CFL VP Kevin McDonald on league's amateur football survey with Football Canada

The CFL recently teamed up with Football Canada for a survey on amateur football across the country, intended for athletes, parents,  families, coaches and officials. I spoke with CFL vice-president (football operations) Kevin McDonald this week about the timing of this joint endeavour and what they're hoping to accomplish. He said the key goal of the survey is to understand just where amateur football in Canada is at.

"I think primarily it's to get a broader sense of what's going on across the country, at all levels," McDonald said. "It's to get a sense of what's good, bad and broken."

In addition to getting voluntarily-submitted surveys through the web, there will be extensive phone interviews as part of this as well. The surveys are going to look at all sorts of elements of amateur football, and they're part of the CFL's larger plan for a national strategy to work with amateur football organizations.

"At the end of the day, we're looking to come up with a broader strategy as it relates to amateur football and our role within it," McDonald said.

McDonald said the CFL's overall goal in working with Football Canada is to try and increase participation in amateur football. That's beneficial for the league on a couple of different levels; it helps ensure there's a deep pool of Canadian talent that can be scoured for CFL players, but perhaps even more importantly, it helps build more fans of the Canadian game (whether those fans are players, friends or family members). McDonald said a lot of the CFL's teams are already doing impressive partnerships with amateur football organizations in their regions, but he feels there's an opportunity for the league to get involved on a national scale.

"There's an abundance of outreach that goes on at the team level," he said. "We're looking to see what we can do at the league level."

McDonald said one key component of that outreach so far has been coach development, with teams holding clinics for amateur coaches and inviting some to be guest coaches at training camps. He thinks there might be opportunities for the CFL to do something along those lines.

"If we can facilitate that more, that's an area to focus on."

Working with amateur coaches can be important for developing training techniques, but it's also important from a safety perspective. Towards that end, this week saw another key release involving a CFL/Football Canada partnership. That would be Football Canada announcing that all of its head coaches and half of its assistant coaches will now need to be "Safe Contact-trained" by March 2016, with the rest to be trained by March 2017. Coaches will also need to take the e-learning module "Making Head Way in Football" through coach.ca.

The Safe Contact initative has been going on for years, but the CFL teamed up with Football Canada to expand and promote it last year, and this latest rollout is a further expansion of it. The program focuses on teaching safe blocking and tackling techniques, emphasizing making blocking contact with the hands and tackling contact with the chest and shoulders. That should help reduce head injuries, as poor tackling form has been a key part of those in the past. McDonald said lowering head injuries is a key goal for the CFL, and teaching players to do things safely early in their careers is crucial.

"Player safety is at the forefront of what all leagues should work on," he said. "This is a project that really tries to adopt that at an early age."

The CFL got involved in Safe Contact last year, helping to create better teaching material and promote the campaign.

"We reshot all the teaching components, shot it all in HD, brought in an expert," McDonald said.

They also ran a PSA for it on TSN during a CFL game in the fall.

"It was to create that awareness, get it into the vernacular, the football community's mind," McDonald said.

McDonald said amateur football in Canada is generally growing and improving, and it's producing more top-quality talent for the CFL. That's evident from the depth we've seen in recent drafts and the expansion of regional combines. McDonald was at last weekend's national combine, which he said was yet another demonstration of how good Canadian talent is now and provided further reason to keep investing in it.

"This is my 15th combine, and it's amazing to see the progress," he said. "Coming from the combine this week and looking at where 50 per cent of our roster comes from, it's certainly important."

He said the CFL feels working with Football Canada is vital to developing that future pipeline of Canadian players, and that lots of progress is being made at the amateur levels.

"We are working side by side with them," McDonald said. "The administration of the game is improving, and there are more places for kids to play now. There's football being played year-round in most centres in some form. There's the national championship for teenage kids, interprovincial camps, and more."

Of course, not every amateur player's going to go on to the CFL, and McDonald said it's also important to promote football for players who aren't going to make it a career.

"It's an opportunity to get out and exercise, and if they fall in love with it, that's a great bonus."