:
Thank you for your invitation to appear before the committee to discuss coaching in amateur sport. It is a very important topic for Canadians.
Skate Canada has a long and rich history of which we are proud. This gives us a wealth of knowledge and experience about our sport and about sport in Canada. Skate Canada will actually be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Canadian figure skating championships in 2014, which is just an example of that rich history.
Skate Canada's structure has over 180,000 members, 1,150 clubs, and over 5,100 coaches under its umbrella. Skate Canada's structure is unique in that all skaters, clubs, and coaches are members of our organization. This centralized structure is extremely beneficial. It is what allows us to create a strong, consistent program delivery and club operation standards which all lead to our success in retaining members and developing elite athletes who have won many world and Olympic medals, and who have represented Canada so proudly on the world stage.
Our sections, of which there are 13—Ontario is divided into four; Yukon is with B.C.; and the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are with Alberta—are responsible for helping to fulfill the strategic priorities of the organization, and support rules, policies, and program delivery by member clubs. All skaters, coaches, and clubs pay a membership fee to Skate Canada, and Skate Canada gives a portion of these fees back to sections to help support and deliver programs and training.
Skate Canada coaches are all members of Skate Canada. To be a member a coach must be certified in the national coaching certification program, must have a valid first aid certificate, submit a police clearance check, complete the Coaching Association of Canada's making ethical decisions course, and finally, pay a fee and register with Skate Canada.
Coaches are paid for their services, not by Skate Canada but by their clients. Some are part-time and some are full-time. Coaches also set their own coaching fee rates. Skate Canada does not set the coaches' fees and the fees are not set by their certification level.
Skate Canada's coaching model has an instruction stream and a competition stream with various levels and contexts. I have provided a model for you in the notes.
Concerning the matter of participation rates in all levels of amateur sport, the number of coaches in Skate Canada numbered 5,182 in our 2011-12 membership season. Over the last 10 years the number of coaches has been increasing while the number of skating members has remained constant and the number of clubs has decreased. Therefore, the number of coaches is not really an issue for Skate Canada.
The number of coaches by certification level, again in the 2011-12 membership season, was 510 for the CanSkate program; 48 for the CanPowerSkate program ; 1,950 for primary STARSkate, which is essentially a program to learn to figure skate; 1,411 for intermediate STARSkate/provincial coach; 778 for level 3; 42 for level 4; and 10 for level 5. In total, there are only 120 level 5 coaches in Canada.
By gender, we have 4,622 female coaches and 500 male coaches. Overall, Skate Canada is well represented by female coaches, something not seen in all sports.
How can the federal government further promote amateur coaching in Canada? We have a few recommendations.
Number one is to mandate that the RCMP allow third party access to vulnerable sector search information. This will ensure consistency of information, ensure consistent costs for coaches, and ensure quick processing times. The safety of children is more important than the privacy of individuals who have relevant charges related to minors.
Number two, we recommend national standardized forms for police clearance checks and vulnerable sector searches, again, for some of the similar reasons, but overall for the safety of children participating in physical activity under the guidance of coaches.
Number three is to support ongoing professional development for coaches. This is important because coach training is expensive but critical for ensuring a quality sport experience for physical activity participants.
Number four is to support the Canadian Sport for Life movement, participation in physical activity, and other healthy living initiatives. This is critical for encouraging healthy living, reduced health care costs, and better quality of life for all Canadians.
Number five is to elevate and recognize the role of the coach. Coaches are critical in determining the quality of the participant sport experience and the likelihood for them to remain active over their lifetime.
Thank you very much.
:
Good afternoon, honourable committee members. Thank you for having me here today.
If you flip to the second slide, that is a picture of me. That's a 12-year-old soccer player, my first organized soccer experience. This was a house league in Mississauga. This little guy ended up moving on to play professionally in Canada and the United States, as well as playing for our province, and for our country one time, which I consider a great honour. But the fact is that all of this was quite a fluke. It was really by accident. There is no grand design within the structure in Canada, —although we're moving towards it right no, that actually will guarantee success for budding athletes.
Oakville Soccer Club started about 40 years ago in the garage of some well-meaning volunteers and we've grown to about 12,000 participants. Eleven thousand of them are house league or recreational players, and 1,000, or just under 1,000, are rep players. Within that rep group probably only 200 or so of them we consider to be part of that high-performance track.
