Child Safeguarding Checklist for Canadian Sports Clubs

The Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport (the UCCMS, in the acronym every Canadian sport administrator now knows by heart) has done a lot of good work. The Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner exists. Safe Sport training is available. Most provincial sport organisations have safeguarding policies they’re prepared to share. Background check infrastructure works.

This piece is not against any of that. The point is narrower: the part of safeguarding most likely to actually prevent harm in your community sports club is not on any checklist. It is the assistant coach who saw something concerning at a practice in March, didn’t say anything, and is now wondering whether she should have.

That is the actual question. Everything else is preparation for it.

What checklists are good for, and what they aren’t

A safeguarding checklist is useful for two things. It makes sure your club is compliant with whatever your PSO requires (necessary). It gives the board a documented baseline that they have done their due diligence (useful in the worst-case scenario where something goes wrong and you need to show what was in place).

It is not useful for actually preventing the most common kind of incident in community sport, which is gradual, hard to define, hard to be sure about, and depends entirely on whether someone with peripheral awareness feels permitted to escalate. The checklist doesn’t ask “do your assistant coaches know they have explicit permission to raise a concern about a head coach, in writing, without retaliation?” — but that’s the question whose answer most predicts whether your club catches a problem early or finds out about it three years later when it has become a different kind of problem.

The four-coach problem

In most community clubs, the coaching structure is something like: a head coach who has been there forever, an assistant coach who is a parent of a player and steps up because nobody else will, a few rotating helpers, and a junior coach or two who are themselves recently aged out of the junior program.

The safeguarding policy is usually known by the head coach (who has done the training because the PSO requires it). The assistant coach has probably done the training too, but is less confident. The rotating helpers have not. The junior coaches definitely have not, and would not feel they had standing to raise a concern even if they noticed one.

The checklist won’t change this. What changes it is the head coach or the chair making it explicit, on day one of every season, that any coach, helper, or volunteer can raise a concern about any other coach, helper, or volunteer — including the head coach — via a named pathway. And that the pathway works. And that the person who uses it doesn’t experience retaliation.

If you can’t say all three of those things confidently about your club, your safeguarding posture is worse than your policy suggests.

The cheapest, hardest piece of infrastructure

Most safeguarding incidents that end badly include some version of “people had noticed things but nobody said anything.” The reason nobody said anything is almost always one of:

• They weren’t sure what they saw counted (the behaviour was odd but not clearly wrong)
• They didn’t know who to tell
• They thought they would have to be the formal accuser and didn’t want to be
• They feared social consequences if the concern turned out to be wrong

The cheapest piece of safeguarding infrastructure your club can build addresses all four of those. It’s an anonymous reporting pathway — even a Google Form that goes to two named directors — explicitly framed as “if you’ve noticed something that concerns you, even if you’re not sure what to make of it, tell us.” Not a complaint. Not an accusation. A noticed thing.

Nine out of ten submissions to that form will be nothing — context the directors didn’t have, behaviour with an innocent explanation, misread interactions. The tenth one is the one you needed.

Most clubs don’t build this because the policy template doesn’t suggest it. The policy template is written to be defensible after an incident. The Google Form is written to prevent one.

The screening conversation people skip

Background checks are necessary. Police Information Checks with Vulnerable Sector Verification, where applicable. Most PSOs require them. They work — within a narrow band of what they’re designed to detect, which is people with a criminal record relevant to vulnerable persons.

What they don’t detect is the much more common case of someone with no criminal record at all who develops a problematic dynamic with a specific athlete over a season. Background checks were never going to catch that.

What does catch it, sometimes, is a screening conversation at the point of bringing someone into the club as a coach. Not the policy review. An actual conversation with a board member: “tell us about your previous coaching experience, why did you leave the previous club, what age group do you prefer to work with and why, do you have a coaching mentor we can call.” Twenty minutes. It does two things. It signals to the prospective coach that the club takes its safeguarding posture seriously enough to ask real questions. And occasionally, very occasionally, it surfaces something that makes the board decide not to proceed.

Most clubs hire coaches through “we know them” or “their kid plays here.” This is fine, until it isn’t. The conversation is cheap insurance.

What the actual checklist should include

If you’re going to have one, three items that aren’t on the standard template but actually matter:

• A named person who is not the head coach to whom any concern can be raised. Email address that exists. Mentioned at the first practice of every season and on the parent welcome sheet.
• A documented commitment that anyone raising a concern will not experience retaliation, and the chair will personally be responsible for ensuring it. (The “in writing” version of this matters more than people think.)
• An annual conversation, not a form — twenty minutes between the safeguarding lead and each head coach, asking how the season went, whether anything was difficult, whether they have concerns about anyone in the broader coaching staff. This conversation has surfaced more genuine concerns in Canadian community clubs than any policy update ever has.

The rest of the checklist is fine. Background checks, Respect in Sport, parent acknowledgment, mandatory training certifications, two-deep supervision for vulnerable settings, change room policies. Do those. They are necessary.

But know that they’re necessary, not sufficient. The work that actually prevents harm in your club is the work of making it normal to notice things and say them out loud — which no policy can do for you. The chair has to.