Best practices for women in coaching have evolved significantly over the past decade. CAC recommendations for supporting women coaches align with the input of women at all levels of coaching according to the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching (April 2008):
Mentoring
- Establish a mentorship program that helps women coaches find a path to club-level, provincial, and high-performance positions.
- Pair young coaches with senior counterparts to discuss related support pathways and to offer psychosocial support..
Child Care
- Provide coaching staff with child care.
- Ensure that women coaches maintain contact and remain involved with their sport organization during maternity or other types of leave.
- Permit women to ramp down to shorter hours or offer co-coaching opportunities to share coaching roles, and give them the flexibility to tend to family matters.
- Provide babysitting services during major competitions and training camps.
- Support babies accompanying their coach mothers to practices, competitions, and training camps with appropriate child care.
Recruiting
- Encourage young women athletes to consider coaching, support them with mentorship, and be upfront about the issues they may face, in particular child care.
- Provide financial incentives to make a coaching career feasible.
- Create and promote opportunities for women coaches.
- Find better avenues to bring more young women into coaching.
- Promote the benefits that high-performance sport offers to the greater community.
- End the divisive mentality that pits government against government, be it federal, provincial/territorial, or municipal.
Work Conditions
- Offer flexible arrival and departure times.
- Offer co-coaching positions.
- Offer longer-term contracts to create stable work conditions.
- Limit active coaching time to 20 hours a week so that coaches can work on their NCCP certification and handle their administrative responsibilities.
- Change the traditional structure and hold mid-day practices.
- Guarantee that coaches are qualified, well organized, and paid commensurate with their skill level.
- Support organizations that support their coaches.
- Provide coaches with travel credits.
Education
- Run coaching workshops with female NCCP Master Coach Developers and NCCP Learning Facilitators.
- Introduce business training to the NCCP.
- Publicize the Women in Coaching programs to a much greater extent particularly the Grants and Partnerships that are available.
- Develop and market a seminar that addresses the emotional and practical issues faced by women coaches who return to work.
- Tell the stories of women coaches to show that it is acceptable to have children and coach.
- Provide coaches with the opportunity to interact with other coaches at symposiums and clinics.
Reports
- The purpose of this research was to measure the impact of the Women in Coaching Canada Games Apprenticeship Program (WiC CGAP) on the individuals involved and their career coaching paths.
University of Toronto 2013 Gender Equity Report
- This is the second of a planned, biennial series of Reports on gender equity in Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS).
National Team Apprenticeship Program Report
- The National Team Apprenticeship Program is (NTAP) one of the CAC’s many long-term investments in national-level women coaches through the Women in Coaching program. The program provides opportunities for Canadian women coaches to work with their national team programs leading up to and during the Olympic Games and other major international events. The report was completed to present the impact of the program on the participating coaches and to measure their achievements.