We plan for success by implementing a five-year strategic plan that we started in 2011. That plan is hinged upon the principles of long-term player development, which are tied in with long-term athletic development, which is supported by Sport Canada. We believe that coaching plays a pivotal role to our success and to our meeting all of the elements of our strategic plan. Within our club we have three current players who are in the national men's player pool. We have a little player by the name of Diana Matheson, who scored a goal that won a bronze medal for Canada at the recent Olympics. Kara Lang is a former captain of our national team, and she is another Oakville resident. We also have a number of players in current youth systems at various levels in Canada and in international youth national teams.
On the next slide if you look at Canadian participation rates, we have a very broad base of players, about 867,000 registered Canadian soccer players. Canada ranks 10th in the world. For registered and unregistered players, we rank 22nd, which is only two spots and probably about 100,000 players fewer than the predominant world power in soccer right now, Spain.
At the club level we're starting to see a plateau in registration, or a mild contraction. We think that is partially due to a lack of quality coaching, lack of resources, as well as competition from other sports and from within the sport.
What we see as a difference between here and Spain is that Spain has a large professional and national infrastructure that drives player development and coaching development at a very high level. It shows excellence at a higher level, and that pulls along everybody else. They have over 23,000 UEFA B, A, and Pro licence coaches, which are the equivalent of the Canadian National B and A licence coaches. We have about 553 of those across the country.
It's important to make a distinction between community and high performance. Recreational soccer is very different, but they're intertwined. Community soccer is low priced. It's about fun, enjoyment of the game, and celebration of the game. You can play from cradle to grave. We have four-year-olds who play, and we have 55- and 60-year-olds who play in our club. This still requires investment on the part of our club, but the heavier investment is on the high-performance side. It's a very heavy price tag. It's intense, and a very small fraction of our players use a lot of allocated resources. There's about a 20-year window where we really spend a lot of money on these athletes. What we find in soccer, and I think it's true for Canadian sport in general, is there's a blurred line between high performance and community participation. We want everyone to participate, and you can't treat everyone equally when you're looking at those two streams.
Further into community and high performance, I will say that they're definitely interconnected. Every single high-performance athlete starts off as a recreational athlete and then later becomes a recreational athlete again sometime in their life. As I said, right now because the lines are blurred between the two within soccer, what we find is neither group is actually served particularly well.
At Oakville Soccer Club we have now invested in coaches. We have over 800 coaches within our club alone. We have 750 of them who are volunteers. The circled areas on the sheet are where we've invested heavily. In the red area we have 28 age group head coaches. They are part-time paid professional coaches. As well, we have four full-time coaches: me, two staff coaches, and a coach development manager.
Once again, we've invested heavily in coaching development and increasing our coaching resources. Also, we invest or subsidize all the licensing for all the players, all the coaches within our club.
The reason we invest heavily in U8 to U12, which is really where we put a lot of our resources, is that's the largest pool of players with the potential to go to the excellence stream. We also believe that those athletes who have better skill development from U8 to U12 will stay in the sport longer and, once again, add to the overall soccer community in the soccer for life phase down the road.
At this point we're focusing on skill development, based on the long-term player development, LTPD, plan. We don't concentrate on teams as much as we concentrate on the individual.
The next slide is on the Canadian coaching streams. All of our coaches are also registered with the NCCP. We have a community stream and a high-performance stream. The community stream is managed by the province, the provincial association, and it costs about $250 to $500 for each of the levels within that course. They also have to take the making ethical decisions course and the respect in soccer course, which also cost money. In order to move on to the competitive stream, either you need to have a national or a professional playing background or you have to take the soccer for life course.
When you go to the excellence stream, the first two levels, the provincial B licence and the B licence pre-tests, are run by the provincial association. The A licence and the national B licence are run by the national association. These courses cost between $900 and $1,200, and that doesn't include the travel costs. At Oakville Soccer Club we subsidize these courses for every one of our 800 coaches.
If you go to the next slide, the structure is the message. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. We firmly believe that the structure is the message. If we build the structure properly, it will make sure we're making educated choices at the club level in terms of how we allocate our resources.
