“We haven’t agreed on that, and you’ll never get people to agree on that.” Contestation within the Canadian sport coaching professional project

Abstract

Drawing on the findings from a larger institutional ethnographic study exploring gender, work, and professionalization in sport coaching in the Canadian university sport system, this paper brings to light the contested nature of the sport coaching professional project in Canada. We specifically focus on the efforts of the Coaching Association of Canada to advance its Chartered Professional Coach designation as the preeminent coaching credential and mechanism by which to progress its vision of the sport coaching professional project. However, key findings demonstrate that the Coaching Association of Canada and Chartered Professional Coach are met by university sport practitioners with an ambivalence that complicates, if not works against, the Coaching Association of Canada's efforts to professionalize sport coaching. This paper concludes by focusing on how the intraprofessional tensions within the sport coaching professional project, specifically the ambivalence around the Chartered Professional Coach, add to the challenges faced by women sport coaches in Canadian university sport.

Introduction

Professional projects work to identify, build, and solidify “who can do what” in a particular occupational field, corralling individual practitioners into a defined group (as defined by the group itself) worthy of recognition and legitimization by the public at large, the state, and other relevant groups. Although debates about the professionalization of sport coaching have been ongoing among sport coaching practitioners and scholarly communities (e.g., Malcolm et al., 2014; North et al., 2019; Taylor & Garratt, 2010), research on the Canadian sport coaching professional project has been relatively underdeveloped (Duffy et al., 2011; Telles-Langdon & Spooner, 2006). This paper considers the contested nature of the sport coaching professional project in Canada, with focus on the state-sanctioned Chartered Professional Coaching (ChPC) designation as perceived by sport coaches in the Canadian university sport system (commonly referred to as U Sports). This paper demonstrates the ambivalent reception of the ChPC within the U Sports system, a reflection of both the persistence of intraprofessional debates on the importance of experience versus education in sport coaching, and the perceived equivocal authority of the Coaching Association of Canada (CAC) by key gatekeepers (i.e., the university athletic directors) and sport coaches in U Sports. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the contested sport coaching professional project for precarious workers in university sport, particularly women coaches who are significantly underrepresented in sport coaching positions.

Context

In what follows, we offer an overview of the important sociological insights on professions and professionalization that underpin this study, before then shifting attention to the broader sport coach employment trends in Canada and the long-standing “education versus experience” debate within sport coaching.

Sociological insights on professionalization

Critical sociological insights on professions highlight that occupational groups aspiring to be recognized as professional groups monopolize their social status and enjoy market control through the process of constructing their education, expertise, and work as rare and highly valuable and restricting rival groups’ access to skills, resources, training, credentials, and certification that provides membership (Freidson, 1988). As Larson (1977) asserts: “Professionalization is thus an attempt to translate one order of scarce resources—special knowledge and skills—into another—social and economic rewards” (vxii). At the heart of a successful professional project, Shudson notes that: “A profession is not a particular social evaluation of an occupation but a particular form of political control over work which an occupation gains” (1980: 218).

Gender inequity is implicated in the construction, institutionalization, and legitimation of professions through the too-common coding of “professions” as masculine and the construction of identity around stereotypical male characteristics (Brady, 2018; Davies, 1996; Witz, 1992). Furthermore, there are long histories of women's outright exclusion from various fields of professional practice or, once able to enter, ongoing challenges and marginalization within a profession. For example, medicine's success in establishing professional dominance arose in large part because of its ability to eliminate threats from women healers who were ultimately channelled into paramedical fields (e.g., nursing) that afforded less power, autonomy, and authority as compared to male physicians (Ehrenreich and English, 2010). Many women have since entered medicine over the years, and yet still experience “…pay inequity, sexual assault and harassment, opposition to career advancement, and unconscious bias in the workplace” (Canadian Medical Association, 2018: 3).

Education plays a pivotal role in professionalization by standardizing both the process of and requirements for insider status, thus serving to ensure the homogeneity of members of a profession, and reconciling differences of opinion and interpretation in that profession (Larson, 1977). Tremendous power is afforded to those bodies responsible for education and accreditation, as the power to standardize, grant, or withhold certification offers occupational groups the chance to define who is and who is not worthy of a professional title. This is achieved primarily through convincing others (internal members, the public, the government, and so on) that the sanctioned accrediting body possesses the singular and legitimate authority to define who is and is not worthy of a professional title and the legitimate power to enforce professional standards (Freidson, 1988). For example, no one can legitimately claim that they are a doctor or a lawyer without the appropriate credentials. This influence over the public, including policing members and meting out punishment for illegitimate professional claims, is yet another example of the political power that professionals have been afforded via their professional projects (Larson, 1977).

