Each summer at the draft, the NHL Coaches’ Association holds a global coaches clinic and when NHLCA president Lindsay Artkin gazes out upon the throngs, she notices a disparity.
“Each year I would look out at 500 people,” she told me. “And there were maybe five or 10 women.”
That obviously does not reflect the population as a whole and it certainly doesn’t represent the percentage of women in the hockey community, either. So the NHLCA began to think about options.
The first initiative was officially announced on International Women’s Day this past weekend: the launch of the NHLCA Female Coaches Development Program, which aims to help women with whistles in a variety of areas including skills development, leadership strategies and communication techniques – not to mention valuable networking and career advice.