We have an inverse power relationship within soccer in Canada. The Canadian Soccer Association wields very little power. The power is really diffused between the provinces and even further down between the clubs that make up the large 867,000 base of players. The way to help that is, obviously, economic power, but even more so, organizational and expertise power. Having that at the CSA level we would be able to pull a lot more interest and passion for the game and be an example of excellence so that our coaches can follow that.
We also think that long-term player development and following those guidelines are crucial to the development of the game in this country, and that there needs to be a distinction between that excellence stream and that recreational stream. Each needs to be funded accordingly.
On the next one, follow the money, we have an annual budget of $7.5 million at the Oakville Soccer Club. The CSA, the Canadian Soccer Association, has an annual budget of $12 million. The fact that these are so close, we think, is problematic. We also, at the Oakville Soccer Club, spend 10% of our money on coaching development, so about $750,000 a year on either developing coaches or paying coaches.
On the next one, you will see we have an excellent base, a lot of players, and that's fantastic. But in most other countries, if they have a large base like that, a lot of the coaching development is funded by a robust professional and national network. If you look at Spain and England, they have literally 40 to 50 teams that are driving player and coach development, and are examples of excellence within the community.
What we do know in Canada is that the aggregate investment power of all the clubs together can far outweigh what the provincial associations and the national associations can invest. Once again, we believe that proper structure will help make intelligent resource allocations for those clubs.
On the next slide, when we're looking at creating coaches, we see it as a push and a pull.
The push is at grassroots level. That means we have to continue to drive the structural change that we're driving at the provincial level here in Ontario, where we're making a high-performance standards-based league. We think that will help allocate proper funds to the right channels. We have to differentiate between high performance and recreational tracks. We have to fully support long-term player development as well as strategic planning for all clubs. If you're not planning, you're going to throw good money after bad, and that's a wasted use of resources.
When we look at the pull, it has to be aspirational. We think there really has to be a revamping and a focus on coaching development across the country. We believe that the CSA and the provincial associations need to be pinnacles of excellence. They need to show examples of excellence, because in the aspirational sense, you aspire to be like the best in the industry.
We believe that we need to invest domestically in coaching and administrative and organizational talent, as well as recruit internationally if necessary. We also believe that in the pull part we need to support and drive the professional game here in Canada.
On our final slide is the picture we had at our club of Diana Matheson greeting and meeting one of our five-year-old house league players. Although we don't all make it to excellence within this country, when we do achieve excellence, we all share in it, so we call these people heroes, and we hope to be able to supply and support both tracks within our club.
Thank you very much.
:
Thank you for welcoming me to this committee meeting.
I am the head coach and club manager at Airdrie Edge. I've been there for 19 years and in that time I've coached all levels, from pre-school, one- and two-year-old athletes, up to lead athletes. I'm a current national team coach.
Like the gentleman before me, I have participated in and coached at both recreational and high levels. I have worked with both our provincial organization and our national organization.
In Canada in the acrobatic sports our biggest challenge within amateur sport coaching, and something we have difficulty dealing with.... Our recruitment is quite good. We have excellent participation from young people who get into coaching at a relatively grassroots level and at a young age take the initial certification and get into initial coaching and do an excellent job. But as we move to retaining those coaches and developing them up to a level where they are both educated and experienced enough to work with elite athletes, we have a great deal of trouble holding on to them.
Challenges to do with work-life balance in coaching are problematic for us in terms of transferring from a grassroots coach to a more elite coach. In the acrobatic disciplines competitive athletes are training four, five, and six times a week, evenings and weekends. At a grassroots level, fully 85% or 90% of our coaches are young people, primarily women, and very family-oriented people. As they move up the ranks and become more educated and experienced, they develop conflicts between their own families and their availability in terms of evenings and weekends. We find that especially our women coaches drop off enormously at right about the same time as they would be able to move into elite coaching.
We have no volunteer coaches. All of our coaches are professional, paid, educated, and trained coaches. Moving into the level 3 and level 4 coaching where they can begin to work with elite athletes is a matter of many years of experience.
A lot of our challenges have to do with the actual financial reward, both income and benefits for a full-time coach, compared to the lost time, etc. One of the challenges that we were discussing among coaches prior to my attending the meeting is a still prevalent overall attitude in the general Canadian public that when you mention you are a coach, the first question is, “What's your real job? What do you do for real and then do part-time coaching in the evenings?” The professional coach who is involved in amateur sport is a relatively unknown entity in Canada and relatively lightly held....
