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Recommendations for Supporting Women in Coaching

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.
Learn more about the Female Coach Mentorship Model

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 Funding 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.