Saving the Life of a National Sport Organization with Strategy and Governance

Sage Business Cases Saving the Life of a National Sport Organization with Strategy and Governance: Endurance Canada Author: Milena M. Parent Pub. Date: 2023 Product: Sage Business Cases DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529620382 Keywords: governance, sport organization, Canada, national organizations, sport, strategic planning, strategic plans, students, sports, organizations Access Date: August 22, 2025 Publisher: Human Kinetics, Inc. Online ISBN: 9781529620382 © 2023 Human Kinetics, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Amanda Tsang looked across the conference table at Bill Fitzpatrick, the new Chair of the Board for Endurance Canada, the National Sport Organization (NSO) for the sport of endurance. “I’m taking a big gamble, here,” Bill said. “I don’t want to hire you as a crisis management or strategy consultant—you came highly recommended by the way—I want to hire you to be our full-time CEO. I’m the first to admit we’ve had a lot of problems for some time now, but COVID-19 was the proverbial nail in the coffin. If we don’t fix our problems fast, we’re going to have to declare bankruptcy. I need the best and that’s you.” Amanda tilted her head to the side. One fact still did not make sense. “I’m flattered, but wouldn’t it be better to have someone from inside the system? I haven’t worked in sport for a while, as you know, even though I do endurance events for fun when I can on weekends.” “That’s exactly why we need you. Endurance Canada needs fresh ideas but from someone who understands our sport.” Amanda loved a challenge, and this might be the biggest one she had faced in her 15-year career. “Okay, then. I’m in.” Bill jumped to his feet; a smile plastered across his face. “Fantastic! You don’t know how relieved I am to hear you say that. You can start now. By the way, you’ll need to present your plan to get us out of this mess at our Board meeting next month. No pressure. But as you’ll quickly find out when you look at our files, COVID-19 hit us hard, and we’re going to have to declare bankruptcy if we can’t turn things around asap. I’ll get your employment paperwork started. Now, follow me so I can show you your new office.” The Lay of the Land Not knowing the intricacies of Endurance Canada’s management, Amanda knew she needed to think strategically and understand what was best for the organization but also for the whole sport. Based on her experience, the more knowledge and information she could gather, the better the decisions she could make. She picked up the phone and called her friend, Elliott, who worked at Sport Canada. “I know you’ve been frustrated with aspects of the Canadian sport system in the past,” Amanda said, “so, can you explain to me the key issues?” “How long do you have?” Elliott laughs. “Okay, seriously. I’ll send you some documents after this, but the long and short of it is that we’re lucky—or unlucky, depending on your perspective—to work in a federated or multi-level system. You must deal with not only the workings of Endurance Canada but of each provincial and territorial-level endurance sport organization or P/TSO. Do you know how many you have?” “Eleven,” replied Amanda. “Okay, 11. So that means you have 11 jurisdictions plus the national-level jurisdiction and all their varying laws to deal with. Each jurisdiction, so each province, territory, as well as the national level, has its own laws that you’ll have to consider when making decisions. I don’t envy you having to figure out a human resource policy or a financial policy that’s legal in 12 different jurisdictions.” Amanda swallowed at the thought. “I’ll figure it out. Anything else?” “Well, as the NSO, you’re usually not allowed to speak directly to the local-level clubs because they’re under the purview of their P/TSO, unless, that is, the clubs are your voting members.” Amanda paused in thought then said, “I think they are, but I’ll double-check. I do know Endurance Canada has 20 people on its Board: the 11 P/TSO presidents as ex-officios plus nine members at large.” “That’s a lot. In my experience, when you’re over 10 people, cliques tend to form, and it gets harder to build consensus and have everyone work together, especially when they’re thinking about their own jurisdictions. Do you know if they’re operational or governance-based?” Elliott asked. “To be honest, I haven’t found any written procedures or policies for staff, let alone for the Board,” Amanda said. “So, I don’t know about that. But I did find 18 policies so far for athletes, coaches, and officials on the website.” “One of my colleagues is analysing data from our NSO governance survey she sent out a few months ago, and she was telling the department at our latest meeting that it looks like a lot of NSOs are struggling with redundancies or duplication of efforts and resources between the NSO and their P/TSOs. The problem is sport in Canada is mainly a provincial/territorial-level jurisdiction, so the provinces and territories, especially the larger ones like Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, don’t want to give up control of their portfolios. The system isn’t sustainable.” “Look, I must go, but before I do, you should know that Sport Canada received some complaints from your P/TSOs in the past. I don’t have the details in front of me, but there seems to be concerns with the lack of leadership at the national level—that means your predecessor and/or the Board, I’m not sure—the perceived lack of services from Endurance Canada to the P/ TSOs, and frustrations around the lack of communication and collaboration between Endurance Canada and its P/TSOs.” Amanda drew in a sharp breath and thought more about the overall problem. It was bigger than she thought. She had less than a month to come up with a plan, and she needed to figure out what was most important. The rest may have to wait until the big pieces were in place. But what, exactly, were these big pieces? True to their word, Elliott sent her a set of documents and links. They included a couple of book chapters about sport in Canada (Parent & Patterson, 2013; Parent, Patterson, Jurbala, et al., 2017), as