Within the Canadian sport system, the CAC is recognized as the national organization for coaches in Canada and takes responsibility for their training and education across a range of sports and levels, chiefly through the National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP) (Macintosh & Whitson, 1990). Promoted as a way to “regulate coaching and protect the public interest by ensuring its coaches abide by the highest ethical standard of professional and ethical conduct” (CAC, 2023a, para, 2), the ChPC designation is the NCCP's most advanced sport coaching certification. The ChPC was recommended by a 2002 government task force and was intended to professionalize sport coaching as a “legal entity” to address public concerns about coaching malpractice in sport (Telles-Langdon & Spooner, 2006). The CAC promotes the ChPC as the country's preeminent coaching credential and a marker of coaching's official status as a profession. However, as demonstrated in this paper, university sport coaches and administrators are ambivalent about the CAC and the ChPC, which complicates the CAC's efforts to professionalize sport coaching.

Sport coaching as a profession and the education versus experience debate

Several elements of the professionalization of sport coaching have been explored by sport coaching scholars. For example, Taylor and Garratt (2013) draw attention to inconsistencies over what constitutes a sport coaching profession and what constitutes a “coaching practice.” They highlight how, unlike professions such as medicine “where there is a broad and common agreement and understanding with a shared vocabulary defining the profession” (Taylor & Garratt, 2010: 101), sport coaching has diverse meanings which makes an agreed upon terminology difficult to achieve. In their examination of the sudden move to professionalize sport coaching in Canada, as a response to incidents of unethical sport coaching practices in Canadian high-performance sport in 2003, Telles-Langdon and Spooner (2006) highlight how the lack of formalized education is a part of why sport coaching has not professionalized.

Sport coaching scholars have also explored the value of formalized coach education for those who are already coaching. Some point out that a coach's capacity to learn “on the job,” or from their previous experience as an athlete, is valued more by others in the sport system than formal education (e.g., Erickson et al., 2008). Piggott (2012) notes, in some cases, formal coach education programs are perceived as less important and/or effective, in part due to assumptions held by administrators within organizations “that coaching knowledge and practices, in both elite and non-elite coaches, are derived overwhelmingly from informal and non-formal sources” (538). Such findings are at odds with the belief that esoteric knowledge and credentials are integral to signifying professional status: “Only by requiring a university-based education can coaching hope to command the academic respect required for the public to receive coaches as professionals” (Telles-Langdon & Spooner, 2006: 4).

Debates about formal versus informal education feature as part of intraprofessional conflict for many occupational groups (Abbott, 1988), including those in various areas of sport (e.g., Malcolm, 2006; Scott, 2014; Theberge, 2009). For example, Malcolm and Scott (2011) discuss the contestation of knowledge, legitimacy, and authority within the physiotherapy profession and the consequences of these tensions in sport workplace relations. The ways in which some of Malcolm and Scott's participants situate their “on-the-job” experience as the foundation of their professional legitimacy leads us to reflect on the situation faced by women in sport coaching. Women's restricted access to, or exclusion from sport coaching work—whether because of essentialist assumptions made around women's abilities; perceptions of women's lack of interest in sport; lack of meaningful opportunities and support; or the dismissal of their knowledge or experiences—means that women do not often receive the opportunity to gain the very “on-the-job” experience deemed to be “the determining history of the [sport coaching profession]” (Abbott, 1988: 2; Krahn and Safai, 2024; Sveinson et al., 2022).

Coaching as an occupation in Canada

In Canada, sport coaching is described in the National Occupational Classification (NOC) system in the following manner: “Coaches prepare and train individual athletes or teams for competitive events. They are employed by national and provincial sports organizations, professional and amateur sports teams, sports clubs and universities or they may be self-employed” (Canada, 2023a). The NOC specifically identifies the training and certification provided through [the CAC's NCCP] as part of the “employment requirements” for coaches but, interestingly, with tempered language like “usually” and “may be”:

• - Completion of the National Coaching Certificate program is usually required for individual and team sports coaches in all sports.

• - National Coaching Certificate Level 3 is usually required for provincial coaches.

• - National Coaching Certificate Level 4 is usually required for coaches of national team athletes.

• - A degree in physical education may be required.

• - Experience in and technical knowledge of the sport is required. (Canada, 2023a; emphasis added)

In a foreshadowing of a core theme in this paper, the only firm requirement communicated by the NOC in the above list is that of practical experience and technical knowledge. This distinction prompts the following questions: What constitutes adequate practical experience for one to secure a sport coaching job? Who attains access to the very few opportunities to acquire and build on practical experience with the goal of securing sport coaching work in the future?

