Laurie Mueller’s personality is like champagne. She effervesces! It helps explain how she accomplished so much with soccer for girls and young women.

Laurie had played soccer all her life but stopped around the time she married and moved to Bradford, Ontario. Her husband encouraged her to coach as a way of keeping in touch with a sport she loved.

But there were no girls’ teams offered in Bradford back then.

So she went to a board meeting of the Bradford Youth Soccer Association to ask their support for creating a league or at least a team for girls and young women. She argued to the executive Board of Directors that “at a certain age girls have to have their own club”. Their endorsement was less than ringing but it was an endorsement. They said “if you want to try, go ahead”. She did want to try and so she did go ahead.

“I printed up flyers on my own and went through the subdivision and recruited enough girls for one team. An eleven year old girls’ team was the first all-girls team started that summer. When we formed it they played against girls’ teams from neighbouring communities in Schomberg and Beaton because there were only boys’ teams or boy/girl teams in Bradford”.

Laurie was the girls’ team coach.

“I was new to coaching that summer,” she said. While she had played soccer and knew the technical skills of the game, she also took a series of National Coaching Certification Program coach training courses from the Coaching Association of Canada and the Canadian Soccer Association to improve her abilities in teaching teamwork, strategy, safety, ethics, and the psychology of participants at different stages of their development over the following years of her career.

That was 18 years ago and she is still coaching. Today, the Aurora Youth Soccer Club, where Laurie is currently working, has leagues for mixed teams of boys and girls under four, boys’ and girls’ leagues, a recreational young women’s and men’s league from four to adults as well as a special needs program, which Laurie now says is “the best thing I’ve ever done”. More than 3,800 boys, girls, and young women and men were registered with the organization in 2006.

Laurie still coaches in multiple age groups, which includes the Soccer 4U program geared towards four-year olds to introduce the sport and the fun aspect of the game. She started a women’s recreational league five years ago that runs on Sunday nights and has over 85 women playing. She coaches her daughter on the under-14/15 girls’ house league team, and has started Aurora’s first special needs program “The Stinger Stars”, which very recently participated in York Region’s very first Special Olympics Tournament in Newmarket, which the Aurora Youth Soccer Club will be hosting in August 2007.

For Laurie, the job benefits of coaching are non-traditional. “The best part of coaching has to be sharing my passion and love for the sport and wanting the kids to feel the sense of accomplishment and seeing it in their eyes when they look at you. As young as four-year olds, I love the way they watch and learn things and go home excited about what they learned and can’t wait to get back out there on the field because they have that excitement of being exposed to a team sport. It is so good to see them just having fun, introducing them to soccer and what it’s like to share the joy of the game. That’s what I believe coaching is: loving being there and being taught by someone who loves being there. I also get an amazing feeling when 15 year old girls come running across the field calling me ‘Coach Laurie’. These are young women that I coached when they were four. But now they are 15 and 16 year old young women who still respect me as a coach, and as a friend. Just when you think that it’s not cool anymore to show that kind of enthusiasm to adults, you know you have done a great job when you still see them playing the sport and want to teach that to other children. That is the joy I get out of coaching”.

Laurie’s message to prospective women coaches draws on this experience. “It’s important for these young ladies to have a strong woman’s influence. If you’ve got the love and the passion for kids, which is the most important thing, then you’ve got the stuff to coach. I love the kids. I worshiped my coach and always remembered the things she taught me. Strength, compassion for others, respect for her and my teammates, and the love of the sport. If I can give the kids the sense of self-confidence and enthusiasm for life that she gave me that is what I want to share”.

As for whether the prospective coaches have the technical skills, Laurie says, “we tell the prospective coaches that they have all the technical support from the organization that we have to give and that ‘we trust you’. You are never alone and you will have the tools to help you. So you need to trust yourself, that you can do this role.”

Aside from that, the Coaching Association of Canada in co-operation with the Canadian Soccer Association offers new community coaches a one-day training program on the basics of the game, organizing a practice, ethics and safety, and to let them know of resources they can draw on.

These days, Laurie is the Partnership and Public Relations Coordinator for the Aurora Youth Soccer Club. She has managed to turn her passion into her job. She is still coaching and playing the game. But it is clear that the passion came first and is still alive and well. It effervesces.

The Coaching Association of Canada (CAC) is hoping to develop more role models like Laurie through their “We are coaches” program. In communities across Canada, CAC is working with the Canadian Soccer Association, Hockey Canada, and Softball Canada to offer coach training sessions to women interested in becoming community soccer, softball, and hockey coaches.