, try other things. The pressures on supply compound: a shrinking pool, growing competition for it, and a geography that sets the difficulty level for every club inside that dynamic.
Profile. The hire the sport wants and the hire the sport can find have drifted apart. Most clubs are hiring at some level of compromise to the ideal - and the compromise is not the failure, it is the constraint.
Structure. Once a hire is made, the system inside the club that should hold them is typically thin, inherited, or absent. In a separate study of club leaders, only 40% reported having a visible organisational structure that gives staff clarity on roles - 36% have one but it isn't shared, and a quarter have none at all. This is the layer with the most agency, and historically the layer with the least leadership time devoted to it - because the day rarely leaves room for the people who would build it.
What should be true by 2027
The most professional and well-funded operators - often the ones who have stopped recruiting at speed and started recruiting from strength - already see the workforce as something to build inside the club, not something to find outside it. They have built infrastructure around the people they hire. The people they hire stay longer, contribute more, and grow into the work the club needs them to do.
The clubs that lead the next decade will be the ones that join them. Not by recruiting harder, but by building the structure inside the club that turns a found person into a long-term team member. They will accept that recruitment, on its own, is not a strategy. It is a symptom of the structure underneath it.
Recruitment is one thing. Building a workforce is another. The clubs that recognise the difference will spend the next ten years overtaking the clubs that don't.
The hire is half the work. The structure that holds it is the other half.
Mission Briefings is a series on the operational realities facing serious gymnastics clubs. Briefing 003 drops Monday 29 June.