Women slowly sweeping aside barriers to coaching in curling
A month ago at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts, six of the 15 teams that competed at Canada’s national curling championships were coached by women.
This week at the world women’s curling championships, only two of the 12 teams in Swift Current — Russia and the U.S. — list women as their coaches.
For its part, the Canadian team skipped by Chelsea Carey has been coached by Charley Thomas this season, but Elaine Dagg-Jackson serves as the national women’s coach and has been working with the team since it won the Scotties.
While she’s eager to see more women join the coaching ranks at the highest level, Dagg-Jackson believes progress, slowly but surely, is being made.
“When I started coaching there were no professional coaching jobs in curling, and that’s completely changed,” Dagg-Jackson said. “There aren’t a lot of them but there are many, many more in curling than there once were.”
The lack of female coaches relative to males isn’t unique to curling, and it’s certainly nothing new in the wider sporting community. The Coaching Association of Canada has devoted considerable resources over the years to its Women in Coaching program, which provides workshops and apprenticeships to encourage women who are looking to get into coaching.
While participation in sport among women has grown considerably in Canada over the past couple of decades, there hasn’t been the same improvement on the coaching side. At the 2012 Olympics in London, only 19 of 93 Canadian coaches and two out of 17 Paralympic coaches were female, while only 13 per cent of the coaches in Sochi in 2014 were women.
In a strictly Canadian context, curling might actually be ahead of the curve, as the percentage of women coaching teams at the Scotties suggests.
The number is not as high as it might be — and there was a grand total of zero female coaches at the Brier — but it suggests there’s progress at the local level.
“There are a lot of female coaches at the grassroots level, but at the highest level a lot of the time we’re seeing some of the competitive men come in,” Dagg-Jackson said.
The way she sees it, the challenge for potential female coaches comes from having to find the balance between a travel-heavy coaching schedule and the everyday responsibilities facing young women.
“There’s a couple reasons, but it’s more difficult for women to be flexible with their working lives, I think, especially younger women who have families and children and maybe another job,” Dagg-Jackson said.