At USA Gymnastics National Congress this year a number of club owners got together by the USGCOA booth in the trade show. These club owners were discussing the shortage of coaches available throughout the country. There are many reason for this. In the last few years fewer new coaches have joined our ranks. All the turbulence within the gymnastics community has kept some coaches sidelined. With coaches like Liuken, Chow and Brestyan now coaching overseas we have lost some great leaders in our sport.

With fewer coaches joining our profession it seems like there are hundreds of unfilled coaching vacancies in state after state.

But we need to stop calling it a coaching shortage.

You can’t solve a problem starting with the wrong diagnosis. If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage. If I can’t get a fine dining meal for a buck, that doesn’t mean there’s a food shortage. And if appropriately skilled humans don’t want to work for me under the conditions I’ve set, that doesn’t mean there’s a human shortage.

Calling the situation a “coaching shortage” suggests something like a crop failure or a hijacker grabbing truckloads before they can get to market. It suggests that there simply aren’t enough people out there who could do the job.

There is no reason to believe that this is true. But pretending that it is true sets up justification for a variety of bad “solutions” to the shortage. “Since there aren’t enough coaches,” the reasoning goes, “then we might as well just let any warm body coach in the gym.” Some gyms have adopted the idea of letting any person with any college degree take charge of a class or group of team kids. We are lucky that we are still a field that we cannot be replaced by computers and online learning!

Some gyms instead of saying, “Well, you’d better bend to free market forces and make a better offer,” instead ask USAG to change the rules so that gyms can hire folks who have no real credentials. Some gyms have suggested that a single super coach could handle an entire gym full of gymnasts without any loss of the quality that made them super. All of these choices are less than optimal.

I believe it was Jeff Metzker who said, “It is better to be UNDERSTAFFED than POORLY STAFFED”

All of those “solutions” rest on the premise that there just aren’t enough qualified humans in the world, that the magic coach tree hasn’t borne enough fruit. Given that premise, these all seem like ways to address the problem, even if means settling for less than the high-quality coaches all students deserve.

But if we assume there are plenty of qualified people who could choose to enter our gyms and stay there for a career, then we realize that we’re dealing with an entirely different problem. Gymnasts who could choose to become coaches are choosing not to. People who could choose to stay in the gym are instead engaging in a slow-motion strike, an extended exodus, and our real problem is how to attract and retain those people.

Money is obviously an issue. Also that being a GYMNASTICS COACH is often not viewed as a profession (just ask my father). But over the past couple of years coaches have also suffered a steady drumbeat of disrespect, the repeated refrain that a guy who coaches women’s gymnastics must have a problem. That coaching gymnastics is just a stepping stone until someone can get a “real job”.   The rise of “any warm body will do” solutions sends the message that coaching is such a simple job that any shmoe with minimal training can do it.

Qualified people exist, but too many gyms want to pretend otherwise, in part because there is one other appealing aspect to viewing this as a coach shortage. The shortage model allows gym owners and managers to shrug and say, “Hey, they just aren’t out there. It’s not our fault.”

When the dealer won’t sell me my $1.98 Porsche, I can blame it on him and complain, “It’s not my fault he wouldn’t sell to me.” Or, I can suck it up, take a look in the mirror and say, “If I want that car, I need to do better.”

As gym owners we need to make coaching a profession. Educate our staff. Make them proud of what they do. We need to charge for classes and team enough to pay our staff a sustainable wage. If we do that we will see the ranks of coaches grow. Making coaching and teaching gymnastics a competitive profession.