When someone accepts a professional coaching role it involves responsibility. It is a "the buck stops here" kind of responsibility that means you can't hide from it. This is very different from a volunteer coach who can drop responsibility and have little consequence. When most sport in Canada was run by volunteer coaches the difference between these two leadership functions was less obvious. At that time people viewed being paid to coach as a soft, luxury filled, lifestyle. Non professionals viewed jobs in coaching as being paid to do what they did for fun. But the roles are not the same, not even close.
An example of this is "obligation to attend" where a volunteer coach can say that their work ie accounting, teaching, bus driving, will not allow them to be at practice. A professional coach can't use this excuse to avoid leadership and their athletes know that they will see the same face leading every session all season as they pursue a common goal.
Another difference professionals must accept is that the hours needed to provide adequate training are "determined by program not personal availability". This is a huge issue for us in Canada as we make the change to LTAD program models. There is no way that clubs across this country will be able to provide adequate programming for athletes from 10-25 years of age who train 6-12 times per week with a few volunteers. It is foolish to contemplate that and as teenage athletes move their training hours closer to their weekly educational hours we can see why coaching is needed to be delivered professionally.
One problem we see here that is facilitated by volunteerism is "lack of responsibility for decisions". I work with a club that has professional leadership and coaches have clear authority to present plans for annual training and then obligate teams to attend events, play in leagues, go to camps etc. When the club geographically nearest to us has volunteer leaders we can see that a meeting where we agree on competition or training can have the program fail at time of delivery because the coach who agreed to it did not have authority to make decisions. This happens every year, over and over. Our local clubs have a dialogue, agree, then it all falls apart on delivery because some parent along the line, who has equal authority for program decisions, over rules a volunteer coach with the other club.
That different style of authority is the root of the Manitoba problems in high performance programming. Families that begin in a volunteer lead club that does not mandate training more than 2 or 3 times per week have a very hard time accepting that players need to train more than 5x week as they get older and that this requires trained professionals for leadership. This is really important to me now as I am planning the transition for when I move out of the main professional leadership role in Manitoba. I want there to be an expectation that this province will continue to be lead by a professional coach but there is very strong opposition to that from the Neptunes members.
That opposition is important because in the 16 years that I have coached Bushido professionally there has never been 1 penny contributed to my earnings from Manitoba Water Polo or Sport Manitoba. There have been carded national team athletes from my programs since the beginning but the MWPA has never connected that to my coaching and linked it to the grants available for high performance coaches. So, money has been available to pay coaches from government sources in Manitoba but only through the Provincial Sport Organization. That never comes our way since there is no recognition that professional coaching and high performance training are valued in the community. Hopefully I will see that change before I retire.
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