Such questions assume that opportunities to work as a sport coach are widely available and, sadly, the national quarterly data on the number of sport coaching job vacancies and total employment income for sport coaches in Canada shows that (a) few paid coaching positions exist; (b) job opportunities for sport coaches may, in fact, be declining (categorized by the NOC as moderate, limited, very limited or undetermined; Canada, 2023b); and (c) the average annual income for coaches in 2016 was 40% less than the median after-tax income for unattached individuals (Statistics Canada, 2023). There is a need for caution about these reported data—the job vacancies report is missing information from some provinces/territories, does not differentiate between head and assistant coaching jobs, and does not clearly demarcate sport level (e.g., community versus high performance) or the hours sport coaches are working. However, we are especially concerned for women sport coaches in Canada as few positions, whether as head or assistant coach, are filled by women overall. In fact, Norman et al. (2020) report that only 16% of head coaches and 22% of assistant coaches working in the U Sports system are women.

A closer examination of employment trends highlights that the top employer of sport coaches in Canada is the university sport system, which includes 56 member institutions in four geographically defined divisions (U Sports, 2021, para. 3). Given that the U Sports involves coaches working in the post-secondary education sector, it is important to explore how precarity operating within the broader system of higher education impacts university sport coaches specifically. ¹ There is compelling evidence demonstrating how the processes of neoliberalization and corporatization in higher education have contributed to the rise of precarious labor within academic institutions (Brownlee, 2015; Giroux, 2009; Rose, 2020), encouraging a reliance on poorly paid and/or supported laborers. As it relates to sport coaching, shifts in the structuring of athletic departments are similar in the sense that they mark a departure from full-time, permanent, and, in some cases, tenured sport coaches to coaches whose contractually limited appointments are negotiated annually depending on the institution. Although not a focus of this paper, these are important considerations for future study as the shifting financial (and ideological) landscape of universities has direct impact on the experiences of its employees, including sport coaches.

Much more research is warranted on the ways in which sport coaches may be operating within systems of sport where multiple dimensions of precarity may be operating. For example, Corsby et al. (2022) interviewed sport coaches who were aware of the “precariousness of their work, and hence, the vulnerability of their personal positions” (13), and yet tolerated these conditions as “just what came with” sport coaching work. These results were echoed by Krahn (2024) who explored the constant tethering of coachwork to other forms of labor, the boundarylessness of sport coachwork (i.e., constant demands on time), and the tolerance of a culture of overwork among sport coaches. An increased emphasis on excellence in recent years has underpinned U Sports’ adoption of a high-performance sport model where winning matters most and where coaching careers have become more precarious because of the demands for success (Banwell & Kerr, 2016). Given the precarious labor landscape for Canadian sport coaches noted above, the requirement to be successful, to find paid work, and to maintain employment brings into focus a long-standing question in the sport coaching literature: what constitutes a sport coach's most important credential and who makes that determination?

Theory, methodology, and positionality

This paper is taken from a larger study that was theoretically and methodologically informed by feminist political economy (FPE) and institutional ethnography (IE), respectively. FPE scholars critique analyses of labor that fail to demonstrate how states, markets, and households are interrelated, gendered, and gendering and how such interdependencies shape the agency and daily realities of citizens (Bezanson & Luxton, 2006; Maroney & Luxton, 1987; Waring, 1999). Where FPE sheds light on how gender inequality is sustained through the convergence of social, political, and economic forces, IE provides the means necessary to study this. Specifically, IE makes “power understandable in terms of relations between people…” by examining how “ruling relations” function to shape the local experiences of participants (Campbell & Gregor, 2002: 61). Smith (2005) describes ruling relations as the “extraordinary yet ordinary complex of relations that are textually mediated, that connect us across space and time and organize our everyday lives—the corporations, government bureaucracies, academic and professional discourses, mass media, and complex interrelations that connect them” (10). As such, the participants’ daily experiences and standpoints are prioritized across the range of data collection methods that IE employs (DeVault, 2006).

In addition to being feminist frameworks that were developed to address the exclusion and oppression faced by women, our decision to conduct an IE study framed within the theoretical positioning of FPE emerges from what we see as an ontological and epistemological alignment between IE and FPE as well as from our own personal and political resonance with both IE and FPE. The second author is a White, able-bodied cis-woman who coaches in the U Sports environment, and the project from which this paper is based was borne from a deeply felt awareness of being one of few females coaching in Canadian university sport. Given that most sport coaches positions are held by white men (see Joseph et al., 2021), she acknowledges that coaching university sport as a female is difficult—and even more so for those who identify as part of a minoritized group—as sport operates as a key social site where gender inequities are constructed and reinforced. Although a former athlete but never a sport coach, the lead author (a pass-as-white able-bodied cis-woman) is drawn to this topic given her commitment to better understanding how women's paid and unpaid labor in sport and university academic leadership is valued (or not) in meaningful and equitable ways. She is personally and professionally confronting and navigating the landmines in academia that arise from expectations that she “performs” her professional identity as a female senior academic leader in male-defined ways.