Some of the things that we think would be appropriate in terms of encouraging participation in and staying with coaching, and following amateur coaching has to do with the recognition of amateur coaching as viable and real work, and the impact that the professional amateur sports coach has on the development, recruitment, and retention of kids within the sport.
Ultimately the amateur coaches in the initial stages aren't going to bring an athlete into the gym or into the playing field in the first place, but the very first experiences of the kids will be affected by the coaches' demeanour, by their positive energy, and by their ability to have the athletes enjoy and also be challenged by what's in front of them.
Currently the challenge we have is in having that recognition and having that balance play out. Public recognition can be a tool. Funding, education, mentorship, and dollars put into taking the excellent work on the long-term athlete development model are important. Also important is to ensure that the work is being brought directly to the coaches who are the ones who are working with the concepts they're in. It's about taking that long-term athlete development work and making sure that each coach at every level has had excellent access to it through education, mentorship, and the various ways we nurture professionals who want to take on amateur sport coaching.
If we don't have the committed educated and experienced people taking on those athletes and bringing them through both their grassroots experiences and their elite competitive experiences, we won't see the growth both in the participation numbers in amateur sport, which is such a huge factor for the overall health and development of our young people, and in the elite participation that brings recognition to Canada as a whole.
Thank you.
:
First, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to be here.
I've been a coach of many sports in Canada over the last 30 years. I started out coaching 30 years ago in competitive swimming, and then as my life evolved, I went into triathlon, running, some cycling, and as my kids have grown older, some lacrosse and some hockey. Coaching had been my life until about 10 years ago when I graduated with a master's in the art and science of coaching from the University of Calgary. Now I'm an exercise physiologist with Paralympic teams.
My first recommendation—and I know it won't sit well with a lot of coaches in Canada—is to have a certification system that's university based where our coaches would actually get a degree in coaching. There have been some universities in Canada that have offered the program, but very few, and a lot of the coaching programs are starting to fall away. The University of Calgary had a master's degree in it but it has now disappeared. The University of Alberta has picked it up.
My main reason is that I don't think our coaches in Canada know enough about how to coach and how to teach. They don't know enough about sport in general. Many of them are parents and many of them are former athletes who have no basis of education in biomechanics, exercise physiology, strength and conditioning. A lot of their knowledge is based on what they did, so we're making the same mistakes that we made 20 years ago, now when a lot of other countries are moving forward with professionals.
A lot of the European countries have degree programs, and I think they do better with fewer athletes because they are developing the athletes properly. I don't want to take anything away from the volunteers or the parents, but parents who have kids in programs get a great coach some years and other years they don't. We don't have enough athletes moving through to the international level to really get what we need. I think our athletes are quitting because they aren't having proper coaching.
The downfall of it is that people who go through and get a degree will want to be paid well. The big downfall is the cost of it. I think that if we can have much better coaching, then athletes will stay in it, and parents will be more willing to fund it if their athletes are moving forward.
As the coaches who were here previously said, those are the coaches who should be working with children who are 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 years old, the coaches who know what the children need to have when they are 19, 20, or 21 years old, and move them through. A lot of the European countries will give a group of athletes to a coach, and that coach will work with them and develop them from the ages of 6, 7, and 8 all the way through to the age of 21. If they don't do well, the coach will be fired. Then, when those athletes have graduated from that program, they will go back down to the ones who are 6, 7, and 8 years old.
We tend to put a lot of our less experienced coaches with our less experienced athletes who need to learn the skills, but the coaches don't know how to coach them or how to teach them.
Regarding participation rates, I think it just comes down to cost, and one of the biggest costs is facilities. They tend not to pay as much for soccer as a sport like skating where in Airdrie an hour of ice time costs $160. You have to have a whole lot of athletes paying a whole lot of money to cover that cost. In competitive swimming a 25-metre lane, not the whole pool, costs $12 an hour.
When I was coaching in Nanaimo, my budget for lane space was almost $100,000. My coaching budget was $70,000. I had five professional coaches on staff. If we can reduce the costs for facilities, I think participation rates would go up, which then means more kids would be able to participate, which would lower our obesity rates.
Other than that, that's all I have to say right now, until you guys ask me questions.
:
Thank you. I'll start by extending a thank you to everyone for inviting me to speak here today.
