Sport for Business
Sport for Business
Leading Beyond the Court: How Badminton Ireland Became NGB of the Year
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What does it take to transform a sporting organisation and earn recognition as National Governing Body of the Year? Enda Lynch shares the journey of Badminton Ireland's growth and success since taking the CEO position two years ago.
From his background in sponsorship at O2 and leadership roles at Munster Rugby, Lynch brings a wealth of insights about building high-performing teams and creating sustainable sporting communities. He reveals how Badminton Ireland has grown from 12,300 to over 17,200 members, with much of that growth coming from ethnic minorities and first-generation Irish residents who are forming communities around the sport they love.
The conversation explores innovative programs like the BadminTeen initiative, which is successfully reducing dropout rates among teenage girls by empowering them to become coaches and club leaders. Lynch also discusses the creative solutions being developed to address facility shortages, including collaboration with other indoor sports to unlock access to school halls across the country.
What stands out most is Lynch's philosophy on leadership – "Surround yourself with people who know more than you do" – and his emphasis on accountability at every level of the organisation. He offers a refreshingly honest take on the challenges facing sporting bodies in Ireland, from funding constraints to staff retention, while remaining optimistic about the potential for continued growth through community-focused sponsorships and digital innovation.
Whether you're involved in sports administration or simply interested in how organisations achieve breakthrough success, this conversation offers valuable lessons on leadership, community building, and creating sustainable sporting pathways. Subscribe to the Sport for Business podcast for more insights from leaders across the Irish sporting landscape.
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Hello and welcome to the Sport for Business podcast. I'm your host, rob Hartnett, and today in our leadership series, I'm delighted to be joined by Ender Lynch. He's the CEO of Badminton Ireland, which was named earlier this year as the National Governing Body of the Year. Thank you. Ender Lynch is two years in the role as CEO of Badminton Ireland. He has led the organization to new heights in terms of performance, participation and with a variety of programs, some of which are incredibly imaginative. They were voted as the National Governing Body of the Year in sport at the Sport Industry Awards quite recently, and our conversation covers that. It covers leadership, as you would expect, and he takes a cheeky tilt at our regular question to finish up in terms of who he would bring to dinner with him. He's doubling down and part of the conversation might involve Podio Shay and Jesus Christ. Honestly, it's worth the wait. Wait, I'm delighted to be here in the company of Ender Lynch, the CEO of Badminton Ireland.
Speaker 2:You're very welcome to the Sportive Business Podcast Ender. Thank you so much, rob. I've listened to all of them and I'm honoured to be here and I'm honoured to know about business of sport since its infancy and watch what an amazing product and amazing support for the industry it has become.
Speaker 1:Lovely Can I just stop recording there now then?
Speaker 2:We're done. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:I'll take that to the bank we have. We've known each other for many years now since, as you say, the inception of this little project, when you were working with O2, you were the sponsorship manager there. You've been involved in rugby. Two years ago you stepped into the role as CEO of Badminton Ireland. Yes, that kind of transition into leadership. We'll talk about that a little bit later over the course of this conversation, but give me a sense as to where badminton is in an irish context here in 2025 we're in a great place and it's on the back of staggering work that was done by my predecessor, by the board of badminton ireland and the staff across high performance, across development.
Speaker 2:but it's also on the back of our volunteers. We have an incredible amount of volunteers who put in extraordinary work. And look, every CEO would want to say that and thank the volunteers. I am genuine about it Without our volunteers we'd be nothing. We have gone from just pre-COVID 12,000, I think it was 12,300-odd affiliations we're at now 17,200.
Speaker 2:A lot of growth has come from ethnic minorities and first-generation Irish, where badminton is a major sport India, china, a lot of Southeast Asia and we're seeing people coming to Ireland who want to build their community around the sport they love and that's where we're seeing a lot of our growth. But we're also seeing it in areas where we normally would not have been associated. We are very fortunate we get Dominic Counts funding, like an awful lot of national governing bodies, and that has allowed us to fund roles on the ground.
Speaker 2:Shoe leather on the ground you can't beat it in sport getting people out there into the clubs, dash schools, disadvantaged areas, where we get support funding. We're setting up clubs and school links into clubs that are surviving. It's not just one and done, it's two, three, four years later they're still there. Our activity officers are going into their third full year now fourth full year, my apologies and the number of clubs we have has gone from 320 to 420. And a club could be anything from five or 10 people up to 120 people, but it's their community and they're using a hall and using a space and they're playing the sport they love. And from some of the smallest halls we are seeing our future under 13, 15, 17 and 19,. That's them.
