Almost every senior figure in a gymnastics club - the owner, the head coach, the director, the department lead - came up through coaching. Their route in varied wildly. In some parts of the sport there is a structured qualification pathway. In others there is none. Some had mentors. Many did not. Some were taught progressions, safety, session design, and competition management. Many picked those things up in real time, from whoever happened to be around, in whatever order the club needed them.
What almost none of them received, on any route, was training in how to lead.
The moment they open a club - or are promoted into a role that requires them to lead one - every skill they were never taught becomes the daily work. Hiring. Firing. HR. Payroll. Cash flow. Strategy. Vision. Difficult conversations. Holding people accountable when it costs the relationship. Building a culture that survives whoever happens to be in the room that day. All of it, all at once, with no curriculum, no clear route, and - usually - no one to ask.
What we are seeing across clubs
In our Health Check of 250+ club leaders, 52% report they have no external coaching or business support - no mentor, no consultant, no board, no peer group, nothing formal beyond the club walls. In our 2026 Club Study, 82% of leaders report constant or recurring worry about the club's future or their own ability to lead it.
These numbers describe leadership in the sport as it currently exists: largely alone, and often anxious.
The paradox
Here is the harder truth that most conversations about leadership development in the sport avoid.
The evidence that leaders need support is overwhelming. The data says it. The conversations say it. The tone of the sector, when leaders talk honestly, says it.
These are, to be clear, great people. Many of them are running significant operations they built themselves from nothing, that employ multiple staff and serve hundreds of families. What follows is not a criticism of them as leaders. It is a description of one specific gap that stops even the strongest of them from moving further.
Some leaders have responded to it. They have sought out formal, ongoing, structured support - coaching, mentorship, peer groups, work with people from outside the sport. These are, disproportionately, the leaders whose clubs are ahead. Ask them how they got there and the answer usually includes some version of the same thing: they stopped trying to figure it out alone.
Many leaders also have informal support - access to Facebook groups, calls with their peers, conversations with a spouse etc. That kind of help is real and it is useful. But it is ad hoc. It is not structured. It is not designed to build leadership capacity over years.
The gap the sport has to be honest about is the gap between ad hoc conversations and ongoing, structured support. Many owners running significant businesses - six, seven, even eight figures - will invest small fortunes in equipment, marketing, one off coach education and travel. Far fewer will invest even a small percentage of that same revenue into structured support for the people leading it all.
There is a cultural reason for this. Gymnastics teaches toughness. It teaches self-reliance. It teaches you to figure it out, push through, not complain. Those traits produced most of the sport's owners and shaped them into the coaches they are - and they also work against those same owners seeking structured help when they become the ones responsible for everyone else.
"I'll just deal with it" is a survival response, deeply learned. It is also, in the context of running a modern club, the wrong response.
The paradox is this: leaders in the sport already believe, deeply, in the discipline of coaching. They preach it, live it, and build their careers on it. Many just haven't yet applied it to themselves in the sustained form that would move them further.
Leadership as a discipline
Leadership is not a personality trait. It is not something you either have or don't have. It is a discipline - with principles, practices, tools, and skills that can be taught, learned, practised, mentored, and improved.
The clubs that are already ahead have found ways to import this infrastructure from outside the sport - hiring business coaches, joining owner peer groups, working with mentors from other industries, building their own boards. It is neither cheap nor convenient. It is also what has put them ahead.
What should be true by 2027
Clubs in 2027 will operate inside a sport that has stopped confusing self-reliance for strength. The support that leaders need - coaching, mentorship, peer communities, structured learning - already exists in many forms. What the next decade needs is more leaders recognising the support that already exists, and taking the step forward to reach for it.
There will be a normalised expectation that a serious leader, like a serious athlete, invests in their own development throughout their career. That normalisation is the work.
The support already exists. Willingness has to catch up.
Mission Briefings is a series on the operational realities facing serious gymnastics clubs. Briefing 006 drops Monday 20 July.