Tearing down walls by covering them
Poster campaign aims to raise money to purchase women’s coaching licences
In “Bend It Like Beckham,” the 2002 comedy about a young British woman trying to balance her Indian upbringing with her obsession with soccer, the main character spends what time she can holed up in her bedroom watching Manchester United games on television, her walls covered in posters of her favourite player, David Beckham.
The set was like a scene out of Ann-Carolyn Lang’s childhood, she realized this summer when watching the movie for the first time in a long time, aghast that her girlfriend had never seen it. Growing up in Germany, Lang’s walls were covered in posters of the country’s soccer stars, like Bastian Schweinsteiger and Philipp Lahm.
All the imagery featured male players, she realized all these years later.
“We have great female players but they’re not elevated to that same level or status and we’re far from the point where every girl in Canada has a poster of a soccer player on her wall,” Lang said.
So she set out to change those visuals for the next generation. In August, Lang approached friend Mandela Smith, a concept artist and animator she met on their middle school’s soccer team, about creating posters of female players for a whole new wave of athletes. The program took on new meaning this fall for Lang, who had planned to play in League 1 Ontario Women, a semi-professional league for women age 17 or older, before the coronavirus pandemic put those plans on hold.
As part of the league’s player advisory group, she aligned the poster campaign with league commissioner Carmelina Moscato’s initiative to get more women into coaching. And so Elevate was born, promoting the visibility of Canadian female athletes while raising money to fund five C-level coaching licences, worth about $6,000, to help start a handful of L1OW players on their coaching journey.
Canada has 7,086 licensed female soccer coaches in the country, according to the 2019 FIFA Women’s Football Member Association Survey Report. That’s second in the world behind the United States, but accounts for just 19 per cent of the licensed coaching pool in Canada. Federal data from 2015 found only 25 per cent of Canadian coaches in all sports are women.
Lang herself has never played for a female coach despite decades spent in the game.
“Any female in a leadership position for me as a kid was a bonus, so an extra one would have been amazing,” she said.
The cost of coach certifications — Pre-C and C Licensing courses cost about $1,225 — is a barrier to many young women hoping to take on a coaching role, Lang said. Some clubs are willing to pay for coaching licences, but may require the coaches to pay the fee up front before being reimbursed. Players in L1OW are often not able to tie themselves to a club as a coach because of their own playing schedules.
“It creates a barrier where, if you’re not with a club or going to coach a team for a full year, which is a big commitment, you might not have access to that funding,” Lang said.
The posters, available at wsoccer.ca, launched online last week and are selling for between $19 and $23 dollars each or $40 for all three designs Smith has worked up so far.
One features Canadian defender Kadeisha Buchanan, who recently won her fourth straight Champions League title with Olympique Lyonnais.
Another highlights Canadian midfielder Jessie Fleming, who recently signed with Chelsea FC in the FA Women’s Super League.
The third poster, currently available for preorder, is expected to include a range of top
Canadian athletes like Christine Sinclair, Hayley Wickenheiser, Kia Nurse, Chantal Petitclerc and Penny Oleksiak.
Smith took inspiration from the gaming industry when designing the posters, which look more like art than your traditional glossy magazine image. She loves the way games display character with “really epic illustrations of them doing what they do.” She wanted to depict the athletes she drew with similar power.
“I thought that would be really cool, to put female athletes in that scenario, where it’s kind of superhero-y and action poses,” she said.
Smith said it hasn’t really sunk in that young girls could be inspire by her art on their walls.
“That would be a true, mission accomplished, incredible concluding feeling of like, ‘This worked. (Lang) was on to something when she thought of this sort of blind spot that would be beneficial for girls.’ ”
It will be up to commissioner
Moscato to decide who is awarded the funds for the coaching licences once they’re raised, Lang said. All L1OW players and alumni are able to apply, with a minimum of 25 per cent of the funds raised to be allocated to licensing for racialized women. As of Thursday, the campaign had raised enough money to cover one licence.
Lang, who already coaches in the community, will put her name in the hat for a licence. She hopes this is a practical first step in solving a question that has plagued Canada’s soccer community for decades: Why aren’t there more female coaches?
“People are really engaging around the topic,” Lang said. “I think people know this is an issue but sometimes they don’t really know how to address it. It also seems like a really big and kind of challenging issue, which it is, but I think they appreciate the opportunity to be supporting this.”