More Than a Game

Basketball has never been something I just did.

It became the environment in which I understood myself best.

People outside community sport sometimes see only the visible product: children in uniforms, parents on plastic seats, referees with whistles, coaches pacing sidelines and senior teams playing under lights on a Saturday night.

Underneath that is an organisation.

Budgets. Payroll. Facilities. Insurance. Sponsors. Councils. Contracts. Volunteers. Staff. Coaches. Referees. Complaints. Policies. Governance. Data. Technology. Competition structures. High-performance programs. Thousands of participants and thousands more family members who expect the organisation to work even if they never see how it works.

I love the basketball part, but over time I became fascinated by everything underneath it.

Why did some associations grow while others stood still?

Why could one organisation build strong commercial partnerships while another relied almost entirely on participant fees?

Why were some Boards clear about governance while others drifted into operations?

Why did some staff structures create accountability while others created duplication?

Why were some organisations prepared to modernise while others protected systems simply because those systems had existed for years?

I like building things.

I like walking into a complicated environment, understanding how the pieces fitted together and then making it better.

That tendency became one of my strengths and, at different times, one of the reasons I create friction.

I have never been especially comfortable with the phrase, "That is how we have always done it."

My instinct is to ask whether that is a reason or an excuse.

Sport makes those questions harder because sport is emotional. Parents care about children. Coaches care about teams. Volunteers care about history. Boards care about reputation. High-performance people care about winning. Staff care about workload and security. Sponsors care about value. Members care about fees and opportunities.

Everyone has a legitimate interest.

Someone still has to make decisions.

I am comfortable doing that.

The longer I’ve worked in basketball administration, the more I understand that leadership in community sport is not a softer version of business leadership. In some ways it is harder.

A commercial customer can walk away from a company and buy somewhere else.

A basketball family might have twenty years of history with one club.

A volunteer might have given thousands of unpaid hours.

A coach might have developed an identity around a program.

A Board member might have children in the system while simultaneously being responsible for governing it.

Every decision carries history with it.

I’ve learned to navigate that world over more than two decades in sport management, coaching, competitions and program development.

By the time I became General Manager at Bulleen Templestowe Basketball Club, basketball was not merely an industry I worked in.

It was my professional identity.

That made what happened there much harder to separate from who I thought I was.