Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 25th, 2013

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

How do you find more coaches? What do you do to find more coaches?

[Dino Lopez]

We advertise. We network. We try to build a network within, because once you've coached a high-level player or a good solid player within your club, you want them to come back and contribute to the club, or at least to the youth soccer community at large.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Can you comment on the national coaching certification program and its importance in the development of high-performance and youth-level coaches? Are there any gaps that you might be able to identify for us in the program?

[Dino Lopez]

A lot of what I said in my presentation isn't revolutionary. We're down the path. The NCCP is a great resource. It has pushed excellence out to each of the sports, and makes sure we're delivering and executing on the guidelines from the NCCP. I will say that the best laid plans don't always work out unless you have the right execution model, and I think we're trying to figure that one out in soccer.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

With regard to government support, it's delivered through such organizations as Own the Podium and the Olympic and Paralympic committees.

Can you comment on how that's contributed to the overall development and improvement of our amateur coaches and the ones at the high-performance level? If there are ties, can you outline them?

[Dino Lopez]

Sure, there definitely are. Any sporting community is a very small community, so you're really only a couple of heartbeats away from top-level coaches everywhere. It happens within our club. We have players who grow up playing with.... For instance, I have friends who talk about playing with Brendan Shanahan and how they're connected to that.

That connection to the elite sport piece really drives interest and drives passion for the game. It also means that we have a few more resources in terms of money to drive coaching education. It really does have an impact on the game overall.

Any investment at the top somehow filters down to us. It generally filters down to us.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

What standards do you or your organization have with regard to requirements for potential volunteers? Is it roadblocks, or—

[Dino Lopez]

No, within our strategic plan we definitely have tactical plans for having more volunteers involved. I think we're lucky in that we have a community that really wants to get involved and is eager to get involved. We don't have a lot of trouble with volunteers.

Really, the volunteers are the lifeblood of everything we do. In-house, we want to make sure that we are always telling the volunteers how much we appreciate them, trying to make their lives within the club a little bit more pleasant, showing them the recognition they deserve.

But once again, it feeds itself. The volunteers tend to come out. They all want to support the club in the community.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

You state that the CSA and provincial associations need to be able to display excellence—facility, coaching, organizational.

How should that be done? How is that accomplished?

[Dino Lopez]

Most national associations have a home. The CSA really doesn't have a home where we can make sure our referees are getting the best in training, make sure our players are getting the best in training, or make sure our coaches are getting the best in training. You need something there.

Take a look at bob-sledding in Calgary. Once you build a bobsled course, you start to have world-class bobsledders. It isn't as simple as “if you build it, they will come”, but really you do need that focal point where you're showing excellence for everyone.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

We can build that in Oakville.

[Dino Lopez]

We've got space.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Yes.

Have I any more time, Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

You have no more time. Thank you, Mr. Young.

Monsieur Dubé.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to begin by thanking the witnesses for joining us today.

I find Skate Canada's point of view very interesting. Even though it seems to be a centralized organization....

Can you not hear the French?

I'll continue in English until someone sorts that out.

In my constituency, I have many figure skating clubs. They do a fantastic job on the ground, and despite the centralization....

We're good now?

So I will continue in French.

Despite that centralization, how do you manage to work with clubs? When I met your elite skaters on the Hill, they told me attempts were being made to find ways to promote clubs more.

Skate Canada does some of the work, but what do coaches do to work with clubs? They have a better idea of what is happening in our regions and provinces.

[Jeffrey Partrick]

Let me address your question in two ways. First of all, there's our connection to our clubs. As I mentioned, we have just over 1,100 clubs in Skate Canada and those clubs are all members. We communicate with them on a regular basis. They also have to be meeting certain delivery standards within our organizations. They need to pass and maintain certain standards to stay a member within the organization within their membership requirements, but also in the way they run their programs. That's when the link sort of connects to the coach, because the coach is our primary deliverer of those programs. We provide centralized training in the sense that our programs are developed in one location. They're developed nationally by ourselves at the national office with input from our coaching community. Basically from there we ask our sections, which are essentially our provincial bodies, to go out and deliver that coach training.

