Thank you for welcoming me to this committee meeting.
I am the head coach and club manager at Airdrie Edge. I've been there for 19 years and in that time I've coached all levels, from pre-school, one- and two-year-old athletes, up to lead athletes. I'm a current national team coach.
Like the gentleman before me, I have participated in and coached at both recreational and high levels. I have worked with both our provincial organization and our national organization.
In Canada in the acrobatic sports our biggest challenge within amateur sport coaching, and something we have difficulty dealing with.... Our recruitment is quite good. We have excellent participation from young people who get into coaching at a relatively grassroots level and at a young age take the initial certification and get into initial coaching and do an excellent job. But as we move to retaining those coaches and developing them up to a level where they are both educated and experienced enough to work with elite athletes, we have a great deal of trouble holding on to them.
Challenges to do with work-life balance in coaching are problematic for us in terms of transferring from a grassroots coach to a more elite coach. In the acrobatic disciplines competitive athletes are training four, five, and six times a week, evenings and weekends. At a grassroots level, fully 85% or 90% of our coaches are young people, primarily women, and very family-oriented people. As they move up the ranks and become more educated and experienced, they develop conflicts between their own families and their availability in terms of evenings and weekends. We find that especially our women coaches drop off enormously at right about the same time as they would be able to move into elite coaching.
We have no volunteer coaches. All of our coaches are professional, paid, educated, and trained coaches. Moving into the level 3 and level 4 coaching where they can begin to work with elite athletes is a matter of many years of experience.
A lot of our challenges have to do with the actual financial reward, both income and benefits for a full-time coach, compared to the lost time, etc. One of the challenges that we were discussing among coaches prior to my attending the meeting is a still prevalent overall attitude in the general Canadian public that when you mention you are a coach, the first question is, “What's your real job? What do you do for real and then do part-time coaching in the evenings?” The professional coach who is involved in amateur sport is a relatively unknown entity in Canada and relatively lightly held....
Some of the things that we think would be appropriate in terms of encouraging participation in and staying with coaching, and following amateur coaching has to do with the recognition of amateur coaching as viable and real work, and the impact that the professional amateur sports coach has on the development, recruitment, and retention of kids within the sport.
Ultimately the amateur coaches in the initial stages aren't going to bring an athlete into the gym or into the playing field in the first place, but the very first experiences of the kids will be affected by the coaches' demeanour, by their positive energy, and by their ability to have the athletes enjoy and also be challenged by what's in front of them.
Currently the challenge we have is in having that recognition and having that balance play out. Public recognition can be a tool. Funding, education, mentorship, and dollars put into taking the excellent work on the long-term athlete development model are important. Also important is to ensure that the work is being brought directly to the coaches who are the ones who are working with the concepts they're in. It's about taking that long-term athlete development work and making sure that each coach at every level has had excellent access to it through education, mentorship, and the various ways we nurture professionals who want to take on amateur sport coaching.
If we don't have the committed educated and experienced people taking on those athletes and bringing them through both their grassroots experiences and their elite competitive experiences, we won't see the growth both in the participation numbers in amateur sport, which is such a huge factor for the overall health and development of our young people, and in the elite participation that brings recognition to Canada as a whole.
Thank you.