Article written by FSQ’s Director of Sport, Matt Young
If you haven’t noticed, your landscape is changing. Change happens by design or by disaster, and you have three choices: get in front of it, embrace it, or resist it. Since change is hard, some of you have chosen to resist it. Sorry/not sorry to share, but that’s no longer a viable option. Your time is running out.
We’ve shared, and will continue to share this reality, twenty ways to Sunday, but don’t just take our word for it. An inventory of the North American sports landscape over the past few months alone reveals:
- Hundreds of athletes coming forward and speaking up about abuse in sport, calling for accountability.
- Recommendations to Sport Canada & The Government of Canada for an independent inquiry into our sport system.
- Recommendations to the Federal Government of Canada to increase funding to National Sport Organizations so they may remain operable.
- A deepening mistrust of management and leadership with the existing governance levels of sport.
- Name, image, and likeness transforming the collegiate football world at both a personnel and institutional level. *Dartmouth’s Men’s Basketball team voting to unionize.
- Recommendations to the US Congress for a separate entity to manage grassroots sport and safeguard all participants.
- The continued bifurcation of participation starting in elementary school, where the legislated Quality Daily Physical Education is the rare exception versus the expected norm.
- The continued prevalence of academies as ‘go-to’ development pathways for high-performance identification.
- A competitive private entity (LIV), forcing change through the very traditional golf landscape.
- Numerous governing bodies teetering on the brink of irrelevancy and insolvency, a function of relying on registration fees as the sole source of income.
It is important to recognize a massive bright spot over the past few months has been the growth of women’s sport, which came on the backs of relentless efforts to change the perception around equity and inclusion. Perceptions that some people and organizations inadvertently reinforced through tradition &/or silence.
Outside of this, and instead of reflecting, adapting, and changing, many have chosen the path of least resistance. Wait it out. Do more of the same. Step off one sinking ship and scramble onboard another. Blame ‘a’ particular stakeholder group. In repeatedly doing so, you’ve lost trust from those you are supposed to be serving. Further, you make it almost impossible for a successor to re-establish connection.
You’ve reaffirmed your persistence through futile campaigns lacking any meaningful sustenance: “Sport is for Everyone”, “Build Back Better”, “Grow the Game”. But your walk hasn’t matched your talk. It’s like advertising fillet mignon while dishing out the same mystery meat served on hot dog day at elementary school.
Too many have continued PUSHING policies & procedures down while failing to understand the importance of a ‘people-first’ approach and the nuance of PULLING the consumer in by creating GENUINE value. Because your advisory table is always comprised of the same people and organizations, you’ve not benefited from experts who know how to help you activate the triple bottom line. You’d rather die on the grant / hand-out-vine than work creatively to diversify revenue streams. Gives you an out; “they’ve cut our budgets”.
You’ve demanded compliance from others while taking little responsibility for yourselves. The people you serve see it. They are not fooled. They are not impressed. As a reminder: the participants (across all levels of sport) should be at the top of the pyramid, NOT ‘your brand’. And with 1-10 referenced at the outset, why would anyone listen to you? Increasingly, they are not.
Through this, many of you are about to enter the irrelevant zone. Many have tried to warn you, Many have tried to offer support. But in the true spirit of self-preservation (for some) and ego (for most), ‘you got this’. What’s becoming paradoxically obvious is that some of you actually need to cease to exist in order for sport to improve. It didn’t have to reach this point.
On some levels, the insistence on behaving like this has paved the way for privatized sport. Do not blame privatized sport for delivering what you refused. Privatized sport will likely end up leading the youth and amateur sport sector, and like any business, there will be good & bad examples led by both the altruistic & the greedy. Also like most private businesses (the small ones anyway), there will be no bailouts for lack of innovation, poor leadership, or ‘inflation’. All we can do is hope the cream rises to the top in the ‘get mine’ era.
Privatized sport (on mass) will undoubtedly deliver better customer service because it will have to in order to stay in business and, by virtue of being for profit, will be beholden to the very accountability most of you get to continually skirt.
The most unfortunate reality of privatized sport is that it will only be available to those who can afford to pay for it. Again, that has as much to do with your continued reluctance to effectively deliver what the consumers want & need as it does the opportunistic sportrepreneur
In order to avoid being completely dead in the water, it’s time to lead in a direction you haven’t led before with an urgency you’ve not embraced before. The warning signs are all around you, change (good, bad & different) IS happening & WILL continue. It’s going to affect the way you do things. It is time to acknowledge and embrace it.
It is time to prioritize the participants first and really understand what that sounds, looks, and feels like if you want to remain relevant & solvent. And it’s time to get the right people in the rooms and tables who understand how to operationalize some of the key concepts you’ve articulated in your brochures. There are great examples across all levels of sport, but these are increasingly the exception when they need to become the norm.
It is time to do what your customers have been begging you to do all along in order to preserve all of the inherent good that comes with sport: increase the quality of sport experiences, starting at the grass roots and amateur levels.
Trust us when we assure you that the rest will take care of itself.