well as the Canada Not-For-Profit (NFP) Corporations Act (2017), which made sense since Endurance Canada was registered federally as a national NFP, and a webpage with various Sport Canada policies that funded NSOs was expected to follow (Sport Canada, 2021). Perusing the documents, what struck Amanda was a set of requirements presented in the NFP Act not only for the organization but also for the Board. She noted in particular that (a) voting Board members must be elected, not appointed/ex-officio; (b) there must be an annual general meeting (AGM) of voting members, and meetings could now be conducted via video/teleconference; and (c) financial audits were required for organizations with more than $1 million in revenue (Canada Not-forprofit Corporations Act, 2017; Parent et al., 2018). Amanda knew she needed to address board composition and election issues immediately if she was to follow the NFP Act and avoid dissolution by the government. A strong believer in stakeholder consultations, over the following week, Amanda took the opportunity to introduce herself to each P/TSO president to understand what the federated system meant in real terms. One recurrent topic seemed to be the differences in resources and capacity across the country and the duplication of resource needs. There were efficiencies that could be made, and Endurance Canada could take the lead here. Some P/TSOs also had strong systems or services that could be expanded nationwide if they would allow it. Regardless, it was clear that efforts were needed at both the grassroots and elite levels. Who would do so remained to be determined; she was not convinced yet about leaving most of the athletes’ development to the P/TSOs. With 2 weeks left before her presentation to the Board, Amanda still needed to get a better handle on the internal affairs of Endurance Canada. The Internal Situation The next day, Amanda dug into the files on her predecessor’s computer, looking for anything resembling a strategic or operational plan. She found mention of a strategic plan in the previous year’s AGM as an appendix to the AGM’s minutes. The one-page document looked to be very high level. The vision statement read, “Canada is a world endurance powerhouse,” whereas the mission statement read, “Endurance Canada will be the leader in the delivery of endurance sport in Canada and have a legacy of champions.” Finally, the values included excellence, participation, and stakeholder engagement. The goals included: (a) raise awareness; (b) improve the organization and the whole sport structure, especially provincial/territorial members; and (c) achieve international excellence. Not bad, thought Amanda, but not great; she spotted alignment issues immediately. Something would need to change here. It did not help that the strategic plan did not have any benchmarks, indicators, or timelines—essentially, no action plan components. To her surprise, she failed to find any updates to this plan, which was dated 3 years prior, and a call to Bill confirmed her suspicions. Amanda knew a properly developed strategic plan was critical for organizational success, so she put that at the top of her to-do list. Regarding people, Bill informed that they had quite a bit of turnover in the past few years. Currently, the top management team consists of the CEO, the administrative services manager and the high-performance director. Everyone else is under the high-performance director, so that’s the high-performance manager, the head coach at the national training center and his Parasport coach and assistant coach. The high-performance director also oversees the events and technical officials manager, the coaching program manager, and a sport development officer. They hired a new high-performance director a couple of months ago, but three more positions needed to be filled. Amanda learned that Endurance Canada operated with constraints of both human and financial resources. There is more and more reporting requirements and greater expectations from Sport Canada but without any additional funding, even if some of these expectations are ‘good’ things in principle. So, people are asked to do more with less, and they eventually burn out. Finance-wise, Endurance Canada have half the budget of main competitors, Australia, Britain, and the United States, but with the same performance expectation You need consistent funding over ten-plus years to produce Olympic-level athletes, and it’s been harder lately to get Sport Canada performance funding because of not medalling internationally for some time. Also, it’s hard to get sponsorships for a small NSO because the big fish, like Hockey Canada, Curling Canada, and the Canadian Olympic Committee always get the big sponsorship bucks. Amanda could not find evidence of other Sport Canada funding opportunities like the Next Generation Program. Amanda sat back in her chair and rapped her fingers on the desk as she mulled over all the information she had gathered. She had an idea, but she needed to do some research on successful NSOs first. If the pandemic had taught her anything, it was that people were willing to share their best practices and help each other. She banked on this to get Endurance Canada back on track. References Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act. (2017). http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-7.75/ Parent, M. M., Naraine, M. L, & Hoye, R. (2018). A New Era for Governance Structures and Processes in Canadian National Sport Organizations. Journal of Sport Management, 32(6), 555–566. https://doi.org/ 10.1123/jsm.2018-0037 Parent, M. M., & Patterson, D. (2013). Canada. In I. O’Boyle & T. Bradbury (Eds.), Sport governance: International case studies (pp. 54–73). Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415820448/ Parent, M. M., Patterson, D., & Jurbala, P. (2017). Canada. In E. Kristiansen, M. M. Parent, & B. Houlihan (Eds.), Elite youth sport policy and management: A comparative analysis (pp. 115–130). Routledge. Sport Canada. (2021, April1). Sport policies, acts and regulations. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/sport-policies-acts-regulations.html. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529620382