Coach P: Understood -- it was intended only as an analogy. I'm not trying to say that coaching licensing is inversely related to the quality of coaching (of course!), nor am I even trying to say that coaching licensing is unrelated to the quality of coaching. Coaching licensing over a wide group of coaches I hope may be correlated to the quality of coaching. It's just that when I'm looking at data to try to make a decision regarding the quality of a coach, licensing is at most a minor thing I look at when compared to that coach's history.
Let's take an example from CUFC. I think Heather Frederick is a good coach. I don't know her license (I'm sure she has a very good one) -- however, I've spent the time to understand what she's done in the past and even had my kid train with her a few years ago. If she turned up tomorrow and had no license at all, it wouldn't change my opinion of her.
This isn't simply a soccer issue; I had severe issues with South Carolina's plan several years ago to reward teachers based on their certifications rather than rewarding teachers based on incremental student achievement. Compare the budget outlay for the high school national board certification program in terms of certification expense and bonus salary versus test scores of students. You could have easily predicted that one a mile away...
Last edited by Chico; 05/18/07 06:25 PM.