I'm a former professional soccer player. I turned pro at 16, moved overseas at 22, and spent 12 years there. I was 18 years in total as a professional soccer player. I was fortunate enough to captain my country for five years and hoist the only international trophy that Canada has ever won, the 2000 gold cup on the men's side. I've seen every level of the game.
I retired as a player in May 2008 to move into broadcasting, which is what I currently do. My current employer is TSN, but I've also spent a period of time working as a technical director at the Oakville Soccer Club. I spent time from November 2010 until June 2012 in that position, and I stepped down to focus all of my time on broadcasting. I also knew that I could hand off the reins to the very able-bodied Dino Lopez, who preceded me in this chair. I know that the club is in very good hands.
It was a real eye-opener for me. In part, I took that job because I wanted to experience the grassroots game and to understand exactly what the challenges were at that level. I'm very fortunate in the sense that, because I work in the media, I have a voice, and I feel that I have a responsibility to use that voice in a proactive way. It's very easy to criticize things but it's very difficult to be part of a solution. I'd like to be a part of the solution moving forward for soccer and for sport in our country.
Soccer is the largest participant-based sport in Canada. There are nearly 850,000 registered soccer players in our country. You have asked what the government can do to help improve coaching and improve sport, by extension, in Canada. I'll give you some numbers.
The Union of European Football Associations, UEFA, is the governing body of sport in Europe. Their coach certification program is regarded by most people as the best in the world. The UEFA has a National B licence, a National A licence, and what's called a Pro licence. To be a manager at the highest level of the game, you must have a UEFA Pro licence. I'm currently taking the National A licence and will complete that in June. So I have experience with the course. It is fantastic.
With respect to nationally certified coaches in Europe, France has 17,500 nationally certified coaches. Spain has 24,000 nationally certified coaches. Italy has 29,000. Germany has 35,000. In Canada we have a National B and a National A licence. The CSA, the Canadian Soccer Association, is in the process of developing a Pro licence. It hasn't been launched yet. We have 553 nationally certified coaches in our country for 850,000 players. That's one nationally certified coach for every 1,500 players.
Imagine what our education system would be like if we had one teacher for every 1,500 students. I equate coaches to teachers because I genuinely believe that teaching children sport is no different from teaching them math, science or French. It's about having the skills to impart knowledge and putting children in situations where they can apply those skills and learn and go on to succeed later on in life. Poor coaching at key development stages in our country is a detriment to the game of soccer in our country. I believe it's a detriment to sport as well. We have the largest participant base, but we do a terrible job of developing that participant base because we rely primarily on unqualified, untrained volunteer parents to teach children soccer at the key development stages. I'm a big supporter of the Sport Canada long-term athlete development plan. Those of you who have read what I've written on TSN and CBC prior to that will know that I believe it's a very good plan, a good program. It has its flaws, and we're going through that.
Many of you may have seen in the media criticism of the removal of scores and standings for young soccer players under the age of 12. That was brought about because adults who should be trained in how to coach kids are not trained in coaching kids. They are parent volunteers. They are well meaning and well intentioned, but they don't understand what is required to teach children skills.
The argument against a lot of the changes that are being implemented through the CSA's LTPD, long-term player development plan, is that soccer is really not that important. In the grand scheme of our society, how important is sport? I believe it's very important. I think there are a lot of lessons that can be learned through sport that can be applied to life. I learned those lessons myself as a young soccer player and I've applied them to everything that I've done.
In terms of the government's contribution to the development of coaching and the impact that can have, there are two aspects. One is very much a financial one. I don't believe that our country as a nation funds our athletes especially well, certainly not in comparison with some other countries around the world. We lament the fact every four years that on the men's side we fail to qualify for the World Cup and we wring our hands in collective dismay as to why that is. We do not fund our program sufficiently.
In qualifying for the 2003 North American championships, the gold cup, I, as captain of the Canadian national team, and my teammates were forced to train in a public park in Burnaby, because we did not have sufficient funds to train in a proper facility. People were walking their dogs across the training field of the national team that was trying to compete with the best in the nation, trying to compete against the likes of the United States and Mexico, which have full-fledged professional leagues. It's a constant struggle. The players on both the male and female sides will tell you that it's a constant struggle.
Coach education falls into the area of lack of financial support. I've been lobbying for the Canadian Soccer Association to start finding ways to offset the cost of coach education.
