Becoming a Coach

So this blog is going to be more of a personal one but seeing as the point of this blog is to be about my journey to get more involved in supporting local soccer it does still fit.  This summer my brother started coaching, as an assistant coach, but he has yet to begin the process of training and certification to become an official coach in the provence of Ontario.  I intend to enter the coaching ranks next summer, since I need to fill the void left by no longer playing or reffing the game, but as part of that I am trying to learn how the whole thing is going to work.  I am familiar with how the setup works for becoming a ref as I had taken my class 3, this was before the change to the new system, and to be honest it was a fairly straight forward setup for becoming an official.  With that each time you took a course you became more qualified and it was only one course for each level.  In coaching though I have come across this pathway which is clearly more complex.

To me this pyramid indicates that if next summer I wanted to coach say a U15 boys team at my local club I would be required to take first the Children's course at 9 hours, then the Youth course at another 9 hours, and finally the 16 hour senior course.  That is 34 hours of courses just to get to where I want to be but the trick will clearly be trying to find a way to do as much of this as I can in a single spring.  I was hoping to find a chance to get started on taking one or two of the courses this fall but at least for now there seem to be none listed on the OSA calendar.  That means the obstacle of having to take this course in their prescribed order is going to be the toughest part of this plan.  Even assuming that I can find a course in my area for each level and can get enough spare time on the weekends to attend them the very least amount of time it will take me is three weeks but I highly doubt I can do it that fast.

The one bright spot for me in this process is that there seems to be no waiting period required between taking each course.  It is not like I have to coach at each level for say a year before I can go on to the next.  That should help me in this process and with any luck by this time next year I should be done my community coaching level and able to move on to the pre-B assessment.  So maybe this won't take that long after all but I do still wish there was a way to skip levels for someone who has played and officiated for the better part of 15 years.  I get that the OSA feels there is a need to train coaches on the special needs at each age level since they will be unique and all present different challenges but a part of me wishes that I could do one intensive weekend of say 20 hours of training and cover all 3 levels rather then having to do it over 3 different weekends.

Going further in to the OSA coaching section on their site I have now found that this fall they will apparently be announcing some changes to the structure of the coaching pathway this fall.  No clue what these changes are going to entail since the site does not give anything away besides saying that by november the site will reflect the changes.  To be honest though like many other sections of the OSA website the coaching section is not the best done site I have ever been on to say the least.  It took me quite a while to find all the info that I wanted and for something I still have had to consult with people who have already started the process just to try and understand the structure.  In fact if you are aware of how everything works for coaching in the OSA feel free to get in touch with me since I would love to get a better grasp on it so by the time that the changes are announced in November I can finalize my plans to begin the road to becoming a coach.