Toward a Strategic Future – How

By Todd Powless

In the first article I outlined the first two points of the OLA Strategic Plan in the Lacrosse is for Everyone section:

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation - Identify the most common barriers to participation in lacrosse and then look at practical solutions to overcoming them.
Fostering a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion - Become a larger and more diverse lacrosse family by championing the game and developing a province-wide approach to inclusion.

(The third point in this section, Celebrating and Encouraging Female Participation will be left for a later time, however everything in this article also applies for female participation)

I also illustrated that if no one knows about lacrosse, we aren’t really going to grow, especially in the new Canadian community. The OLA needs to change their focus and re-orient their priorities, otherwise they are ignoring a fantastic business opportunity in every community, but especially in the GTA.

In the second article I looked at house leagues as the strategic platform to foster the changes needed to achieve those first two goals, part of the “practical solution” so to speak. House leagues, when properly run, could easily satisfy all points contained in the Players First section:

Championing the Player Development Pathway
Loving the Game
Increasing Player Safety

Using house leagues as the target strategic platform isn’t to say that Rep programs become secondary, it simply means that the OLA will develop a “province-wide approach” to standardize house leagues in order to break down participation barriers and foster diversity and inclusion. Rep teams will be the happy recipient of the efforts in club’s house league programming.

In this article, I take a more hopeful tone in offering a few suggestions on how the OLA can achieve their strategic goals through Empowering Our People, Extending Our Reach, and Operational Excellence. I believe the OLA can foster unprecedented market growth by making a few structural changes, but it will take disciplined leadership to make changes and stick with them.

Make Strategic Plan Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting mandatory as part of the annual compliance process. Clubs have to report on compliance every year, KPI reporting is crucial for OLA leadership strategic decision making. Don’t let strategic planning get away from us. KPI reporting is now a KPI!
Establish a permanent Strategic Planning Committee comprised of members of the Board of Directors, Staff, & minor lacrosse representatives. This committee could oversee the execution of the OLA Strategic Plan and engage other sporting organizations for information sharing, guidance, experience, etc.
Create a Strategic Planning Information Clearinghouse as a centralized electronic resource center for all members of the OLA, but with a focus on organization and member club administrators. This clearinghouse would contain relative resource documents, reports, links to other provincial sport organizations with a focus on diversity and inclusion. This information would be relevant, current, and timely.
Establish a House League sector that will begin standardized house league programming based on the Sport For Life Long Term Development stages adapted for lacrosse. This can start with a House League/Recreational Director reporting to the OLA VPs for box and field sectors.
Create a Diversity Advisory Committee comprised of volunteer members of representing Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities. Minor clubs from across Ontario can nominate potential members from their own communities. This committee can report to the Strategic Planning Committee.
Develop special and specific communications materials targeting BIPOC communities and alter existing communications strategies to normalize diversity. Such materials should be bilingual, culturally appropriate, and inviting.
Develop and execute a comprehensive communications plan advertising on all Ontario lacrosse channels and including new channels such as television and streaming. Such a plan should repeat during strategic times of the year such as registration opening in January, recruiting coaches and volunteers in March, etc. These communications should be integrated with a diversity component. Brand recognition must have diversity normalized!

Establish a culture of transparency and openness. It goes without saying that transparency in OLA decision making is a good thing for members. This is tempered with the idea that the OLA does have business requirements to ensure specific types of information needs to be protected. Strategic planning information is no different, but access needs to be open by default and only restricted by limited and specific reasons. These reasons need to be published.
Lower costs for equipment and supplies by acting as an equipment and supply broker for clubs. I am sure vendors would lower their cost-per-item if they knew they were dealing with an entity that provides access to every member club in Ontario. An OLA equipment and supply broker could provide a direct means for member clubs to reduce their costs for participation.

As we seem the OLA cannot simply download the Strategic Plan executables to member clubs. Diversity and inclusion isn’t a fly-by-night trend, it’s a just concept and justice must be seen to be done. This must be a top-down process. Everyone who signs on to SportzSoft must be able to see the OLA making genuine and tangible efforts towards fulfilling their best strategic ideas. They also must correct the course when the organization drifts away from the goals, adjust the timelines and KPIs, face the questions. But on this plan, above all, the OLA must lead. That includes buy-in and leadership from every person on the Board of Directors, all committee members, and all staff.

To be fair, the OLA has made some strides in manoeuvring the organization towards the goals of their Strategic Plan. We can see this in some of the staffing changes, the policy adjustments, and in the use of digital media. The OLA is working on their strategy, or so it appears. I will give them that despite the fact that the Plan is over 2 years old.

