By Canadian Press

Coaching and motherhood the new frontier in Canada’s high-performance coaching ranks

Jul 5, 2023 | 10:48 AM

When Shannon Winzer moved back to Canada from Australia to take an assistant coaching job with Volleyball Canada, her heart pounded when she asked head coach Tom Black if she could arrive an hour late on her first day in order to get her children settled in school.

“I was so nervous,” Winzer recalled. “It was his first interaction with me. I’m going to a new job and I’m asking someone to let me show up an hour late.

“He was incredibly supportive right away. That made me feel better.”

That moment was a game-changer for Winzer, who is now the national women’s volleyball team’s head coach, because a sport organization accommodated her motherhood without viewing it as a drag on her coaching ability.

“As women who coach and as women who have children in this space, we so badly want to be seen as the same as our peers because we want that mutual respect from our peers,” Winzer said.

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“For a long time, I tried really hard to be the same as all my male peers. We desperately want to be seen as the same, but we’re not the same. If we want to do this job, we really have to accept that it looks different.”

Only 16 per cent of head coaches and 18 per cent of assistant coaches of national teams were women in 2021, according to Canadian Women and Sport’s most recent statistics.

Mothers are now arriving in the high-performance coaching ranks with varying degrees of acceptance.

The sport system isn’t set up to accommodate them, even though their presence could contribute to safer sport.

“Diversity of thought, diversity of lived experience creates better teams, creates better, healthier, safer environments for all people,” said CWS chief executive officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves.

“If we’ve built a role and a culture around a role on the way men have traditionally inhabited it, but now we want women in those roles, we have to be willing to rethink how we structure and support those roles.

“You can’t add women and stir and hope for the best because it clearly doesn’t work.”

Sailing’s Lisa Ross and cycling’s Jenny Trew were coaches at the highest levels in their respective sports. Both were fired this year by their national sport organizations, which cited budgetary reasons for their dismissals.

Both women described motherhood as a hurdle they had to clear within their NSO. 

Trew says when she was hired in 2017, her request to bring her breastfeeding daughter with her on trips, as well as her toddler son on any trip over eight days, was granted with reluctance.

“I was determined to be a mom who coaches,” said Trew, who was Canada’s lead track cycling endurance coach. “I slowly understood that I was allowed to be a mother and I was allowed to be a coach, but those two spaces should not overlap.

“It was like, ‘we’re going to do this big favour and we’re going to let you take your kids’. The biggest concern was that I would be distracted if my children and my family were there. I was going to be distracted if my family wasn’t there.

“I was not let go because I am a mother. However, any time you have to hide a part of you in order to fit in or do your job, you are compromising yourself.:

Trew said she would like mothers to be able to enjoy their full lives in high-performance positions.

“Both being a mother and being a coach are round-the-clock professions,” she said. “They are both the hardest and most rewarding things I have ever done.”

Ross was fired in March nine days after she informed Sail Canada she was pregnant.  The two-time Olympian was the only woman on the national coaching staff at the time.

Her $80,000 salary was supported by the federal government’s gender equity fund, which was renewed in October. The next tranche of that money has yet to reach the sport system, however.

When Ross returned from a maternity leave in 2021, she says her job shifted from coaching Olympic-bound athletes to developmental athletes.

The 46-year-old from Mahone Bay, N.S., has written to the federal Heritage Department committee that holds regular safe-sport hearings. 

“The entrenched bias against mothers, lack of appropriate support and the resulting drain of talent and experience from our system is a significant barrier to achieving gender equity and creating a safe sport environment,” Ross wrote.

“Mothers — be they athletes or coaches — are not sacrificing their pursuit of excellence because of their children or family. Their abilities are often increased by the perspective and balance brought by motherhood.

“If we do not examine and change the inequitable treatment of female coaches and mothers within our system and move to make gender equity a core principle of our structures, we will not create a truly safe Canadian sport system.”

When Black stepped down in 2020, Winzer was promoted to head coach of the Canadian team.

The combination of sports organizations not knowing how to accommodate coaches who are mothers, and mothers not asking for help because they’re afraid of damaging their careers, is “a horrible cycle,” Winzer said.

“Unless you ask, they’re not going to be at your door saying ‘these are the things we have to offer’ because they don’t know and they don’t know because there aren’t many women who do it,” said the 43-year-old from Port Coquitlam, B.C.

“We don’t want to be easy to fire or hard to hire, so we don’t ask.”

Winzer eventually did when it was clear to her that she wouldn’t be judged for asking.

“There’s this real push in Volleyball Canada to get women into coaching,” she said. “When they started to have that conversation, I said in the nicest possible way ‘we are working so hard to bring women into coaching and we’re not doing enough to support the ones who are already here.’

“It was like the penny dropped. Within 24 hours, I had a message from my CEO asking ‘what do you need?'”

Winzer, who has three children under the age of 12 and travels at least four months a year, gets financial support to cover extra childcare and household costs while she’s away.

Volleyball Canada has a family support reimbursement program of $200 a week for an employee travelling one week or longer and who has children 16 years or younger.

Chief executive officer Mark Eckert says the development of female coaches is an organizational goal in a sport where 80 per cent of youth athletes domestically are girls.

“We’re being very intentional and we’re shoulder-tapping and we’re saying to people ‘can we support your journey?'” he said.

“We’re a female sport and it makes no sense to us that we haven’t got the leadership opportunities for the young women growing up in their sport to continue to give back.”

Winzer was the only female head coach among the 16 countries competing in the first round of Nations League that concluded Sunday.

“We hired Shannon because Shannon’s a great coach,” Eckert said. “Why we’re investing in Shannon is because we don’t want to lose a top-10 coach in the world.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 5, 2023.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press