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.