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APRIL 2008 FEATURE They Never Give Up: Once a Coach, Always a Coach Since its inception in September 2000, the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching has explored the situations of women coaches from almost every angle. We’ve reported on women coaches with young children, on star women athletes wanting equal success in coaching, on the value women bring to the coaching profession, and on national team coaches who juggle career aspirations and motherhood. We’ve put Canada’s women coaches under the microscope in an effort to draw influential attention to their situations, to stimulate debate, and to effect change that will lead to a more equitable environment. Another voice that clamours to be heard, we were told, belongs to women whose childbearing years are largely past and who could now focus on coaching careers that were interrupted, slowed down, put on hold altogether, or handled with difficulty. Consequently, we sought out these largely silent voices and found women who have been tested, challenged, or shoved aside, yet who persevere, each driven by a powerful desire to coach: women with children, women with different ways of making it work, women with the highest of ambitions, women devoted to community coaching — above all, women who excel at coaching. What follows are their illuminating personal stories. And what talented coaches they are! Educated, experienced, dedicated, committed — and under-utilized to an astonishing degree. What these women have in common is a passionate desire to coach even when hopes for promotion are dashed, when they are penalized for speaking their mind, or when they have trouble being taken seriously because of their gender. Out of the discussion come a number of provocative observations leading to 25 recommendations. It is the Journal’s hope that this country’s decision makers in sport will pay them the attention they merit and then follow up with action. It is long overdue! This is not as impossible as it may seem. Let’s take a leaf from business, another male-dominated bastion, which, over the past 10 years, has begun to build an environment conducive to a growing and valued segment of their workforce — women — and provide incentives for this formidable talent pool: “… flexible working hours, compressed workweeks, letting women ‘ramp down’ their work schedules for a period of time while still keeping a hand in work, and then ‘ramp up’ to a regular workweek once they are ready.”* If business can do it, why not sport? Let’s urge sport’s decision makers to make common cause with author Sylvia Hewlett, who notes in Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, that “There’s a new willingness on the part of cutting-edge firms to walk the talk and change the rules of the career game to better utilize female talent.” Indeed. *As reported in The Globe and
Mail, “Welcome mat’s out — for mom”, October
3, 2007. The views expressed in the articles of The Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching are those of the authors and do not reflect the policies of the Coaching Association of Canada. |
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April 2008 They Never Give Up: Once a Coach, Always a Coach Download a PDF of this article click
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Get on the email circulation list click here Publisher: Sheilagh Croxon, Consultant, Women in Coaching, Coaching Association of Canada Editor: Sheila Robertson Editorial Board: Copy Editor: Heather Ebbs Translator: MATRA • gs Inc. © 2008 Coaching Association of Canada, ISSN 1496-1539 Coaching Association of Canada Web site by
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