Thank you.
I don't have a presentation and I don't have notes, but I have 46 years of experience as a coach. I know, how can a guy who looks so young have that much experience? I think I started coaching in the womb.
I just want to share some of my thoughts with you. I have lots of answers to some of the problems, but we don't have time for them here, so if you want to invite me back, I'd be happy to come back. I'd like to address some of the concerns I've had over the 46 years. I'll just walk you through a little bit.
I started as a very young coach in a different sport from the one I'm in now, in basketball. I coached at every level. I was a volunteer coach as a university student. I became a college coach, a local coach, a university coach, a junior national coach, and finally, a national coach, which I did for nine years. So I've seen pretty much the full gamut of coaching, and I still feel I'm coaching now because....
There are 65 people working in our organization. We're probably the largest gymnastics organization in North America—or one of the largest. There might be a couple we don't know of yet. We have 1,600 young kids, aged 18 months to 18 years, and we have a lot of new, up and coming young coaches.
We struggle with getting good coaches, and getting coaches in general, because the reality is that coaching is not really a great job. The hours are bad, the pay is bad, and the longevity of a life in coaching is bad. And depending on what types of groups they're coaching, it becomes even more problematic. In our situation, for example—I know it's not like this in every sport—when parents get involved...obviously, parents know better than coaches because they're a trained parent and not a trained coach, and they're now paying the way. The challenges in every sport are different—I get that—so I can only share with you some of mine.
When I was a professional coach, people stopped me on the street, friends of mine, and they'd ask me what I did. I'd say, “I'm a coach”, and they'd say, “No, what do you do?” Sport in Canada is seen as an activity, not something that we necessarily pay as much attention to as perhaps we should.
I learned a long time ago, too, that sometimes the people who are really involved are the ones very close to the sport, close to their kids, or close to someone coaching that sport. As we have Olympics and Paralympics and things of that nature, we have a tendency, as everybody has heard, to wave the flag and try to do a little bit more, and try to do a little bit more with coaching.
But it starts so much further back than that. If you come to our club, every day you'll see little 18-month-old kids just getting comfortable in a gym, and there has to be someone in there with them. As John said, certification is very important; however, if you have young coaches working with these young kids...to be certified to coach gymnastics it takes three or four weekends and it costs them a couple of hundred dollars. We pay half and they pay half, and then they earn it back. As I said, they have to deal with a lot of problems, and it's just a tough thing for them.
I was glad to hear John mention the online part. I just mentioned it to him today, so I don't know how he got it on his screen so quickly.