Methods

In line with IE, data for this study were collected through semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. Data collection spanned a 2-year period (March 2018 to March 2020) and formally ended because of pandemic-related disruptions. The fieldwork/observations in the local settings were incomplete and this marks a limitation of this research project. As such, the research reported here draws exclusively from interview data and textual analysis for its key findings.

Following human research ethics approval for the research protocol (York University, STU 2019-013) interviews were conducted with university sport coaches and administrators (Dean, Athletic Directors, and Associate Athletic Directors), and senior sport administrators from U Sports and the CAC. In total, 21 participants were interviewed, five female and 16 male (see Table 1). All the interviews were conducted by the second author and were digitally recorded. Ten interviews were conducted by phone at the request of the participant, and all interviews ranged from 60 to 120 min in length. Pseudonyms, either chosen by the participants or assigned, are used in this paper.

Table 1.

Participant pool across research setting

Position title	Research setting
	IAD	NIAD	U Sports	CAC
Dean	1	—	—	—
	John
Athletic Director	1	1	—	—
	Andrew	Margaret
Associate Athletic Director	2	2	—	—
	Kurtis	Sophie
	Ella	Tim
Non-University Sport Administrator	—	—	4	2
Coach	4	4	—	—
	Matthew	Rachel
	Eddy	Will
	Carl	Jonathon
	Logan	Mike

The interviews were formally analyzed using Thematic Analysis (TA) which we felt aligned well with IE's aim of prioritizing the experiences of participants, and the insights gleaned from them were useful in analyzing the texts from the CAC, U Sports, and ADs. Specifically, TA provides an approach to data analysis that allowed us to examine both the breadth and depth of our data set, which was achieved through the identification of patterns and/or themes across the data set to describe and interpret the meaning and importance of such themes (Braun et al., 2016). Additionally, TA requires the researcher to engage in the recursive and reflexive process of working through data familiarization, coding, theme development, revision, naming and writing. As such, “…analysis is produced through the intersection of your theoretical assumptions, disciplinary knowledge, research skills and experience, and the content of the data” (Braun et al., 2016: 7). Codes and themes were applied from interview transcripts to the texts to illuminate how these institutional documents structure the experiences of coaches. During the analysis, extensive notes were taken to keep track of the connections between the data, literature, theory, and methodology as well as researcher reflexivity.

The research setting for this study includes many sport organizations embedded within the larger Canadian sport system. As mapped in Figure 1, the CAC and U Sports are understood as National Multisport Service Organizations (MSOs) in Canada and operate as macro-level entities in the research setting. Universities and their athletic departments (hereafter referred to as ADs) within provinces and territories’ borders are located at the meso-level of the research setting, while the sport coaches and administrators within the university ADs occupy the micro-level under study. It is important to note that, in Canadian universities, ADs are governed in two distinct ways. The minority of departments are integrated into an academic unit (e.g., a Faculty), whereas most others are not integrated. To compare the ruling relations across the different departments, this study was conducted in two university ADs—one integrated AD (IAD) and one non-integrated AD (NIAD).

Figure 1.

Research setting.

Results and discussion

As will be demonstrated below, although the CAC understood the ChPC as the foundational mechanism by which to transform one form of a scarce resource (knowledge) into another (status and prestige), its reception and uptake among members of the university sport community (at least as evident by study participants) was, at best, ambivalent. This is a critical consideration given that the professional project is “not a process of upgrading the essential character of a kind of work but a political process of gaining greater control over work” (Johnson, 1972 as cited in Shudson, 1980: 219) and, by extension, over workers and decision-makers.

The CAC's efforts to increase use of the chPC

The CAC recognizes itself as central to the Canadian sport coaching community: “Through its coach education, research, and advocacy programs, the CAC unites partners and stakeholders in its commitment to raise the skills and stature of coaches, and ultimately to expand their reach and influence” (CAC, 2023b, para. 1). The CAC describes the supposed benefits of the ChPC as follows: it “promotes the profession of coaching” and “regulates coaching and protects the public interest” through ensuring that the coaches who come through this program “abide by the highest standard of professional and ethical conduct” (CAC, 2023a, para. 1–2). Under a section entitled “Why become a ChPC or registered coach,” the CAC describes ChPC holders as “being recognized for their credibility and experience in coaching, forming a professional community, having exclusive professional coach benefits from the CAC, proudly adhering to ethical/professional standards, and raising the confidence of Canadians in coaches through ‘responsible coaching practices’” (CAC, 2023a, para. 7). The CAC is explicitly positioning the designation as essential for Canadian sport coaching as a field of practice and for any individual coach sport in Canada and, implicitly, positioning itself as the authority on sport coaching as a profession in Canada.

