Handoff to female coach Canada’s golden goal
John Herdman, coach of Canada’s women’s national soccer team, was blueskying the future over the phone from Vancouver the other day.
The year, in this particular aspirational dream sequence, will be 2020. The song will be “O Canada,” played in Tokyo with Canadian players draped in Olympic gold. The world ranking will be No. 1, as prophesied by captain Christine Sinclair way back in 2017. And in that moment, Herdman will wave goodbye after nine years at the helm of the squad.
If that bit about global dominance is yet to be achieved, Herdman says his parting is already settled. Maybe, he says, he’ll reboot his career in the men’s game. Or perhaps he’ll embark on the PhD he has long talked of completing. What he knows, though, is that he won’t occupy his current post past 2020. And what he hopes is that the next coach of Canada’s women’s national team is a woman.
“We’ll be giving the women’s game to women in 2020. It’ll be a watershed moment,” Herdman said. “You won’t see many guys around the women’s game in the future … You should see the women’s game owned by women, I would hope. That’s why I’ve got to get ready to move on. I’m committed to handing it over.”
This is, in some ways, a down year for Canada’s women’s soccer squad. The next World Cup isn’t until 2019. The memory of last summer’s Rio Olympics, where Canada won a second consecutive bronze medal, continues to fade. And yet Herdman’s team remains one of the most interesting stories on the Canadian sporting landscape for more than one reason. Earlier this month, for one, Sinclair announced the team’s ultimate goal is to be No. 1 on the planet — an unprecedented bit of goal-setting for a country that only moved into FIFA’s top five for the first time last year.
For such supremacy to materialize, Herdman figures it would help if the game’s domestic power brokers provide what he sees as one of the missing pieces to the puzzle.
Specifically, a Canadian-based professional team.
“I hope to see a fully fledged pro team in Canada next year … And I think that’s going to change the game forever in our country,” Herdman said. “We want to see young women, aunties, grandmothers, moms taking their daughters and owning their own sport. I think it’s just around the corner.”
Herdman is of the belief that the women’s pro game can be a success here, financially and competitively, in part as evidenced by the 35,000 combined who came to see his team play friendlies in Winnipeg and Toronto last weekend. The key to a pro team’s theoretical prosperity, Herdman insists, will be simple.
“Put women in charge — that’s the key,” Herdman said. “Put women in charge to design the product. They’ll know exactly what time to put the matches on. They’ll know exactly what will draw female crowds in. Typically (women’s pro soccer has) failed because you’ve got men trying to run the women’s game. That’s a big part of what I’m doing here. The reason I’m buggering off in 2020 is because I’ve got a couple of coaches who’ll hopefully be ready to take over.”
The seeds of that handover are already being sown. Two of Herdman’s ex-players, Rhian Wilkinson and Carmelina Moscato, are enrolled in Canada Soccer’s newly hatched elite-player-to-elite-coach program, which exposes them to every level of the developmental system with an eye toward cultivating their sideline talents. Later this month Wilkinson and Moscato will be presiding over Canada’s under-17 team at a friendly four nations tournament in Australia.
“That’s not to say they’ll be the ultimate (national team) coaches. But we’re putting them through some really robust experiences in every facet of our system,” Herdman said. “They’re experiencing every piece of the jigsaw. So if they ever become the head chef they know every ingredient, every work station, how every work station works.”
Wilkinson, a veteran of both of Canada’s bronze-medal Olympic teams, said one of the reasons women haven’t regularly found themselves in positions of power in her sport is that retired players have often been left with no post-athletic career options but a real-world occupation away from the pitch.
“All these women have come through the system and they’ve just been dropped. And we’ve lost all their knowledge,” Wilkinson said. “(Herdman) believes in women leading women. It’s not that a wom- an is going to get hired because she’s a woman … A woman’s getting hired because she’s qualified and ready to take the team to the next level.”
That’s not to say the soccer universe doesn’t remain a male-dominated domain.
“I’m in coaching courses, there’s 40 men and me,” Wilkinson said. “We like to think we’ve come a long way — and I’m sure we have if you interview my mom and my grandmother — but we’re not done … Gender is such an old story. But why do we have to keep talking about it? Well, there’s a reason.”
Still, things are changing in other ways. Wilkinson, 35, began her national team career a decade and a half ago, back when players partook in the sport part-time. When she retired as a player earlier this year, she exited a different reality. Canada’s national teamers have been full-time athletes for a while now. Herdman said one of the obstacles to the ultimate success he’s envisioning is the complicated nature of this universe. To that end, Herdman has been recommending reading for his players, including The Little Book of Clarity: A Quick Guide to Focus and Declutter Your Mind.
“A lot of these players have a lot going on. They’ve got Champions League. They’ve got agents. They’ve got speaking opportunities. There’s all sorts of things happening to these women that never used to happen,” Herdman said. “We’re genuinely entering the age of the pro game now in women’s football, and that celebrity sort of status. With that, people can get lost. And when you’re lost, your game suffers. And I just want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Hard to imagine it will with Herdman and Sinclair et al bent on No. 1. The continuing rise will be something to watch.