Photo: Carleton Ravens
There are two things that factored Nadia Doucoure becoming the first-ever female coach on the Carleton Ravens’ football team.
One is a confidence in her qualifications. Doucoure had worked in football since 2001 in her native France, working with a local team in La Courneuve, then a number of community clubs and a high-performance team in Bordeaux. She’s also played a high level of flag football and rugby in her homeland.
The other is a personality and spirit that embraces the unknown and the challenges that come with that. It’s what led her to Canada in 2014.
“I had a visa to come to Canada and I was like, ‘OK, I don’t want to go to Montreal. I know how to speak French already. Now I have to challenge myself and see where I can go and how I can be comfortable without knowing anybody and make my little community in a brand-new town,” Doucoure told Donnovan Bennett and Kate McKenna on Game Changers podcast presented by CDIC.
She checked options in Winnipeg and Regina, since it’s the capital of Saskatchewan. She eventually Googled her way to Saskatoon and realized she had a contact there. Then she found a job to apply for in event management. She was a Saskatonian not long after.
Wherever she’s gone, she’s found ways to weave football into the journey. She played for the Saskatoon Valkyries while she lived there, learning the Canadian game and coached female flag teams. She even answered a Kijiji ad to join a Saskatoon flag team.
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A job opportunity brought her to Ottawa and she continued to build her little community when she came there, working on adding to her coaching certifications. Eventually, Ravens’ head coach Steve Sumarah heard about her. The two met this year to discuss the offensive assistant and assistant receivers coach role and as much as he interviewed her, she was doing the same.
“He explained to me why (he wanted a female coach),” Doucoure said, remembering that he told her he was thinking about what a female head coach could look like for a women’s national team.
She in turn asked what her tasks would be. When they were done talking, she said she needed to consider the role.
“We were very open. The thing is when I present myself I think he didn’t expect that I had so much experience,” she laughed.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry, I can help you with everything you want me to do or (responsibilities to be) taken over. I know it can be different because you’ve never been in a situation with a woman that knows football and not just administration and not communication, marketing and stuff like that.
“It was very intense. You know, I’m very interested but first I need to know what I’m going to do. I need to meet the staff because they’ll be my colleagues every day.”
The Ravens are 2-3 this season and every day, every week, every game is a learning experience. Doucoure also knows that she’s blazing a trail, even if it’s one that we’d all like to see have seen blazed at least a generation or two ago.
In her conversation with Bennett and McKenna, she talks about getting “the look” from men that she’s encountered through her life in football, those what-are-you-doing-here glances. It goes back to that first trait of hers, though. She knows her stuff and she knows it. She knows she has a place in this game, whether it’s teaching it in France, or coming to Canada and learning a new set of rules, adapting to it and rolling along.
“I hope one, two women will actually knock at the door of clubs or universities because they saw me,” Doucoure said.
“More inspiring than being the first, that’s not the point. I think it’s more like if I can help as well. That’s what I said to the group at Ontario women collegiate football. If I can help in any way, any women who need advice or anything like that — because a lot of women that I met during the COVID period, they said, ‘Oh, I don’t have enough experience.’ But we’ve been all newbies in a sport. We need to have at least one (person) to get there and learn. It doesn’t come from the sky, right?”