However, a more critical reading highlights the lack of connection between what the CAC aims to provide program participants and what it can accomplish for those who take on the designation. According to the CAC (2023a, para. 9), being a ChPC:

…positions you as a committed professional, shows your commitment to a higher standard of excellence, allows you to coach at major international games, connects you with other professional coaches, demonstrates to students and the community that you are a trusted and reliable mentor, differentiates your program in the eyes of potential customers, helps you land a coaching position more quickly, improves your ability to transition between roles at all levels and grants you the right to use the ChPC designation after your name.

While the designation may grant some of the privileges listed here (e.g., using the credential after your name), the CAC does not have any actual avenue by which to guarantee that all ChPCs will be the recipient of the benefits outlined above, including achieving a coaching position more quickly. As was made clear by all study participants—including those from the CAC—the CAC has a limited relationship with the university sport system as it does not employ and/or hire university sport coaches. Although the CAC offers coach education, university sport coaches’ job prospects and experiences are most convincingly shaped by the institution in which they seek work or do work.

The ways in which an interested individual can enter the ChPC program are outlined in a section entitled “Pathways to ChPC Designation,” which includes four pathways: (1) NCCP Certification, an Undergraduate, Graduate, or College degree, plus 3000 h (4 years) of coaching experience; (2) NCCP Certification, an Undergraduate, Graduate, or College degree, plus 5 years of part-time coaching or 2 years of full-time coaching (4000 h); (3) NCCP Certification, enrolled in the Advanced Coaching Diploma (ACD), plus 5 years of part-time coaching or 2 years of full-time coaching (4000 h); and (4) Post-Secondary degree from a CAC-accredited Coach Education Program, ² plus 5 years of part-time coaching or 2 years of full-time coaching (4000 h) (CAC, 2019). Of particular interest is the range of what is deemed acceptable in terms of prior educational requirements of coaches, according to the CAC. Specifically, coaches do not necessarily need to hold a post-secondary education degree or diploma and, of the coaches who do possess a post-secondary qualification, undergraduate and graduate degrees are treated as equivalent. In the canonized professions (e.g., Medicine), there are more prescribed educational pathways into the field because restricting membership is central to a successful professional project. Part of the very challenge here concerns the multitude of ways in which individuals can identify as and operate as coaches in the sport system. Jonathon (NIAD), a sport coach participating in the study, remarked how he had “sat on a committee with the CAC and they’re like ‘Ok we don’t own the word ‘coach,’ anyone can be a ‘coach.’ It's not copyrighted, so what do we do?’ Not everyone can be a physiotherapist. So how the heck do we professionalize the word ‘coach’?” Since a major tenet of the professional project is the ability of a professional group to police claims of membership, the program's many points of entry into the ChPC render it porous and unrestricted.

Successful professional projects serve to foster a sense of collective buy-in to processes and core requirements of the profession (cf. Larson, 1977). Without buy-in, the CAC's ability to create social closure, control the production of coaches, and regulate the field of sport coaching work remains contested. From the interviews with CAC administrators (Sarah and Kenneth), buy-in from the university sport coaching community (whether coaches or administrators) was critical and yet difficult to secure. When asked how many university sport coaches were ChPC-certified, Sarah answered: “Not many. [Where] we see is better [buy-in] is from our national sport system,” which included the Canadian “Olympic Committee and Paralympic Committee, or Commonwealth Games and our Pan Am games.” She later clarified, “I would argue that universities are a part of the national sport system, but I would tell you that the system itself is still trying to figure that out.”

Sarah acknowledged that the CAC is “…invited to the table by different universities, and that's a really critical component. Those universities where we don’t have a role is because we’re not invited in.” Where the CAC was working with supportive university gatekeepers through “…the deans of Kinesiology and Physical Education programs to try and create and foster more partnerships and accrediting through undergraduate and masters in coaching programs.” In Sarah's view, this was part of “creating and fostering more undergrad and masters [programs]” and getting people to see the profession of coaching “as a viable option and a viable career.” Sarah suggested that the hope for these partnerships was to “help to raise the standards of the profession,” which would ultimately result in “motivating universities to hire professional coaches who have undergrads and designations, to be part of their coaching ranks.” According to Sarah: “Right now, universities typically just hire a coach based on their own perspective” and that different universities had “different levels of robustness around who they hire, who they pay, how they pay them, and other criteria used to employ coaches.” As such, for Sarah: “…until we get [into] the academic side of universities, we don’t think we’re going get into athletic departments in a way that's meaningful. We have relationships with some, but not with many.”

