Erin Ball/CFL.ca
REGINA — Laurence Pontbriand’s playing days are probably over, but that might be just as well considering how much work she has been doing with the sport of football off the field, never mind on it as well.
“I’m pretty sure I’m hanging up the cleats,” said Pontbriand, the CFL’s manager, football and officiating development, capping a 12-year career with an appearance with Team Canada at the 2022 Women’s World Championship.
As a manager with the CFL, Pontbriand has a lot on her plate, adding responsibilities steadily since joining the league’s office four years ago, taking on challenges and managing new initiatives that she knows are crucial to strengthening diversity in the sport of football in front offices and on sidelines across the country.
Pontbriand is presenting the Jane Mawby Award at the 2022 CFL Awards and is happy to do it, she says, because “I think it’s important that females are represented in the sport.”
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That sums up well some of the important responsibilities Pontbriand has been undertaking with the CFL. She leads the league’s mentorship program, which sees current and former players taking intensive immersion courses in team and league operations. She’s been a leader in launching and managing both the Diversity in Football Program and the Women in Football Program presented by KPMG, initiatives that were met with great enthusiasm by both the CFL’s member clubs and by applicants looking for inroads to a career in the sport.
Some 200 applications were received for the programs in 2022, with about 150 of those coming from women interested in investigating the possibilities that a life in pro football might have.
“It was really well received by the clubs, by the public, by the fans, by the women that want to be invested in the sport,” said Pontbriand, “and I’m really happy that we get the chance to do it again next year.”
In cities across the league, women were invited to work with teams at training camps, learning on the fly and getting a chance to place a foot firmly in the door by impressing coaches and football operations managers.
Elisha Torraville was one of the applicants for the Women in Football Program and she wound up being hired by the Edmonton Elks as their manager of football operations.
“I think this is amazing,” said Pontbriand. “This is proof that the program is working and it’s going somewhere and that it’s absolutely needed.
“Because women are in football,” she continued. “The issue is that they just don’t have the connection in professional football. Putting them in those positions during training camp is going to help them to make a name for themselves.”
Pontbriand certainly knows this for a fact, because it’s how she made her way to professional football herself.
In February of 2018 she was invited to take part in the NFL’s Women in Football Forum and that’s where she crossed paths with the league that now employs her.
“The CFL football operations department was there and I think they were looking to hire women in their department,” said Pontbriand, “and I guess I made a good impression.”
Two weeks later, she was invited to help out at the regional combine, in Montreal. And two weeks after that, Pontbriand started her new career at the CFL’s head office in Toronto. With the league looking to make strides in diversifying itself, Pontbriand not only fit in her day-to-day role, she’s been an excellent conduit to helping the league to make those strides.
“I went to the NFL’s Women’s Careers in Football Forum with Laurence at the NFL combine in 2020,” said Greg Dick, the league’s chief football operations officer. They saw Sam Rapoport, a Canadian that is the NFL’s senior director of football development and all of the change she’s helped bring to that league.
“I was like, ‘We can do exactly all this here. We can do it at a smaller scale,'” Dick said. “That internship that we did with KPMG, the Women In Football Program, was just the start to me.
“Without Laurence being there and being an ex-football player and having experience in football and driving that forward to say, ‘OK, here’s what Sam Rapoport is doing in the United States, we should be doing the same thing here. There’s no reason why we can’t.'”
“She’s got all of these contacts all over Canada with women in football,” added Ryan Janzen, the league’s associate vice president of football operations. He first met Pontbriand at the Women in Football Forum in 2018.
“She’s played on the national team and so she meets people from all over Canada that are football players or coaches.”
On top of the responsibilities of her job, Pontbriand co-chairs the CFL’s IDEA committee (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility) which ensures those ideals are championed throughout the league.
Susan Jones Bouk, the CFL’s chief people officer and head of office operations, approached Pontbriand in 2021 about taking a leadership role in the volunteer committee.
“She lives it. She has lived experience and is always willing to share with the group, always coming up with great ideas and keeping us focused. She’s set the example for us,” Jones Bouk said.
“Not just as a woman in football, she’s broken the glass ceiling there, but also in the way which she builds relationships with people. She sets a high standard for herself and so by doing that I think she inspires other people to do the same.”
While Pontbriand believes crucial steps have been taken in promoting diversity in the CFL, she wants things to be even more successful in the future, beginning with ensuring even more curious men and women attempt to take first steps next year.
“We didn’t do as good a job in promoting the Diversity In Football Program as we did the Women In Football Program, but we’ll work on that in 2023 to have more candidates apply for sure,” she said.
“She’s very focused on developing football. Not just for women, but for everybody,” Dick said.
“That mindset leads her to think, ‘How do I how do I improve football in Canada? How do we improve what we’re doing at the amateur level?’ She’s focused on the amateur because she does a lot of officiating work with Darren Hackwood (the league’s associate vice president of officiating). It’s official development, it’s player development, player participation. (She approaches it as) how do I do that and get more women? It just dovetails nicely because that’s part of what she’s focused on doing.”