There are two barriers to coach education for a lot of people who want to become involved. One is cost and the other is availability. Many parent volunteers believe they're giving up their time as it is. They can't afford to give up any more time to train to become qualified. I think that's a big mistake, and it's something for which we need to try to find a solution.
The coaches of players at the young ages can have a profound effect on a young mind, and not just in a sporting context.
I wrote a story for CBC in 2009, I believe it was. I've been very fortunate in my career to work with some fantastic coaches at the professional level. The best coach I ever had, aside from my father, who has been coaching me my whole life, was my hockey coach from when I was 10 years old, a man by the name by Jack Mackinnon. He taught me more about what it took to be a professional athlete than anyone I've ever come across in 18 years as a professional soccer player. He got me to understand that the goal of the team is not about being an individual and that sometimes you have to give up a little of your own success as an individual for the benefit of the team.
I distinctly remember that in one practice he was teaching us how to skate and to cut on the outside of our blade. He demonstrated a number of times how to do the correct technique. When I got it, he grabbed me and literally picked me up off the ice and said to me, “Boy, I'm gonna make you a player.” Hearing that as a 10-year-old kid has stuck with me my whole life. He taught me more at the age of 10 about being a professional athlete than any professional coach I ever had.
How can we support coaches like Jack Mackinnon? How can we get them the training and education they need if they are to have that impact on kids? I think it's a huge initiative which the government could undertake to find a way to offset those costs so that it becomes more accessible to more people. There are lots of people out there who want to do it, but cost and time are two big considerations.
Thank you.
Thank you both for being here.
Mr. Esau, obviously I know you, as you are from Airdrie as well. I'm glad you're here to share your expertise with us. I know you've had a lot of experience coaching at a variety of levels and in a variety of sports, so I think your testimony and your answers today will be very helpful for us.
Mr. deVos, the experience you just shared when talking about the coach you had at age 10, Mr. Mackinnon, ties back to what Mr. Esau had to say with regard to ensuring that we have coaches for the young age groups who have that expertise.
I can only speak to my own experience with hockey. I've seen it with my son as he has gone up through hockey, and I saw it as a kid when playing and later when coaching. As you said earlier, Shane, some years you get a great coach and some years you get a not-so-great one. I have seen it in my son's experience. He had one year with someone who was a terrible coach. It was at the wrong point in his development as a hockey player and it discouraged him from the game. The coach can make all the difference in the world. It is important to ensure that our coaches be trained and understand the game.
I also get the reality of the fact that in minor sports there are thousands and thousands of coaches out there. In an earlier panel, for which you were here for at least a part, we heard from representatives of the more technical, specialized sports, such as gymnastics and figure skating. Those are both very difficult sports for parents to coach. Those sports need professional coaches to provide training.
During that earlier panel, I mentioned my experience with coaching hockey. I was just out of junior hockey myself. I was about 20 years old and was coaching kids who were three or four years younger than I was. A number of the players I coached went on to quite successful junior hockey careers, or even further.
Did I know what I was doing as far as coaching was concerned? No, I was just sharing with them the stuff that I knew from having played. Could I have been more effective? Yes. Could some of the coaches I had or whom I have seen through my personal experiences and with my son have been more effective, with better training? Yes, absolutely.
How do we put pursuing that goal into practice? I'll throw the question out to both of you. We talked earlier about figure skating and gymnastics, those kinds of sports, being different from soccer and hockey, which have thousands of teams across the country for which we have to rely on volunteer coaches. I have heard of models in which minor hockey associations will hire one paid coach to run the whole thing and have the help of some parents. Maybe we need a model like that.
Could you elaborate on how you think we could see this done?
:
Yes, I think the holistic approach is one I definitely believe in.
The CSA launched their LTPD, which is the soccer-specific adaptation of LTAD back in 2008, and I've spent the last five years researching the science behind it. Comparing it to my own upbringing as a child, I definitely had that rounded background in multiple sports which helped me. I believe that's definitely the way forward.
The challenge we've had in soccer is that people think soccer is easy. They think that you just put on a pair of shoes and go out and kick a ball, that it's not difficult to figure it out, and anybody can teach it. Have you ever seen a hockey coach who can't skate? Have you ever seen a swimming coach who can't swim? How can you teach a child to kick a ball if you can't kick one yourself?