The OLA – the head office so to speak – is the hub for the Strategic Plan, serving as the central repository and authority for the Plan’s execution. In other words, if the OLA drops the ball on any of the Strategic Plan goals, we can’t realistically see those objectives being achieved in a meaningful way province wide. However, the experiences that will count the most, especially when compiling KPI data, is at the club level and for the purposes of diversity and inclusion I am referring to minor clubs.

What are the biggest challenges for minor clubs to execute their portion of the Strategic Plan? Certainly, there is a reporting element that needs to be done, part of the compliance process as we have said, but what else? The first thing to recognize is that there are differences between the demographics served by different clubs. Six Nations will have a different look than Arthur who will have a different look than Mississauga and so on. While the demographics may be different, the goals of the Strategic Plan are the same: break down the barriers to participation and foster a culture of inclusion. This is not about numbers defining differences, it is about attitudes.

What can a local minor club do to satisfy, not only the KPI elements, but to enhance the collaborative elements of the plan overall? Here are a few suggestions:

Lower registration costs. Probably one of the biggest barriers to participation in lacrosse are the registration fees, tournament fees, and equipment costs. It seems that post-pandemic, everything has gone up in price, but does it need to in Ontario lacrosse? Clubs need to establish financial baselines for operations and then look for ways to lower the costs for all participants. The first thing clubs can do is make the registration costs for house leagues very affordable. Lacrosse competes with relatively inexpensive house league sports like basketball, soccer, and softball and they do not have the same equipment costs our sport does. House Leagues should operate on a break-even basis and that includes awards, photos, and special events.
Lower operational and rental costs. Often, we’ll all sit back while municipal bureaucrats decide to raise the cost of facilities. Well shrug when the price of balls go up as the cost of putting on the best sport in the world. It doesn’t have to be this way. Minor clubs should have leverage with their town or city facilities, especially when it is explained that we are trying to increase the number of players and increasing the number of rentals. Talk to your councillors, talk to the mayor. Get them to help you make the change by making our sport more affordable to citizens.
Lower player equipment costs. Many minor clubs supply goalie equipment for house leagues and this is good, but is there a way of lowering the cost of player (runner) equipment from the manufacturer or providing equipment to the players at a no- or low-cost basis? This is where OLA leveraging numbers can provide enough weight to explore alternative equipment design and costs. For example, MaxLax (Maximum Lacrosse) provides one-piece and combo equipment for players at a low-cost. For a low-contact house league such equipment is perfect. A club could purchase ‘loaner’ equipment until participants purchase their own. The OLA could act as a bulk purchaser and likely lower the over cost per piece. This is not a new function for the OLA, they have done this before.
Create community outreach ambassadors. Essentially the club will appoint members that belong to specific BIPOC communities and help them promote the sport within those communities by promotional and demonstration events. The OLA has a promotions page on their website (albeit hard to find for some reason) and this function should be a hub for promotional materials targeting minority communities, in different languages, etc. However, the OLA can produce as much material as we want, but it has to be delivered and presented. How much of that slice of the sport business pie will make it worth it?
Finally, and most importantly clubs must develop their house leagues and rec programs to be inclusive & welcoming, fun & vibrant, and provide an experience that keeps bringing players and families back the following years. Lacrosse is a wonderful sport, but managing the participation experience is key, especially for entry-level players from diverse cultural backgrounds and communities. “Take care of house league because Rep will take care of itself.” Start now.

All of the above suggestions, and I am sure others will have many more, are achievable and land within the scope of the OLA Strategic Plan. The only issue I see is the narrow perspective caused by a warped sense of organizational ‘tradition.’ Here’s an example:

During the Festival this year, the OLA posted some AI-created avatars on Facebook representing the teams playing in a particular division that week. During the U22 Provincials, the avatars, called “Ken,” looked like a packaged Ken doll dressed in a team’s jersey. Of the 25 avatars posted, not a single player was black, brown, or East Asian. The only way I would have guessed a player was indigenous was because of the jersey they were wearing. During Girls Provincials, the “Barbie” avatar set fared a bit better in the diversity department, but not by much. This same ethic was displayed during the U11 Provincials but using Lego characters – all white-male-presenting. I could identify the indigenous characters by their black hair.

Come on OLA, surely you can do better than that! But you can’t if you don’t see it and if you can’t “see it” then your Strategic Plan doesn’t really mean Lacrosse is for “Everyone.” It is simply a paper exercise completed and posted to satisfy some funding requirement. If that is the case, then that is sad and ‘niche sport’ takes on a whole new meaning.