The 2022 National Coach Survey found that just over a quarter of youth sports coaches in the United States are female, but the City of Los Angeles is looking to change this.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday accepted $1,000,000 in total assets from sports apparel company Nike — including $750,000 in cash — to help implement a Citywide Coach Plan Initiative to help encourage equitable coaching opportunities at parks across Los Angeles. The initiative will also expand the successful Women Coach Los Angeles (WCLA) pilot program, which has worked to provide female coaches with training and internship opportunities to promote gender equity in the field of sports.

Establishing a citywide standard for coaching practices through a newly developed Coach LA Playbook — that establishes a framework of standards to develop coaches and gives guidelines and advice to help coaches lead their teams — is chief among the initiative’s goals. The five-year plan will also establish a universal training program that will help produce high-quality coaches throughout the city.

The WCLA program that inspired this motion was established in 2019, training 25 new female coaches in its first cohort. The second cohort of 25 additional participants successfully completed three coach training sessions and a hands-on clinic. They were also given the opportunity to accumulate 750 hours of paid internship work at five participating recreation centers in the city.

“WCLA 2.0 proved successful as staff at the recreation level has seen an uptick in girls participation in sports,” a report on the partnership noted.

Seeing the success of this program, the Los Angeles Parks Foundation (LAPF) and the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks (RAP) entered an agreement with Nike in 2021 to develop a more broad and established program to foster the development of youth sports coaches in Los Angeles.

An ambassador program will be created as part of the implementation of this initiative that will help establish coaching standards and train coaches throughout the city. It will be created with collaboration from Nike and the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport (CHJS), a nonprofit that focuses on using sports as a way for young people to promote camaraderie among youth. The CHJS helped create the Coach LA Playbook that will be used to train coaches in the program.

One of the cornerstone goals of this initiative is to establish the Coach LA playbook as the standard throughout all recreation centers in the city, starting with a Coach LA Summit held in April 2023 at Dodger Stadium. City staff in the Recreation and Aquatics departments were presented with the final version of the playbook at the summit, with volunteer and part-time workers expected to see the document sometime this spring.

While LAPF and RAP staff will mostly be responsible for the implementation and training, Nike will also be involved in the estimated five-year-long process. On top of a $250,000 product allowance, Nike will be providing $285,000 in hiring support for a Senior Project Coordinator and $255,000 to assist with operational costs and evaluation of the program. 

The timeline of the program has the city fully implementing the Coach LA playbook throughout the Department of Recreation and Parks by 2026. From now until that time, the city will host annual Coach Summits to help raise awareness about the playbook, and an internal department within RAP that focuses on connecting coaching activities across the city will be established to promote a stable long-lasting ecosystem for developing coaches in Los Angeles.

“Through thorough training models, rigorous program evaluation, and exhaustive outreach,” the report said, “The goal to establish a lasting system for coaching equity throughout the city of Los Angeles is well within reach.”

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