What's happening with the participation rates is really interesting. When you dig down and do the research on it, soccer is the most played sport in our country, but the drop-off rate is crazy when kids get through that learning stage, the 8 to 12 age group. Why? They haven't acquired the skills they need to play the game at any level moving forward. You throw a group of kids who are 8, 9, or 10 years old on a field and they run around like a swarm of bees. They kind of chase the ball wherever it goes. You probably all have kids and they've all played the game, so you know what it's like. It's kind of funny for a while, but after a while you get a little frustrated. I'm at that stage right now with my own kids. I'm very frustrated watching them play, because I know they need to be taught. If they don't get taught, they're never going to have any level of success in the game moving forward in life.
Again, I only can talk about my own experience. I learned how to play hockey because I had a great coach when I was a kid, Jack Mackinnon. I stopped playing hockey at the age of 12 because I couldn't play both hockey and soccer. Soccer became a 12-month commitment for me at that point and I couldn't fit hockey in. I did not skate for 22 years, until the day I retired as a soccer player. As soon as I did, the first thing I did when I moved back to Canada was go out and buy equipment because I wanted to pick up and play with my buddies again. I was able to do that without a problem because I was taught those skills, how to do it properly, at the age of 10.
That is something we need to focus on in every sport. Train the coaches so they can teach kids the skills, and the kids will stay active for life. It won't be about developing national team players, because the reality is it's a very, very, very small percentage of athletes that reach that level. It isn't about them. As Dino said before me, every national team player, every single one of them starts out as a grassroots athlete.
:
I got an 80% in soccer in grade 9 phys. ed. The next year I turned pro. So I'd say, no, teachers don't generally have an eye for that.
Again, you have to go back to lack of training for coaches at those key development stages. My daughter is 10. She plays house league soccer at the Oakville Soccer Club. I go and watch her every Saturday when I'm not broadcasting, and virtually every week I'm there watching the house league program I send Dino an e-mail saying, “You need to look at the number four kid on the orange under-nine team, because he's got something.”
There was an article printed in the New York Times recently about Ajax, the development academy in Holland. Ajax is famed as a developer of talent. They play obviously in Holland, and their academy system is arguably the best in the world. Barcelona certainly is making a push to be up there as well. The interesting quote from the coach was this: “I don't look at who scores the goals. I don't care about that. I look at how the players move. I look at the way they move at the ages of 8, 9, 10 to be able to tell if they have what it takes to go to a higher level.”
That comes from training and knowledge. Are you going to get that in a small town? Absolutely not. But what we need to put in place I think in every sport is a pathway. When you are living in Appin, Ontario, which is where I grew up, and playing coed house league soccer in Glencoe until the age of 10.... I had a father who recognized that I needed to move to a more competitive environment for my development as a soccer player, and I did that. I've seen countless players over the years get pigeonholed and not recognized, not identified.
Hockey certainly has a much more developed pathway than any other sport. Look at the list of players who are Canadian in the NHL and at how many of them come from some hick town in Saskatchewan that you've never heard of.
A voice: [Inaudible--Editor]
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Jason deVos: No offence to anyone from Saskatchewan, but you see it all the time.
Can you develop into an NHL player in that environment? No. But the talent is there, and that talent knows that it needs to move to an environment where it can grow and develop.
:
Don't invade my territory by being competitive.
[Translation]
My question is for the two of you.
[English]
Is this okay? I can speak English. That's no big deal.
[Translation]
Let's say the competitive aspect was removed from young players' training. The sport I am most familiar with is hockey. Obviously, in hockey, we are talking about little pros.
[English]
From day one they dress like pros. They have the stuff, the equipment, and everything. They pretend to be pros.
[Translation]
It would be very difficult to do away with the competitiveness.
[English]
It's like moving a mountain a centimetre.
[Translation]
Taking away the game's competitive aspect would imply changing the mentality of the parents and volunteers in charge. However, if that goal was achieved, rather than disseminating strategic efforts and competitive skills, could we not focus—both in terms of the budget, and in terms of human energy and competence—on the elite athletes who distinguish themselves naturally?
Would it be possible to move toward elite sports in search of excellence? As Mr. Esau was saying, that would enable more people to play the sport with less pressure.
When it comes to young people who are new to sports, would setting aside those funds and efforts for the pros result in savings?