Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for being here.
Mr. Esau, obviously I know you, as you are from Airdrie as well. I'm glad you're here to share your expertise with us. I know you've had a lot of experience coaching at a variety of levels and in a variety of sports, so I think your testimony and your answers today will be very helpful for us.
Mr. deVos, the experience you just shared when talking about the coach you had at age 10, Mr. Mackinnon, ties back to what Mr. Esau had to say with regard to ensuring that we have coaches for the young age groups who have that expertise.
I can only speak to my own experience with hockey. I've seen it with my son as he has gone up through hockey, and I saw it as a kid when playing and later when coaching. As you said earlier, Shane, some years you get a great coach and some years you get a not-so-great one. I have seen it in my son's experience. He had one year with someone who was a terrible coach. It was at the wrong point in his development as a hockey player and it discouraged him from the game. The coach can make all the difference in the world. It is important to ensure that our coaches be trained and understand the game.
I also get the reality of the fact that in minor sports there are thousands and thousands of coaches out there. In an earlier panel, for which you were here for at least a part, we heard from representatives of the more technical, specialized sports, such as gymnastics and figure skating. Those are both very difficult sports for parents to coach. Those sports need professional coaches to provide training.
During that earlier panel, I mentioned my experience with coaching hockey. I was just out of junior hockey myself. I was about 20 years old and was coaching kids who were three or four years younger than I was. A number of the players I coached went on to quite successful junior hockey careers, or even further.
Did I know what I was doing as far as coaching was concerned? No, I was just sharing with them the stuff that I knew from having played. Could I have been more effective? Yes. Could some of the coaches I had or whom I have seen through my personal experiences and with my son have been more effective, with better training? Yes, absolutely.
How do we put pursuing that goal into practice? I'll throw the question out to both of you. We talked earlier about figure skating and gymnastics, those kinds of sports, being different from soccer and hockey, which have thousands of teams across the country for which we have to rely on volunteer coaches. I have heard of models in which minor hockey associations will hire one paid coach to run the whole thing and have the help of some parents. Maybe we need a model like that.
Could you elaborate on how you think we could see this done?