BEHIND THE PLAY #51

Girls soccer in Canada is not doing well. Someone will figure out what needs to be changed, fixed, stopped, started and will make a huge difference in youth sport. I’m trying to be one of the ones who does but the challenges are not easy to figure out. This one post will not resolve the issues but for starters here’s a date driven look at the landscape here in Vancouver and some interesting points that can be pulled from it.

The largest league in the Province of British Columbia is the BC Coastal Soccer League in Metro Vancouver. The league covers U11 to U18 play, offering multiple divisions across a geography with a population close to three million people. Municipalities technically not in Metro Vancouver like Abbotsford and Chilliwack are participants in BCCSL.

Here’s the number of boys and girls teams in BCCSL from the last three seasons and how girls team fare as a percentage of the overall number of teams.

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The good news is that BCCSL is growing. The bad news is not only that boys teams vastly outnumber the girls but that girls’ teams as a percentage of the overall teams continues to shrink. Given the incredible population growth in Metro Vancouver over the last several years you would expect that soccer would see increases in registration and it is; particularly in suburban areas where it is less expensive to raise families.

But when you dig down a bit more into the numbers a few more things become important to note.

[I’ll say here that while I have excellent data on this that is broken down by club, I’m not going to name any clubs. This isn’t about shaming people or clubs. I work with many people with teams in BCCSL and I think most if not all share my concern for the state of girls soccer and would like to see registration numbers move much closer to parity with boys’ numbers.]

There are 45 clubs participating in BCCSL this season. Eight of those clubs have no girls teams. A further twenty have between just one and nine girls teams. A the other end there are eight clubs that have 331 of the 539 girls teams. That’s 61% of the girls playing at 18% of the clubs.

Even looking at just those top eight clubs, only one has girls teams comprising at least 40% of their divisional teams overall and they scrape into that position with exactly 40%. The rest are between 34% to 38%.

There are some interesting anomalies though. In one municipality there is one large girls only club and one large boys club. These are the only clubs in BCCSL that are set up to be for a single gender. If you took them to be one club, the number of girls teams in that club would be 42%; joint highest, with a mid-size club, for having more than any other club big enough for these numbers to not be statistical outliers (ie more than 15 teams which I have randomly picked as a cut off point).

That said, are these small clubs with higher percentages of girls teams statistical aberrations or is there something to be said for smaller clubs being more appealing to girls or those clubs having the ability to make girls soccer a better experience for their players? These smaller clubs generally fall into two distinct categories. The first is Academies that have gained membership into the league (a relatively new phenomenon here). There are three clubs in this category and none have a single girls team. The second group are clubs located in small communities at the north and west edges of Metro Vancouver. Here we see very mixed results with one having more girls teams than boys (3 vs 2), another having one girls team and two boys team and the last having just one team in total and its a boys team. Nothing statistically significant.

It is worth noting that the one other mid-size club also hits the 40% mark for girls teams and that that club is the result of a recent merger in a municipality that had one boys club and one girls club.

Factor that in with the first example of the last existing girls-only club that would be at 42% if you combined them with the one existing boys-only club and there could be something to be said for clubs structured as girls only being more appealing to girls and/or their parents. This is worth exploring.

It’s in everyone’s interest as a player, parent, club official or governing body to spend time assessing why girls teams, as a percentage of the number of boys and girls teams combined, are decreasing each year. I highly doubt this is a problem that is exclusive to Metro Vancouver and the BCCSL but clearly we, here, are not making the game compelling enough for girls to join and, once they have joined, making the experience appealing enough for them to stay.

Clubs that solve this will not just grow but inch closer to being that Perfect FC that makes them stand out qualitatively. I welcome your thoughts on how that can be done by email.

More examples of coaches valuing mental attributes in athletes

Three videos that unpack the importance of the mental aspect of being a top athlete. Character, determination, integrity…so often these are what separate athletes in elite environments more than technical ability and why so many top athletes go on to have success in other careers once they retire from their sport.

Warning: bit of foul language in the middle one.

mojocrowe

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chasejacksoneliteperformance

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playbook_consulting

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