Sport Organizations and their Environment

The environment has a huge role in a sport organization and in some cases I think when people think of an effective or very structured organization they forget to look at the environment of the sport organization. I believe that the environment plays a huge role in the organization of sport. Slack and Parent describe the environment of a sport to be categorized into two different sections, general environment and task environment. The general environment section specifies the legal, economic, political, demographic, and ecological sides of the organization environment. The task environment looks at the aspects of the general environment like the customer-member-fans, staff, suppliers. This leads to the article at the begging of the reading where it talks about adidas and the Olympic Committee and how Dassler used the environment to make adidas what it is today. Dassler used the environment in take that he got to know the people around him to better his company in the way that he had someone from adidas in on every big thing that was going on to make sure adidas was doing everything they could to advance and keep moving up the charts to eventually where they are today at #1. The chairman of adidas would work themselves into every meeting and corner of sport politics to better themselves and to see what the people were saying about there product. Dassler found out very quickly that you need to get out and seek your environment and the people that you need to become close with. the adidas company believes that in making friends you are making deals and that is so true even today. People are not going to come out and find you, you need to take the initiative to go out and find them. This is what Dassler did best he started talking to people and pretty soon he had administration of adidas working on the International Olympic Committee. The environment is something that every team takes a look at in determining many things. For example after the North Stars left Minnesota, one guy by the name of Naglee decided it was time to bring hockey back to Minnesota. This was the birth of the Minnesota Wild which has been here for its 9 season this year and has sold out every game since coming. They felt that this environment of hockey in Minnesota was crucial and something that could relate to the environment of Minnesota and its 10,000 lakes. This is something where they are using there environment to there advantage and it has been working very well. They get everyone involved and not just hockey players in Minnesota even though its there main focus. With the economic status changing here in the last year the WIld has not sold as many tickets and is no reaching out to the environment to see what needs to be done to keep fans watching Wild hockey. When you pick out different situations it makes environment of a sport organization more understandable and you can really see where some teams do it more than others. In fact these are the teams that have sell out crowds night in and night out. This whole economic dropout is in the category of general environment of how are we going to get people in the doors still and keep them wanting more even though the money from them may or may not be there. Q1: With the dropping in the economy will you see more teams going bankrupt? Q2: Is the environment determine how effective the organization will be?