Your Newsletter Is Not a Diary. Stop Treating It Like One.
A few weeks ago I got to sit down with a group of age-group swim coaches at the LEAD Sports Summit in Houston and talk about something I care about a lot: personal branding. Not the Instagram-selfie kind. The real kind — the kind that actually builds your team, your career, and yes, eventually helps someone write you a very large check for a new pool.
Here's the thing that got the room's attention, so I'll lead with it too.
That Coach's Corner blurb in your newsletter? It's gold. You're burying it.
Almost every club has some version of this: a coach writes a little reflection for the monthly newsletter. Maybe it's about managing pre-meet stress, maybe it's about bouncing back from a bad race. It goes out, it gets read once, and then it's gone forever — buried under next month's schedule changes and sponsor shout-outs.
That's a problem. Because that piece — the actual thoughts and experience from a coach who's in the trenches every day — is your highest-value content, full stop. Everything else in a newsletter (meet highlights, schedule updates, sponsor mentions) is disposable. That's not.
So here's the one-line fix: copy, paste, and give it a permanent home. Put it on the website under “News” or “Education” or whatever you want to call it. Now when a parent thinks, “wait, what did Coach Tanya say last month about managing stress?” — there's somewhere to go find it. Now it's shareable. Now it's forwardable. Now it compounds instead of disappearing into an inbox nobody remembers checking a week later.
Try it right now: can you remember a single email you got last week? Neither can I. That's exactly the problem.
You are the stewards of a product. Yes, really.
I know, I know — nobody becomes a swim coach dreaming of the word “product.” But bear with me. Your team, your program, your name on that pool deck — that's a brand your families are trusting you to represent. And most teams, even big ones, don't have anyone thinking about this. Which means there's a wide-open lane for anyone willing to put in a little effort.
One of my favorite stories on this: I was helping a team in Charlotte that was tied to a hospital's sports-health wing. I pulled up the Google reviews for the hospital group and the Google reviews for the swim team, side by side, in a presentation. Some of them were almost word-for-word identical — same phrases, same energy. I highlighted them in gold and basically said, “Look how aligned you two already are.” That one visual moved the needle on a deal in a very real way, because it made leadership see themselves reflected back.
The lesson: your Google reviews are basically a free, built-in trust asset that almost nobody in this sport is using intentionally.
Ask for the review. It's not weird. I promise.
Every coach I've ever talked to has some version of this hesitation: “Is it okay for me to ask for a Google review?” Yes. It's not just okay, it's expected in basically every other industry. Restaurants do it. Retailers do it. “Leave us five stars and get 20% off your next visit” is a whole category of business behavior.
Set a team goal. “Let's get 10 positive Google reviews by the end of the month.” Ask your loudest fans — your product evangelists, as I like to call them — directly. Most of them will be flattered you asked. And here's a bonus move: you already have Instagram posts from proud parents. Just ask if you can turn that into a review too.
Stop overthinking the format. Just start writing something.
Here's my own confession: I write a newsletter every single week. It's just me, talking about the business — the wins and the losses. It started with 65 subscribers. Years later, it's at 5,000. That didn't happen because I found some secret marketing trick. It happened because I kept doing it, adjusted the frequency over time (quarterly, then monthly, then weekly), and never stopped treating it as one of our strongest marketing tools.
And the real unlock wasn't the newsletter itself — it was what I did with the good pieces afterward. If something got a lot of engagement, I'd turn it into a standalone piece on the homepage. Now it keeps driving traffic for weeks. I can text it, post it, reference it later. One piece of writing, reused five different ways.
We have a tribal-knowledge problem in this sport.
Here's something that should bug you a little: if I asked you to send me three things to read about your coaching philosophy, could you? Most coaches — 90%+ — couldn't. Not because they don't have a philosophy. Because it's never been written down anywhere I can actually go find it.
Compare that to basketball. Google almost any coach at any level and you'll find interviews, articles, opinions. In swimming, that body of work basically doesn't exist for most people. Which means there's a huge opportunity sitting right there for anyone willing to put a few thoughts into writing.
And here's the underrated bonus: when you build your own name, your team benefits by proxy — because you're wearing their logo while you do it.
You don't need to be a video person.
There's a real overemphasis on video in our sport right now. And look, an underwater dolphin-kick before-and-after clip is cool. But when that kid looks back years from now on what actually mattered, it's not going to be the clip. It's going to be the character-building moment — the time they failed, got back up, and you were the one who talked them through it.
We almost never document that part. And that part is exactly what moves people — parents, sponsors, investors, whoever. Nobody writes a big check because of technique. They write it because of the story behind the kid.
So: any piece of content with a real lesson in it, however small — that's the gold. Video is one channel. It's not the only one, and for a lot of us, it's not even the most natural one.
Your homework (two things, that's it):
Give your existing content a home. If you're already writing something for a newsletter, don't let it die there. Put it somewhere permanent.
Ask for a Google review. From one family, this week. See what happens.
That's genuinely it. Do those two things, and you'll start to feel the shift — not overnight, but it compounds. Building a brand isn't a mystery or a full-time marketing job. It's just taking what's already in your head, giving it a place to live, and letting people who don't even know you yet start to find it.
