Maria Nordstrom, CEO Basketball NSW

Alex Mednis & Nicholas Watkins, Australian Sports Professional Association
Maria Nordstrom, Basketball NSW
 

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

What is the Maria story? Did you always think you were going to work in sport?

I never thought I would work in sport. I was active in sport and I played basketball from a very young age as an elite athlete, all the way through the system up to the national league, and the national teams, but not in Australia. I grew up in Sweden. I also was lucky enough to have a full scholarship to college in the US playing basketball.

I was always very passionate about sport, and understood the pathway for our sport from a young age. I was brought up playing in the top divisions, from when I was around 15 years old. I was quite athletic and had a strong mental attitude towards achieving goals and winning, and it took up a lot of my youth. 
 

When did you move to Australia?

I moved to Australia some years later with my then husband, who actually worked in extrusion plastics as an engineer, and Melbourne. I wasn't planning to play basketball in Melbourne, but you know when you have those sliding door moments?
 

Oh no, what happened?

I remember we arrived on Wednesday, the day after Melbourne Cup day, which was really bad planning. 

We lived at a hotel for the first period as we wanted to find our own home. We settled in for a day or so, and then asked reception, "What do you do on a Friday night?" They gave us about two or three places to go to, so we went to the micro-brewery in northern Melbourne, and we walked up to the guy at the door who was a bouncer. 

He was a big American guy that my husband Peter used to play basketball with in Sweden, and he was just a bouncer filling in on the night. He wasn't even working there properly. 
 

Just a random coincidence?

Random coincidence.
 

Wow.

Just there on the night, we just go in, and ask, "What are you doing here? And all the way here in Australia!" And he tells us we should go to the Albert Park Barracks, which are really the old barracks from the 1956 Olympics, and down there are nine basketball courts.

"You'll pick up a game and you'll meet loads of Australians," he told us.

This was on Friday night. On Sunday we go down to check it out. We walked up and walked in the door, and Peter is six foot five, I'm six foot, so we're both very tall and people just turned and looked when we walked in the door.

Various people started approaching us, saying, "Oh do you want to play? You're clearly new here." By the time we left, I'd signed up to play and train with a certain team. I was playing with a group of girls who are still my friends today, 20 odd years later. They're still my best friends in Melbourne, this group of 9 or ten girls.

We were connected with a basketball community in Victoria for a long time, and we worked through the pathway down there, and learnt to fully appreciate it. I think from my perspective this were I  really got to understand the system in Australia which is very different to Sweden. 
 

That was how you ended up back in sport?

Not at all. I then worked in IT, and an American company for about six years, and through that I moved into more leadership positions. At the end of that I disconnected with sports completely, and I joined Fuji Xerox Australia.

I worked for Fuji Xerox in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney for 18 years. I worked in leadership areas where they needed cultural change, where they wanted to look at improving general performance, behaviour and relationships with customers. 
 

This is starting to sound more like sport!

Absolutely. It was especially the stakeholder side. I worked in Melbourne during the recession where the printing industry went through major challenges due to the market changes as well the change from analogue presses to digital technology in the late 90s. We worked with a group of people that really struggled and we needed to reinvent ourselves in how we approached the market and how we approached our customers.

I did that for that for many years, but I wanted to go and run a business fully as a CEO or a Managing Director. I never really considered sports, which is really interesting considering I came from sport.

I ended up doing the AICD Company Directors course, and through a number of conversations around basketball, ended up in my current role!

As I entered sport then, I asked myself, "Wow, why didn’t I consider a career in sport?  Isn't that interesting?
 

Absolutely. What's the biggest learning from the corporate world?

In a corporate business you can systemise the business and implement shared services and outsourcing, for non-core activities such as accounts receivables, finance, HR, IT and other functions within the organisation. In sport, you can do the same thing with business specific processes such as accounting, HR, legal, corporate services.  You can also apply business improvement processes in other areas of the business such as the canteen, the management of the stadium and competition management. You can definitely apply business logic to optimise that.

But the actual structure of sport, the core of that organisation, the federated model needs to have considered change and while other business models will allow to take away some of these issues that stifles growth there are other capacity challenges that sport faces.
 

Do you think capacity is the biggest issue?

I think that's the conundrum. For community sport to continue to thrive, you need to have space to be able to see more money, but because you're busy doing that core piece, you're not really delivering as optimally as you could. 

I think that's a big challenge, increasing funds and delivering value to your members. How do you manage to do both when your day-to-day focus is delivering the sport?

Every sport has associations/clubs of different sizes. We have some very big clubs and who are very self-sufficient and self-reliant. They're very much about ‘how do we expand?’, ‘how do we grow?’. They have growth strategies such as, ‘how do we expand our membership in the next five or ten years?’ Whereas the small ones are currently focusing on the day to day. ‘How do we get by?’ ‘How do we get the competition running next Saturday?’ The biggest challenge in sport is that. How we build long term capacity.

The multiple layers of politics don't help either.

That's right. The stakeholder ecosystem is complicated. We tend to think about the associations and in some cases the associations have clubs, with each layer having a Board or Committee. The associations/clubs then have members. And then you will have the participant member structure, including the parents and fans. From there you have all the auxiliary roles, as your boards, committe....

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