Coaching, motherhood the new frontier in Canada's high-performance coaching ranks

When Shannon Winzer moved back to Canada from Australia to take an assistant coaching job with Volleyball Canada, her heart pounded when she asked head coach Tom Black if she could arrive an hour late on her first day in order to get her children settled in school.

"I was so nervous," Winzer recalled. "It was his first interaction with me. I'm going to a new job and I'm asking someone to let me show up an hour late.

"He was incredibly supportive right away. That made me feel better."

That moment was a game-changer for Winzer, who is now the national women's volleyball team's head coach, because a sport organization accommodated her motherhood without viewing it as a drag on her coaching ability.

"As women who coach and as women who have children in this space, we so badly want to be seen as the same as our peers because we want that mutual respect from our peers," Winzer said.

"For a long time, I tried really hard to be the same as all my male peers. We desperately want to be seen as the same, but we're not the same. If we want to do this job, we really have to accept that it looks different."

Only 16 per cent of head coaches and 18 per cent of assistant coaches of national teams were women in 2021, according to Canadian Women and Sport's most recent statistics.

Mothers are now arriving in the high-performance coaching ranks with varying degrees of acceptance.

The sport system isn't set up to accommodate them, even though their presence could contribute to safer sport.

"Diversity of thought, diversity of lived experience creates better teams, creates better, healthier, safer environments for all people," said CWS chief executive officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves.

"If we've built a role and a culture around a role on the