We've tried to make sure that as little degradation as possible to the quality of that coach training happens between the national developing the program and the coaches receiving that training out in their provinces. What happens is the clubs will send their coaches to those training sessions to either upgrade their training or to become trained to start coaching in the club. Those are a number of ways we connect with them. Once they're members of our organization we communicate with our coaches on a regular basis. For example, we have bi-weekly e-mails that go out to our coaching members that tell them all about any updates on technical items, any training updates, any other rule and policy updates that they need to know about to help run their clubs and programs better. With all those things this is how we touch our grassroots club programs and also our grassroots coaches, because, as Mr. Lopez mentioned, it's extremely important for us as well to have a very strong grassroots programming and a very strong grassroots program delivery. Those are a few ways that we connect with our members.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

A number of people I know used to be skaters. One of the challenges is the cost of participating in that sport. It can be very costly. People think it's just a matter of buying a pair of skates, but there are many travel costs involved, especially when it comes to different tournaments, which sometimes take place on the other side of the country. One of my friends lives in Longueuil, and she went to Calgary over the weekend.

Let's talk about costs. You say that coaches are paid, but are they paid by the club? I assume that you don't pay them directly. In addition, I assume part of the budget is used to cover athletes' travel costs and similar expenses. Are any challenges involved in that?

That question is relevant, as this is a sport where coaches work one-on-one with athletes much more often than they do in soccer or hockey. Do you try to help our clubs meet those challenges?

[Jeffrey Partrick]

First of all, I'll comment on cost. I think the cost of participation in any amateur sport can be quite prohibitive. My daughter registered in soccer recently. She participates in hockey as well as figure skating, so I'm getting a good sense of the cost of participating in a variety of sports at a very early stage. Even though skating can be expensive, it's not the only sport that has that issue. I think one of the things that a lot of sports are dealing with is how to keep that cost low, because ultimately that's what forces skaters or other individuals playing other sports out of the sport earlier. They don't get the chance to experience a skill development that allows them to participate for life.

One of the things that was talked about a little bit today was the whole concept of long-term athlete development to long-term player development, depending on how the sport defines it.

For us, our long-term athlete development is actually very much centred on philosophies that are designed to help combat the cost. There's a lot of, I'll call it “tradition“ for lack of a better word, around how we feel sport should be for our young people. Unfortunately what we do is we say we have elite athletes here who have done this kind of training, have skated this many hours, have had this much invested in their training, so let's make the 8-year-olds do it. That's not right. We need to try to get our coaches, our communities—and when I say communities I mean our clubs, our volunteers—to understand that they need to view athlete development very distinctly between the various stages that makes the athlete development age and stage appropriate.

In the case of skating, for example, at a low level don't have your skaters travel long distances to skating events. Make sure they're competing locally, competing in your club, competing in your region to keep those costs down. To be honest, even at the very initial stage we're starting to remove competition because of the fact that it can be discouraging for athletes when they're at a very young age. The cost of that can somehow be prohibitive as well. The intent is to give them the chance to develop their skills first, develop confidence, and then introduce the competition components.

Those are some of the things that we're doing in a philosophical way surrounding our long-term athlete development to combat some of the issues of cost.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

That brings us to my next question, which I would like to put to Mr. Lopez.

My question is about this controversial idea in Ontario, whereby no score would be kept, and teams would not be ranked. This is somewhat related to what you were saying during your presentation. Scores will no longer be kept in soccer matches involving children under 12, and the teams will no longer be ranked. I think that has to do with what you were saying about prioritizing individuals and their personal development.

Do you have anything to say about that? Is that a step in the right direction for soccer and all sports?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

We have time for a really quick response.

[Dino Lopez]

I completely agree with Mr. Partrick, and that's where we're going in soccer. I think the big difficulty with moving away from keeping score and winning is that's an adult point of view. We try to put our view of the game onto children, and children play quite differently from adults. The biggest challenge is changing the mindset of the parents and then all the coaches to believe in this because it is the way to go. In soccer in Europe the top European nations don't have competition up to the age of 12; it's all about skill development.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Mr. Dubé.

Mr. Simms, you have seven minutes.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all, thanks to the witnesses for coming.

Would I be right in saying that in the individual sports—and I'll compare figure skating to soccer—it would be harder to retain a higher level coach than it would be in a team sport? You said earlier that a lot of coaching, or the payment for coaches, is done through the individual. Obviously if I become a skater who shows promise, I get my own coach and that coach stays with me through the period. For soccer you go up the levels and you change coaches as you go through that. Do you find that problematic in an individual sport?

[Jeffrey Partrick]

Problematic in what way?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

To retain coaches. For instance, I'm from a small town, and we have a club with three coaches there right now. If one of them showed promise in coaching, it sounds to me as if that particular skating coach would move away.