The drive to affiliate with, if not accredited through, university degree programs is integrally connected with the professional project as it signals both higher status and credibility, as well as greater standardization of what is being taught to whom and how (cf. Telles-Langdon & Spooner, 2006). The CAC is understandably keen to establish uniformity among sport coaches through education which, as Larson (1977) notes, is central to reconciling differences in opinion and interpretations within the group. Simply put, if the CAC cannot control the production of sport coaches as the producers of sport coaching knowledge and expertise then the professionalization of sport coaching is unlikely to be achieved—ironically, the very porous pathways into the ChPC undermine the CAC's efforts in this regard. And yet, what the CAC wants to accomplish through the ChPC, and how it is received by university sport practitioners, are not the same things.

University coaches’ perspectives on the ChPC

All the coaches in this study claimed that sport coaching was a profession, but not all had obtained or were even aware of the ChPC designation; in fact, only half of the coaches interviewed for this study were ChPC-certified. When asked, their rationale for going through the program and obtaining the designation, their responses did not constitute an enthusiastic endorsement of the credential or the CAC. Jonathon was somewhat noble in his reasoning: “to support the system that wants to develop that name and what it's all about.” However, Karl (IAD) offered a more pragmatic rationale—he undertook the program because his AD paid for it.

Coaches candidly shared their misgivings about what the ChPC would do for them. Matthew (IAD) did not have a ChPC designation, and he reasoned that: “I didn’t think it was important. I didn’t think just to put ChPC beside my name would make me a better coach or a better person.” Rachel (NIAD) mentioned the high volume of educational requirements for coaches: “In coaching, it's like what's next? What do I have to get and why? How do I get there? It's very foggy, and the ChPC just adds to the fog.” Although certified, when asked how the ChPC benefitted him as a coach, Jonathon (NIAD) said: “Right now, it does not deliver me anything. It doesn’t give me a higher salary.” The perceived lack of financial return on investment in the designation was echoed by Matthew who stated: “If I would get a salary raise, I would apply, but it won’t change anything.”

Several coaches spoke about the lack of demand for the ChPC from the athletic directors who employed them. In fact, there was no mention of the need to possess a ChPC in any coach's contract or other governing texts (e.g., descriptions of coach duties) from either the IAD or NIAD. Rachel stated that: “if my employer or my boss doesn’t think it's necessary then [trails off].” Interestingly, this point was also raised by Kenneth (CAC administrator): “…coaches often think ‘Why bother if I do not technically need this designation to be employed.’” Logan (IAD) discussed how medical doctors and accountants have designations and codes that they adhere to but that, in Canada, “there is not enough political push behind making [the ChPC] mandatory.” He noted other dynamics at play in sport coaching: “In Canada, you’re supposed to have a minimum level of coaching education to qualify for [the ChPC], but those things seem to be pushed aside if somebody wants to put a friend of theirs [as a coach] on a national team.” When asked how the ChPC benefits him, he noted he did not gain his job because of the ChPC; rather, it was because of his resumé, his master's degree, and his success as a coach.

The insights of sport coaches on the CAC and the ChPC are fascinating. On the one hand, coaches are clear that coaching is a profession; on the other hand, their reaction to the ChPC as a signifier of professional status was, at best, tepid. This uncertainty about the ChPC led some coaches to question its value which, in turn, raised questions about how this occupational group might professionalize when its members are undecided about whether the ChPC is a worthy signifier of professionalization. In not requiring university sport coaches to be ChPC-certified, ADs establish work conditions that contribute to this situation.

University administrators’ perspectives on the ChPC

In many ways, the standpoints of the university sport administrators in this study dovetailed with those raised by the coaches. When reflecting on whether coaching was a profession, five university administrators felt that it was. However, both Andrew (IAD) and John (IAD) were clear that coaching had not yet been regulated and/or recognized by the Canadian government and the public as a profession. Andrew remarked, “I don’t think [coaching] is a profession, I think it's a career. I don’t think it will ever be a profession.” John said: “Coaches should be professionals. At this point, no one is because we do not have a profession.” Andrew further added that professions require “regulatory bodies and inclusion criteria” and highlighted: “We haven’t agreed on that and you’ll never get people to agree on that.” From his viewpoint, the question “What does it mean to be a Chartered Professional Coach?” remains unanswered. He gave the example of Kinesiologists who are regulated as health professionals in some Canadian provinces. He reflected: “You’ve got a Kinesiology degree, or you don’t. Well, what are you gonna do in coaching? Are you gonna say you have to have a coaching degree to coach?” He then went on to say that coaches “will never go for that” because they will say: “‘I need an exemption. I need to be grandfathered in, aren’t you going to recognise my 25 years of playing professionally?’” The inability to control entry into coaching or to “own” the title of sport coach weighed heavily for Andrew whereas, for John, the ChPC was the very instrument “to move the profession of coaching forward” because: “We need to clearly designate the profession and, in Canada, that's definable. It's the Chartered Professional Coach status under the CAC.”

