Ken Pride, CEO Bowls WA

Alex Mednis, Nicholas Watkins & Ryan Agar, Australian Sports Professional Association
Ken Pride, Bowls WA

Bonus content

Each CEO has bonus content available to ASPA members that is not found in the book. The philosophies below are sourced directly from the interview, however each interview contained so much great content we had to put together an excerpt. Note that the content of the interview differs than the philosophies.

Interview

From studying accounting and marketing at university, working through banking, the West Australian Cricket Association and then the school sector, Ken has had a diverse background before coming to Bowls WA, where he is now the CEO.

How has working across so many different sports and different types of organisations over the years shaped the experience that you brought to bowls?

I think the similarities of what the staff do at any sporting organisation are very similar. The difference between bowls and a larger sport is that at a larger sport these days, they might have a whole department to fulfil a particular role. 

We've got seven full time employees here at bowls, and of those seven employees, the last one that I employed was eight and half years ago, and each of these people have got a very specific job. They don't have a department to work with - it's a department of one, in their particular area.

That means people have to get creative, and be thoughtful and bring a lot of experience and drive to the roles to make them work, which is what they've done. But definitely that outside experience has helped.

What does that say for institutionalised knowledge, having such long term employees?

Our longest employee is our accounts lady, who has been here for 27 years. That's a real plus because of that fantastic corporate knowledge that she's built up over time, but it also comes with the understanding that when we eventually get a new person in that role, that we need to ensure that the handover is seamless. 

And that goes for all roles, including mine. 

Looking back, it was an issue that the board decided about three years ago now - in that we need to have really quite detailed background information on what each of us do. 

I'm guessing that with such long term staff, you have really good, long-term relationships built with your clubs. How do you manage such a large geographic spread of clubs across Western Australia with a small team? 

I think COVID really opened our eyes up to that whole communication area being able to be delivered online. The whole world in terms of communication has changed. We can easily now communicate with clubs that are 4,000 kilometres away.

Before COVID that was almost impossible, and that can build dissent in the ranks because a club might say, "why are we paying Bowls WA for? You're 4,000 K's away, you don't give us any support". 

This whole area of COVID-19 (where everything is being done remotely) has actually brought our outer lying clubs back into the fold a lot more. We can now very personally describe to them what the background of some reasoning or outcomes are, that might quite specifically influence them, whereas before they had no idea.

We've just changed our whole operational plan to make sure that we do the video conferencing with our outer lying country clubs at least three times a year. 

Looking at other future trends, people are shifting their time away from organised competition and moving more towards gym, or yoga, or martial arts where they can choose when they want to. How do you think that will affect bowls in the future?

There are more things for the traditional bowler these days, the traditional bowler being in the ‘40 year old upwards’ group. Are there more things than to do now than there ever was? Absolutely. Think about the cruise industry. 25 to 30 years ago, no one would go on a cruise unless you were rich. Now, half of our sport goes on a cruise in the winter and summer. There are so many more things for people to do and travel and so on, than there was in the past.

And it really hurts sports like bowls, which traditionally people would play after finishing their rugby, netball, footy, whatever else. They'd finish up in those sports and go straight into bowls. There was nothing else. There was bowls, or there was golf. There might be tennis. They were about the only three sports you could do until the day you drop dead, and bowls really did well as a sport out of that. But now there are so many other things for that generation to do. 

To come back to your question - we are struggling. Like a bucket with a leak, we're getting lots of people in the top of the bucket in terms of new members, but we're losing more out of the bottom of the bucket. It's gradually declining all the time. That's a challenge for us at the moment. 

On the other end of the age spectrum, younger people today would much prefer to spend 70 or 80 bucks to go down to the bowling club on a Saturday night, but then not join, and do that 10 times a year rather than spend $200 to become a full member. It's five times more cost, but they don't want to sign a piece of paper. 

That's an interesting point, Ken, and on the topic of communication with those differing age groups, how do you differentiate or split your member groups in terms of communication? Is social media the answer?

It's changing quickly. I think around 75% now of all of our nominations for events are done online. Even with an obviously relatively older group of individuals that play, it's still 75 and it is increasing rapidly. However, that said, we still do a printed magazine. The old coffee table magazine that every sport does. 

We actually got clipped over the ear quite a bit a couple of years ago when we tried to go online with our publication. People genuinely liked to sit down at their club and read the magazine. Yes, it would be old news by the time they actually started to read it, in terms of social media and so on, but there was still a call for that. 

We now try to keep website as up to date as it possibly can be for news, but the print publication still goes out. The general thought at the moment is that our next appointee for a staff member will probably deal specifically with social media in their role.

Do you think that bowls as a sport will ever get to a point where you would be 100% online?

It’s interesting to look back at what we’ve done previously. What the heck we were doing 20 years ago? There was no such thing as email, Twitter and all of those things. I think five years, to be honest, is likely the timeframe. I think within five years’ time, we'll have everybody effectively either on social media or being able to be contacted in other ways for the written word than in print.
 

Continuing the theme of future trends, and considering you've got a bit of history in cricket as well, a lot of sports have taken a massive change towards their game formats and to make them more of a community or family based event. Do you think that bowls as a sport would be able to move towards something similar?

Certainly, and that's happening as we speak. We've got a lot of shorter, sharper games. The traditional 5 hours in 40 degrees on Saturday afternoons in a pennant competition, is changing very quickly. We've got a major TV  version of the sport, the Bowls Premiere League, which is on a lot of TV at the moment, and which is due to be in November in Pine Rivers in Queensland. They are short, sharp one hour games. Get on, get off, get a result, move on.

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