The Sports Playbook ― Building Teams That Outperform, Year After Year

Why do so many sports teams have losing records, year after year? Why do others win big, but only every 20 or 30 years? And why is it that so few teams enjoy sustained, continual success? This book gives the answer. Providing a blueprint or "playbook" for success in sports at every level, it lays out a clear step-by-step plan for building a team culture that will lead to winning consistently.

With each step, the book introduces real-world tools that can be easily implemented by every sports organization and coach to achieve success, including team charters, individual athlete plans, player accountability systems, and team communication strategies. It offers expert advice and practical guidance on key areas such as aligning individuals with a clear team plan, resolving conflicts proactively, and learning from every game and every season to develop a smarter and more consistent culture of success.

The Sports Playbook: Building Teams that Outperform, Year after Year will help every team fulfil its true potential through leadership, focus, and performance. It is essential reading for coaches, sport management professionals, and leaders of every kind of team, inside and outside of sports.

Joshua A. Gordon has been a leading business and legal strategist for more than twenty-five years, and is an experienced educator, consultant, negotiator, facilitator, and organizational capability builder. He specializes in sports industry strategy and crisis management that builds upon a deep history of contexts that have included business-to-business, organizational change, energy, environmental, real estate and housing, family, and gang-related challenges. Gordon teaches sports business and sports law at the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business and is the founder and lead practitioner at the Sports Conflict Institute (SCI), which supports competitive goals in athletics through understanding, preventing, and resolving destructive conflict inside and outside the lines and specializes in building high performing team culture. Gordon has developed creative organizational solutions to ensure competitive success for a number of teams and leagues from collegiate through the professional levels. He has presented to audiences that have included individuals and teams from the NCAA, NBA, NFL, MLS, NRL, MLB, USATF, USTA, PGA, LPGA, and ATP. Gordon earned his Juris Doctor from Suffolk University Law School, his Master's in Dispute Resolution from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and his Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Gary T. Furlong has extensive experience in mediation, alternative dispute resolution (ADR), organizational facilitation, team-building, and conflict resolution. He is past president of the ADR Institute of Ontario, is a Chartered Mediator and holds his Master of Laws (ADR) from Osgoode Hall Law School. Gary is the author of The Conflict Resolution Toolbox, and was awarded the McGowan Award of Excellence in ADR in 2005 by the ADR Institute of Canada. He has worked with many organizations to create alignment and focus in mission-critical team-based environments, in business and commercial settings as well as sports organizations. Gary has also conducted original research into the relationship between team performance and dispute resolution processes, and has conducted hundreds of interventions to help teams and organizations build focused and effective cultures that breed success. He is a board member with the Sports Conflict Institute, teaches at the Queen’s University Industrial Relations Center and the Osgoode Hall Law School LLM program, and is a leader in the mediation and alternative dispute resolution field in Canada and North America.

Ken Pendleton earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oregon, having written his dissertation on how standards of reasonableness are applied to hostile environment sexual harassment cases. After teaching courses about reasoning and writing, ethics, and social and political theory at Oregon State University for more than a decade, he changed his professional focus to his lifelong passion, sports. He conducted research, assisted with program development, and taught highly successful courses on sports and cultural studies at the Competition Not Conflict program at the University of Oregon. In general terms, the purpose of his teaching and research was to show how the line between healthy competition, on the one hand, and destructive conflict, on the other, is reshaped by class, race, nationality, gender, and other factors, such as commercialism. Ken and Joshua Gordon work together at Sports Conflict Institute, which focuses on projects that help stakeholders understand, resolve, and prevent institutional problems that arise at all level of sports. He has also consulted with London-based Football Marketing and Management International (FMMI) since 2006. His work with FMMI centered around his encyclopaedic knowledge of both the major American sports and international soccer, including doing deep background research on a ground-breaking comprehensive study on the North American soccer landscape, Soccer in North America: The Commercial Opportunities.