Soccer Ontario calls for more female officials
Niagara isn’t all that remarkable when it comes to the number of soccer officials who are female.
The 24 per cent participation rate in the region, unchanged from last year, is on par with the rest of the province, says Nicky Pearson, Ontario Soccer’s manager of match officials development.
That’s not good enough for the sport’s governing body.
With nearly 50 per cent of players female, Ontario Soccer is launching an initiative aimed at increasing the number of female officials.
“This isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but our ultimate goal in the next five to seven years is to have all major female games officiated by female crews,” Pearson said.
“Create a pathway for them to advance, because (women) need the opportunity,” Pearson added.
Ontario Soccer has relied on clubs and districts to recruit officials, but three years ago it launched the Long Term Officials Development initiative with the goal of educating and developing referees.
While the LTOD is aimed at all genders, its talent identification process incorporates females specifically.
“We’ve told everybody it’s a five-year plan,” Pearson said. “We’ve got probably seven or eight really strong females coming through. We had none three years ago.
“So you know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but to us it’s a 500- to 700-per cent increase.”
Ontario Soccer extended the program over the past month, launching an initiative called the Female Leadership Strategy.
The program is structured around five concepts: awareness, advancement and opportunity, assigning, mentorship and support, retention and recruitment.
Pearson said it helps recognize women looking for an opportunity to officiate, and gives them the chance to succeed.
However, the key component revolves around mentorship and support. Ontario Soccer noted female referees tend to stay in the game longer if they have guidance and encouragement.
“We’re very much aware of that relationship that needs to be built based on peer-to-peer and gender-to-gender,” Pearson said in emphasizing the importance of role models.
“That’s why the mentorship is so important, because the 12 year old can now look at the 16 year old that’s mentoring her and say, ‘I want to do that. I can be that. I can aspire to that. Four years down the road, I can be there,’” Pearson said.
That support begins at the grassroots level, making sure female players know there are more opportunities to stay in the game as they move forward.
“That really doesn’t exist right now in the context that we need it to exist.”
Ontario Soccer is collecting data from a survey looking at the wants and needs of its female membership. The survey helped create the five actions of the Female Leadership Strategy.
While the data will continue to be examined in the coming months, one thing is already standing out.
“Opportunity for advancement. Not being potentially seen as a future regional or provincial officials,” Pearson said.
“We have to work with the assigners, and work with the leagues and work with all the membership.”
Part of that is at the highest levels of soccer. Referees, regardless of gender, have the opportunity to officiate men’s and women’s games as long as they pass the necessary requirements — fitness tests, educational, assessments, game experience.
Yet the number of females remains low.
“Only one per cent of our female officials get to the top pool, so I’d like to increase that by one or two per cent per year for the next five to 10 years,” Pearson said.
“So eventually we would have 20 to 25 per cent of our females get into that level,”
Pearson points to FIFA referees Marie-Soleil Beaudoin, Chantal Boudreau and Carol Anne Chenard as key role models for the next generation of female officials.
Beaudoin and Boudreau are refereeing at the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France. A cancer diagnosis forced Chenard to withdraw from the World Cup last month.
“The aspiration is there. You just need to give them somebody to look at,” Pearson said.
While Ontario Soccer still gets the occasional negative email regarding female officials, players and coaches on the field aren’t concerned about gender as long as the referees are “competent, fit and knowledgeable,” she said.
Niagara College women’s soccer head coach Rob Lalama agrees. Even though his team doesn’t see female officials at the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association level often, he would like that to change. “It is my experience that (female referees) take the game seriously. They officiate the games very efficiently and there is an obvious effort to call the best game possible,” Lalama said.
“We are all for promoting more females at all levels of soccer.”