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 recorded. That’s one...

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 week to week. And...

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 brand-new product...