Sixty-four per cent of UK swimming coaches report symptoms of depression. Sixty-seven per cent report anxiety. Among the athletes those same coaches train, the figures sit around four and five per cent.
Read that again. The people on poolside are roughly fourteen times more likely to be struggling than the swimmers they're there to look after.
Those numbers come from a Nottingham Trent University study — "On an Island Alone," led by Dr Ella McLoughlin and published in The Sport Psychologist in early 2026, funded by the British Swimming Coaches Association, drawn from around 150 coaches ranging from club level to senior international. A fifth of them reported depression that was moderate or severe. More than a third reported anxiety in that range. Nearly a third said they felt lonely and isolated in the role. Almost four in ten didn't know whether any support existed for them at all.
This is the part of the sport nobody puts on the recruitment leaflet.
The shape of the problem
The study found something worth sitting with: the more hours a coach spent on poolside, the worse their emotional exhaustion. Full-time coaches reported worse depression, anxiety and emotional exhaustion than part-timers. The thing the job is built around — being there, session after session, early and late — is the thing quietly grinding people down.
And it isn't only the hours in the water. The same research flagged strained relationships with parents and committees (nearly a third of coaches named this), the feeling of being unsupported by the people above them, and a loss of autonomy over how they actually do their work. The American Swimming Coaches Association, running its own sustainability survey across the Atlantic, found the same fault lines: burnout, retention, and — said again and again — the administrative load. Coaches asking, in effect, for someone to take the paperwork off their hands so they could go back to coaching.
That last point is the one we kept hearing too, in our own conversations with coaches. Not "I've run out of passion." Something more like: I spend my evenings doing the other job. The spreadsheets. The session plans typed up twice. The best times copied from one place to another. The mental arithmetic of who can handle what tomorrow, done at eleven at night because that was the first quiet moment all day.
The coaching wasn't the part wearing them down. The scaffolding around the coaching was.
Why this is a technology problem as much as a wellbeing one
It's tempting to file coach burnout under "wellbeing" — book a workshop, hand out a helpline number, move on. Useful, as far as it goes. But a chunk of what exhausts a coach isn't emotional at all. It's load of a different kind: the cognitive overhead of holding twenty athletes' situations in your head, across six disconnected tools, with no system doing any of the remembering for you.
Every swimmer who turns up carries a context. Who's mid-exam season. Who played a match on Sunday. Who's been quietly flatlining for three weeks. Who slept badly because of a part-time job nobody mentioned. A good coach tracks all of this — and tracking all of this, for a full squad, by memory and spreadsheet, is genuinely exhausting work that never shows up as work. It's the invisible second shift.
When the admin is fragmented, the coach becomes the integration layer. They are the thing holding the system together, by force of attention, every single day. That's not sustainable, and the figures are what it looks like when it isn't sustained.
What we're actually trying to lift
We didn't build this to replace coaching judgement. We built it to stop coaches having to manually be the database.
One place where the best times, the target paces, the session history, the wellness, and the readiness all live together — and update themselves. A system that flags the swimmer whose numbers are drifting, so you don't have to notice it at eleven at night. Session plans that don't get rewritten in three formats. The arithmetic of "can this athlete take this load tomorrow" done by something that isn't your tired brain at the end of a fourteen-hour day.
None of that fixes parent committees or short contracts or the structural underfunding of the profession. We're not going to pretend otherwise. But if a meaningful slice of coach exhaustion is admin overload and cognitive load that software is genuinely good at carrying — then handing that part over isn't a luxury. It's one of the few levers actually within reach.
The sport spends a great deal of energy worrying about whether its swimmers are okay. It should. It might also look up, occasionally, at the person standing on the side holding everything together — and ask the same question.
We're building this for coaches first. If the second shift sounds familiar, get in touch — we'd like to hear what's actually eating your evenings, and show you what we're doing about it.