Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 25th, 2013

[Jason deVos]

The first thing I would do is make coach education free. I would find a way to make coach education free. If that comes through government funding, through a combination of government funding and private sector partnerships.... I've suggested this to the Canadian Soccer Association. Find a corporate partner that will offset the costs of coach education.

We have volunteer coaches. We rely on them in our country. The reality is we're a pay-for-play sporting society. You pay a fee to play a sport. In that type of system, in soccer anyway, there's always been a desire to make soccer the cheap option. It's the cheap sport because all you need is a pair of boots, a grass field, and a ball, and you can run around. If you spread that cost over a bunch of kids, it's not that difficult. I said before it's not that hard to teach a kid how to kick a ball. That's the mentality of most people involved.

I think there's a lot more to it than that. If you don't teach those kids at the right stage of their development, they're never going to fall in love with the game. They're never going to learn the skills they need for lifelong success in the game and they're going to fall away from sports entirely. They're going to miss out on the opportunity to learn those life lessons that we all talk about, that you learn through sport, because they won't be engaged in the games.

How do you make it free? Obviously there is a financial impact. Whether the government's in a position to fund that entirely is not for me to say or suggest. I think it is very important and I would agree with Shane's assessment of making it more academic in a lot of ways. I'm fortunate enough that I hold a U.S. national A licence and I'm doing my UEFA Pro licence at the moment. The most enjoyable aspect of this for me is learning the science behind it, learning the academic approach: how does an eight-year-old learn? There's nothing I learn on those courses about how to play a formation or a tactical analysis. I don't learn that. I have that professional background. I learn the academic side. That's what I have a hunger for.

I think we do have to move into that, but it's a fine balancing act because the more you move into that, the more prohibitive it becomes for a lot of people to get involved. The vast majority of coaches in Canada are volunteers. How can we make it accessible to them but also raise the standard at the same time?

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

The parent coaches at Oakville Soccer Club have their courses paid for. It's a fairly well-off club. They have a $12-million budget or whatever. I forget.

[Jason deVos]

It's $7 million actually.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Is that a pool for professional coaches? Those are a bunch of dads and moms who just want to help out.

[Jason deVos]

When I started in Oakville in 2010, the coaching budget, the overall expenditure on salaries for coaches at the club, was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $350,000. That didn't include the technical director's position, but it did include the staff coaches and the part-time staff coaches.

What I did is restructure that entire budget. We hired 24 professional part-time coaches who were paid anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 each. We put aside a significant six-figure sum of money for the training and education of all of our coaches. If the parent volunteers wanted to get the active start, fundamentals, or learning to train stage, or the active for life stage, we would pay the full cost of that. That's a significant investment. There aren't that many clubs in Canada in soccer that have the financial wherewithal to do that, in part because they believe cheap is better. We priced our programs accordingly and competitively and still were able to offset the cost of that.

As I've said in my criticism of coaching in this country, all you need to coach the best youth soccer players in Canada right now, given the standards in place right now, is a heart beat. That's all you need. If you have a heart beat, you can go to one of those courses. All you need to have is the active for life course, which is not assessment based. It's participation based. You show up and take the course, and you'll receive your certificate, but no one ever assesses your ability to teach. I think that has to change.

We're in the process of implementing a high-performance league in Ontario, called the Ontario Player Development League, which is standards based. To coach in that league, starting in 2014, you must have a national B licence at a minimum. You will have been assessed at least three times—a pre-B, a provincial B, and a national B—and passed those assessments to be able to teach young players. That's at the high performance level, the elite level. If we don't set standards for elite sport, those standards will never trickle down to the recreational level.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Chair, could I ask one quick question?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

No, you're out of time, and it's Mr. Nantel's turn.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Is there anything you can do to help the Leafs?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Don't invade my territory by being competitive.

My question is for the two of you.

Is this okay? I can speak English. That's no big deal.

Let's say the competitive aspect was removed from young players' training. The sport I am most familiar with is hockey. Obviously, in hockey, we are talking about little pros.

From day one they dress like pros. They have the stuff, the equipment, and everything. They pretend to be pros.

It would be very difficult to do away with the competitiveness.

It's like moving a mountain a centimetre.

Taking away the game's competitive aspect would imply changing the mentality of the parents and volunteers in charge. However, if that goal was achieved, rather than disseminating strategic efforts and competitive skills, could we not focus—both in terms of the budget, and in terms of human energy and competence—on the elite athletes who distinguish themselves naturally?

Would it be possible to move toward elite sports in search of excellence? As Mr. Esau was saying, that would enable more people to play the sport with less pressure.

When it comes to young people who are new to sports, would setting aside those funds and efforts for the pros result in savings?

[Jason deVos]

It's an interesting debate. Should we focus on the elite and then that drags everybody else up to that level because it gives them something to aspire to? I don't personally believe that's necessary, and I think you're going to have a lot of opposition to that as well.

Ultimately, what is your goal in all of this? You're studying the state of coaching at the amateur level in Canada. You obviously want to improve the standard. Is that for elite players, or is that for everyone?

By improving the standards for everyone, your elite players will find a way through the system. I grew up in Appin, Ontario, on a dirt road. There is no high-performance soccer program there. I found my way to the highest level because I was able to wind my way through the system.

A clearly defined development pathway for all of the sports in our country, I think, is very important, as are standards for each one of those levels.

What does it mean to be a recreational youth soccer coach in our country? Right now all it means is you volunteer your time. Clubs are begging parents. No soccer experience is necessary. They are just begging them to coach kids because they don't have enough.

This is the analogy I use. I go back to the education system a lot because I believe there are a lot of parallels with sport and education. Would you trust the education of your child to a parent volunteer who has no training as a teacher? I would never do that, and yet we do it in sport. We certainly do it in soccer. I can't speak for other sports, but we definitely do it in soccer, and that's having a negative impact on our ability to produce elite athletes, and our ability to teach kids the skills they need to stay in the game even at a recreational level for the rest of their lives, and that is having a negative impact on their well-being.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

That will have to be the last word. It's 5:30.

I want to thank both of our witnesses for their very informative, very passionate testimony. We certainly appreciate it.

The meeting is adjourned.