Where have all the coaches gone? The volunteer crisis hitting grassroots sport in NZ

As the international rugby season kicks off in earnest, and other sporting codes compete for TV airtime and fans’ disposable income, something worrying is happening down at the grassroots.

Sports clubs across many codes are running with drastically fewer volunteer coaches and administrators, and the pressure is rising.

According to the NZ Amateur Sport Association, the average number of volunteers has fallen more than 40% since the onset of the COVID pandemic, and those who remain are close to burnout.

Volunteering has long been the lifeblood of community sport. But the average number of active volunteers in sport clubs has dropped from 31 to just 18 per club over the past five years. Coaching roles, so often filled by volunteers, are increasingly vacant or stretched.

Sport New Zealand estimates young New Zealanders spend millions of hours each year participating in sport and recreation. These experiences rely on the goodwill of those volunteers – unpaid, untrained and often unacknowledged.

But while participation numbers remain healthy, fewer volunteers are having to do more of the work in many clubs. We may be witnessing a slow erosion of capacity that will stretch clubs thinner each season – until something gives.

Admin and risk

The pressure is especially visible in the area of health and safety – specifically, the measures and policies put in place to safeguard children from harm, abuse and exploitation.

My research, conducted with volunteer coaches across New Zealand, has looked at how administering safeguarding policies affects coaching. The picture that emerged was one of confusion and caution rather than clarity.

Coaches were unsure how to get it right, and wary of getting it wrong. Just 33% found their sport’s safeguarding policy helpful. Others described defensive behaviours such as avoiding physical contact with players entirely, or hesitating to coach across gender lines.

These weren’t formal requirements, they were improvised responses, driven by uncertainty and fear of consequences. Some of the strain is caused by the system. Clubs are now expected to meet an expanding list of compliance and governance requirements.

The Incorporated Societies Act, for example, requires every registered club to review its constitution, a task that usually falls to the same handful of volunteers already juggling coaching, managing uniforms or running sausage sizzles.

A report from the Amateur Sport Association suggests only a third of clubs knew by 2024 what the re-registration process required, underscoring the challenges of implementing large-scale compliance changes in a volunteer-led system.

3 big pressures

It might be tempting to think volunteering would recover with better support – more toolkits, training and recognition. But early findings from my current research suggest something deeper is required.

Volunteers aren’t stepping back because they lack information, but because the experience of volunteering has become increasingly complex, isolating and hard to sustain.

Three types of pressure are emerging most clearly:

1. “Role bleed” is when volunteers end up doing far more than they signed up for – agreeing to coach a junior team but finding themselves managing finances, sorting uniforms or leading the AGM.

2. “Interpretive risk” is the stress of not knowing what the rules mean in practice (especially around sensitive areas such as child safety), and the potentially serious consequences of getting this wrong.

3. “Compliance fatigue” involves the energy-sapping obligations around paperwork, reporting and other bureaucratic requirements. While often necessary, this work is rarely energising.

As any volunteer will tell you, one thing that cuts across all three of these pressures is relationships. Where they are strong and volunteers feel supported, trusted and respected, they tend to endure, even when the demands are high.

But when they’re strained or absent, even modest pressure can take a toll – not just on retention, but also on personal wellbeing.

Shared responsibility

There’s another striking aspect of my research findings: it’s not just about why people walk away, but why some don’t.

Even when relationships fracture, support disappears and the joy is gone, many volunteers stay out of a sense of loyalty and obligation, and a mixture of identity and habit. There’s also a fear that if they step back, everything they’ve contributed will collapse.

This is the quiet cost that is rarely named: not just fewer volunteers, but lonelier, wearier ones. Still turning up, still carrying the weight, but without the sense of reward and fulfilment.

Stress, strained relationships and emotional fatigue are well established contributors to mental health decline. It’s a quiet contradiction: on one hand, we position sport and recreation as a path to personal and community wellbeing; on the other, we overlook the toll it takes on the volunteers who hold it all together.

There’s no silver bullet. But the first step is recognising volunteer wellbeing isn’t just a personal challenge, it’s a shared responsibility. We need club systems geared to ease the burden, expectations that don’t overreach, and cultures where kindness isn’t an afterthought.

Ultimately, recruiting more volunteers has to be a priority for all sporting codes – while ensuring the “lifers” who’ve kept the lights on are looked after in the process.