Joy Jouret’s research into the under-representation of female coaches in European high performance hockey will receive the support from the first EuroHockey Institute Academic Grant.
The support from EuroHockey will assist Jouret’s important work, creating an evidence-based and consistent approach to understand the obstacles and generate meaningful solutions.
It will form a key part of the former Belgian Red Panthers’ captain’s Masters in Clinical Psychology, something she dovetails with her extensive coaching work since retiring from playing.
It includes coaching both men and women’s teams at the highest level in Belgium as well as several national youth national teams in her country. She shares this knowledge as one of their coach educators for the FIH Academy.
Speaking about how the project came about, she explains: “When I embraced the career of a coach, I always wanted to have the academic background to do it properly.
“I believe psychology is an important aspect of coaching so it is a real pleasure and a good help to have psychology by my side doing my coaching everyday tasks.
“In Belgium, I see there are not many female coaches. For me, I was lucky enough to be supported by my federation and sent to EuroHockey and the FIH different courses but there, I saw the same problem, the recurring problem of the representation of female coaches around Europe and around the world.”
It appeared to be a systematic problem which got her wondering what are the causes and the reasons behind it, leading to her specific question: “Is there interest in our top national athletes in a coaching career?”
“Because the quickest and easiest solution or way to cover the gap between men and women in coaching would be that our top athletes turn into coaches because they have the knowledge. But for some reason, it’s not the case.
“I’m really passionate about the subject because for me it embraces so many different, complex layers above each other and every perspective is interesting at least in my eyes.”
Currently, Jouret is defining the traits of the project with a survey going out to female coaches which will help define the research, the final research question and the hypothesis to be tested.
“The idea will then be to develop a long-term approach and use the methods and strategy to first identify, then attract and retain and develop female talents because that’s what we are not doing really well at the moment.
“We want to create an evidence-based consistent approach looking at high performance because in most countries what you see is that you have women coaches until what we call ‘the small field’.
“It’s often up to U-12 or U-13; once we step up to the big field, the numbers drop. So what we wanted to do is really to address the high performance first because that’s where the numbers are the most striking.
“It can be other involvements, you know, like traveling or the consequences it can have on your household or family. So that’s what we’re going to address in the first phase. And in the second phase, what we wish to do is to broaden the sample.
“In most countries it is the case, so there must be something, a reason that we should look at because it’s quite systematic.”
She concludes by encouraging people to be proactive and willing to participate in changing the current status quo to see more women take on high performance roles.
“Change will only come if we actively do something. It’s not going to come from the top or the bottom, it will be a mix of both, but we need active participation of both men and women in order to address that.”
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** Click here to find out more about EuroHockey Institute Academy Research Grants