Andrew's concerns about tensions between coach education and experience as linked to professional buy-in were echoed by the U Sports administrators. For example, one of the U Sports divisional representatives (Nate) remarked that “I looked into [requiring the ChPC] a couple of years ago, as something we should pursue as a conference. The challenge we received from some of our members was I think for the designation you need a degree […] yet we have coaches who have coached for 15 or 20 years in their sport who don’t have a degree! And so, what happens to those coaches if we said you have to have a degree!” To this end, the COO of U Sports discussed “the challenge I always think of is if you’ve got a coach with 20 years experience that is an exceptional coach, knows everything about his or her respective sport and then for whatever reason never went to the course or got the [ChPC]. Is there flexibility or an alternative or equivalent?” Not only do these remarks echo the educational versus experience quandaries in sport coaching, they further point to the porous nature of the sport coaching profession which works against efforts to control the production of sport coach professionals.

In discussing the ChPC designation, the sport administrators were all aware of the credential and some saw some degree of value in it. For example, Margaret (NIAD) noted: “I think it elevates [a coach's] profile and it's a stamp of approval that you’re part of an organization that recognizes coaches as professionals. I think it's a very positive thing.” Even ChPC-resistant Andrew noted: “I don’t think [the ChPC] is important from the perspective of hiring but, as a concept in our country, it's important.” These comments about how the ChPC elevates a coach's profile lead to a critical question: for whom do university sport coaches need to raise their profile? Is it for the government? The public at large? Athletes and/or their parents? Other stakeholders within or outside of universities? Tim (NIAD) was very practical and applied in his support for the ChPC: “It is a treasury board-recognized title that you’ve been through the professional practices review.” In contrast, Ella (IAD) commented: “To an athlete, a coach's biggest credential is that they’re a university coach, not that they’re a ChPC.”

It is key to note that the positive reception of the ChPC by some of the sport administrators did not necessarily translate into a requirement for those seeking to coach in an AD. Sport coaches can be brought into and remain in university sport without a ChPC designation—a feature made clear by the absence of the ChPC as a requirement in any of the institutional governing texts or job postings, and by study participants who had been working for over 20 years as university sport coaches without a ChPC (e.g., Matthew and Will). This lack of requirement for a ChPC among ADs is particularly noteworthy given that most sport coaching jobs (whether paid, unpaid, full-time, part-time, or contractual) are in the Canadian university sector (see U Sports). To that end, Sophie (NIAD) was the only administrator to suggest that universities have a responsibility to endorse the ChPC because universities have: “…a part to play in the professionalization of coaches and I think we hire the most full-time coaches out of anyone in Canada….” When pressed to comment on how many of the coaches working at their university had a ChPC, the IAD administrators indicated that many (but not all) of their coaches had the credentials, while the NIAD administrators noted that very few of their coaches were ChPC-certified. Perhaps those institutions that integrate their sport programs with academic units are more likely to cultivate a workplace atmosphere or culture that encourages formal education and credentialling.

Did the administrators (or even the sport coaches) see U Sports as having any influence regarding the ChPC? Not really. John discussed the importance of gaining more “broad acceptance [of the ChPC]” within U Sports. He also added that in the past, “We’ve opened that discussion up with U Sports and it hasn’t gone very far at all.” When asked why this was the case, he remarked that it had to do with governance: “U Sports doesn’t govern athletic departments.” Other participants were blunter in their assessment of U Sports’ role as a stakeholder in the sport coaching professional project—“I have nothing good to say about it” (Andrew); and, “Do we need them? I don’t know” (Rachel). To be fair, U Sports was understood by the university sport administrators as important, but not with regard to the professionalization of sport coaching. U Sports’ significance was mainly understood in terms of organizing and governing the leagues and conferences in which competitions occur: “We don’t have anything if we don’t have our conferences and U Sports” (Margaret).

