One of the hardest strategic questions in sport is this: How do you protect the value of membership today, without closing off opportunities to grow the whole pie tomorrow? Golf’s latest participation numbers, and Golf Australia’s response, are a live case study in that balancing act. Golf is booming. So why change anything? Golf in Australia isn’t in crisis. It’s flying. More than four million  adult Australians played some form of golf in 2024/25, the highest total ever rec

Run Club near Sydney Opera House It’s that time of year when our favourite apps release their annual data drop, giving us a snapshot of how people are choosing to move, train and connect. For anyone involved in sport and recreation program design, Strava’s Year in Sport report is a useful proxy for broader sport participation trends. It’s not a perfect mirror of the whole market (no single dataset is), but it’s a massive, real-world sample of how people are actually behaving

Asset first revenue model Across the sport and recreation sector, the same question keeps coming up: “How do we diversify our revenue and improve our long-term sustainability?” Funding is more contestable. Costs are rising. Participants have more choice than ever. So it’s understandable that boards and CEOs feel pressure to “find new revenue streams” or “be more commercial”. The problem is, that pressure often sends organisations straight to the wrong starting point: What bra

If AI takes more of our jobs, sport and recreation might become some of the most important civic infrastructure we've got.  When people talk about AI and robots, the conversation usually goes straight to productivity. Smarter scheduling. Cheaper admin. Better data. Fewer staff hours. All useful. But there’s a bigger opportunity AI could create for sport and recreation – and it has nothing to do with optimisation or automation. It’s about what happens to people when work no lo

AusPlay’s participation data – particularly its focus on lifelong involvement in sport  – offers a useful lens for anyone thinking about the future of community sport. Outside of the often-reported drop-off in youth sport participation, there are two insights that consistently stand out. On the surface they seem obvious, but we don’t always leverage them as well as we could in a bigger-picture strategy for engagement – especially if we’re serious about keeping people connecte

I’ve recently been thinking about the boom/bust cycle some sports and activities go through - and whether we sometimes over-credit the strategy and under-credit the simple fact that culture moves in waves. In sport we spend a lot of time on the “product”: formats, pricing, marketing, pathways, facilities, digital. That’s important - especially for participation-based sports that have to keep lowering the barrier to entry. But sometimes the biggest lift doesn’t come from a cle

Strava Logo It’s that time of year when our favourite apps unleash the data they have captured during the year to show us latest trends...

Diplo run club Music producer and DJ Diplo held his first running club event with 11,000 registered runners hitting the start line for a...

ESG in sport Thanks to  SportWest  and the  ASTN - Australian Sports Technologies Network  for hosting a workshop earlier this week on...

5 prompts to uncover your organisation'spurpose Your association's purpose or mission shouldn't just be some sort of esoteric statement...

How does technology and data influence or impact your participation in sport and physical activity? Parkrun, an organisation I admire...

Necessity is the mother of innovation.  When I worked on the WA State Mountain Bike Strategy in 2022, one of the key priorities...

Our increasingly comfortable lives are the leading cause of our most urgent physical and mental health issues.  I’ve been reading the...