Taken as a whole, the university sport administrators’ concerns about the value of the ChPC as a professional designation are significant because they inform the management of the different ADs and, invariably, contribute to the coaches’ hesitation or apprehension about the designation. The mixed reactions from these university sport leaders further illuminate the ambivalence surrounding the ChPC designation and its role in the professionalization of coaching. They reveal the struggles in terms of power relations at play between the CAC, the university sport system as represented by U Sports, the university ADs, and sport and sport coaching practitioners/leaders working “on the job.”

Conclusion: the risks of ambivalence for sport coaches

Through an examination of intra-professional conflict in the Canadian sport coaching professional project, this paper highlights the ambivalent reception of the ChPC designation among university sport coaches and administrators. Without the ability to establish and control social closure, the CAC can neither secure its own authority in the professional project as the regulatory body of sport coaches in Canada nor control the production and regulation of sport coaches. Little can be achieved in a professional project without buy-in from members of an occupational group. The lack of buy-in from coaches and administrators underscores the fact that the CAC's sport coaching professional project is not making progress in the Canadian university sport community.

We argue that the intra-professional debate between experience and education in the sport coaching professional project exacerbates precarity for sport coaches. This is because the requirements to secure and retain work in sport coaching in university athletic departments give less emphasis to coaching education and credentials and more to experience related to producing winning athletes and teams (Krahn and Safai, 2024). The requirements are dependent on the institutional cultures and attitudes in individual athletic departments that increasingly privilege winning above all, as either set or tolerated by the athletic directors leading those departments (Banwell & Kerr, 2016). When the ability to produce winning athletes or teams is the default criterion for hiring, keeping, and supporting sport coaches, it is important to question whether credentials really matter in a system that privileges those who can produce winning athletes and teams, and where winning is related to experience and opportunity?

The construction of winning as the unspoken coaching credential has important implications for those who are routinely underrepresented in sport coaching—including women sport coaches in U Sports (cf. Norman et al., 2020). Numerous feminist sport scholars have drawn attention to the fact that while women's opportunities to participate as athletes have increased over time, the construction and preservation of sport as a male space renders sport coaching a difficult occupation for women to access because women's increasing involvement in sport leadership poses a threat to those men who have “historically gained from their near-exclusive access to and control of the world of sport” (Theberge, 1993: 312; see also Demers & Kerr, 2018; Harvey et al., 2013). We add to these observations by recognizing that if professionalization is a process whereby groups attempt to secure their power amidst a landscape of other actors, we must attend to gender inequity to better locate who gets to be part of the power-defining group and who doesn’t—a significant matter in the context of the sport coaching professional project since sport is such contested terrain for women. FPE and IE support us in this line of inquiry as both frameworks encourage examining the intersections of gender with education, occupational status, professions, and the labor market. The challenges women face in the professions—including sport coaching—are located against a broader political economic backdrop in which patriarchy and capitalism operate to limit women's opportunities within the labor force—whether by denying women full entry into fields of work, by limiting career options, by minimizing or discounting women's expertise and skill, or by normalizing unpaid caregiving labor in the private spheres of family or home as primarily women's work.

As a consequence, sport coaching in the Canadian university sport system is a risky business for women. If women have a difficult time entering sport coaching, then they will have a difficult time gaining experience and, with that, the winning record they need to secure a sport coaching position. This is exacerbated in the current political economy of Canada, which continues to normalize women taking on the bulk of social reproductive or care work both inside and outside of the home (Bezanson & Luxton, 2006; Waring, 1999). These systems function to keep women on the margins of sport because many cannot find time for their own sport participation or sport coaching participation/development. Nonetheless, more research is required here, as studies to date have not focused explicitly on how professionalization as a process mitigates or aggravates disadvantages for women sport coaches.

This paper's findings are in line with the debates within the broader international scholarship on the tensions and ambiguities surrounding the sport coach professional project. In circling back to Shudson's (1980: 218) argument that a profession is “…a particular form of political control over work which an occupation gains,” we underscore that professional projects are only successful when they achieve social closure. Although social closure works to exclude some, it also works to include others in a defined community worthy of recognition and opportunity. From this perspective, it is possible to argue that the ChPC has the potential to counter the narrative that women sport coaches are not qualified. Yet, possessing a ChPC currently does not necessarily afford any sport coach an equal opportunity in the current university sport coaching job market because the system privileges a winning record as the preeminent (unspoken) credential. Given that university ADs hire sport coaches—and not U Sports and/or the CAC—it is critical that these hiring units acknowledge their power and position in perpetuating a landscape of sport that has largely been inhospitable to women, and that adds confusion to sport coaching's contested professional project. In this respect, this paper is breaking ground in the extant scholarship in its attempts to highlight the social and political impacts of professionalization (or lack thereof) for women in sport coaching, and calls for more research on how the process of professionalization resists or contributes to the disadvantages faced by women in sport coaching.