Speaker 2:So this all matters. It is that grassroots community growth through disadvantaged areas, areas with socio-economic disadvantages or challenges, and we're seeing it from those in ethnic minorities and first generation Irish, because they're seeing an ability to go and play the sport when they're out. They may not have known about it but through our hard work and through the work of the team, they're seeing an ability to go and play the sport they love. Could we grow more? Absolutely, but we are 34,. 34.5% of our clubs are running a wait list because of facilities and that's a whole other conversation and we might dip into that as well.
Speaker 1:but there is a lovely simplicity to badminton there is in that it is it is almost childlike in the ease of setting it up that we've probably all got in a shed or a garage or a garden, and one of those ones that you buy in little orality yeah, you can actually set up in the garden when the sun shines in the summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the lovely thing about that is, though, that is, you know, to be to be a tennis club, you have to have a tennis court. To be a paddle club, you have to have a paddle court. To be basketball, there's a lot of infrastructure around it, whereas you can actually bring your sport into a hall, school hall, a community hall, and actually go from there. So what, what proportion of that 420 are clubs is? Is that like?
Speaker 2:that I think we're. I don't have the exact number, but it's somewhere about 25 percent of our clubs have their own facility. Okay, the rest are in hired or rented facilities town halls, school halls, parish halls A lot of our clubs in the north of Ireland and in Ulster would be in parish halls, etc. Gaa clubs Less and less so.
Speaker 2:GAA clubs are utilising their indoor space an awful lot more as well. Yeah, that's true. So we're finding they're converting indoor spaces for Astro and all kinds of stuff, so you're losing out and that then puts a squeeze on the club. We've seen some clubs fall as a result of that. But where you'll see an awful lot of opportunity is schools.
Speaker 2:Facilities that are built that have great halls, halls that don't open up after hours, and we've all the indoor sports in Ireland have formed an indoor sports working group through the Federation of Irish Sport and through Mary O'Connor, and we're putting together a position paper at the moment on around four key pillars, one of which will be to open up more schools and give greater support to schools to open up their facilities.
Speaker 2:They are community facilities. The vast majority of them have been built with public money. Uh, concerns around insurance etc are all moved because all of us have to have public liability, all those kind of things. There are great companies in the uk that have set up booking facilities that schools now use, that make the concerns around opening the doors after hours and all that kind of stuff that remove those concerns or needing to bring the caretaker in talking it up. They've removed an awful lot of those concerns uh, badminton england have. In a year they're over 100 new schools now renting their facilities, badminton clubs, so there are are opportunities there but ourselves, basketball, volleyball, squash, foosball and Olympic handball and all those. We're all working together trying to open up more facilities and lean gently but persuasively on government powers to make that happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, from knowledge of government. Government loves to have solutions presented rather than problems given out of that. So that nature of coming together and collaboratively working on something which is going to have an appeal across the thousands schools that there are in the country, there and you're right, you've mentioned it insurance, employment, good behaviour, those are the kind of things which, if you can have a code of conduct and a reference point, then that that'll be a winner as well and it's all data backed.
Speaker 2:It's all evidence backed. We have we've done research through hundreds of indoor clubs around the country. They're running costs, how much they're spending on facilities, what kind of waiting lists they're running, what age important they have our age demographics to have in their clubs. All of this, this data, we have it all and through the great work of the Federation of Air Sport, we're working on that at the moment so that we have a position which goes this is how we can make better things happen. We can. You know, sport Ireland have very challenging targets in their national sports action plan and getting Irish people moving and involved in sport. And you don't need to build huge amounts of more facilities to to get that dial up to a three percent. The organizations are there, the clubs are there, the community networks are there.
Speaker 1:It's just about opening up the facilities yeah, and moving from that current target of 50 percent to the to 60 target of 60 in in a couple of years' time is going to be challenging. So it needs everything to move in the right direction and we want to help.
Speaker 2:We want to play a part. You know it's great, we'll all take the facilities. But sometimes building new facilities is not the answer because then you need people to manage them and et cetera, and sports organizations don't have that resource. Capital grants are right in the comment. They can use really wisely.
Speaker 1:But we're saying open up what's there, work on what's there and we can make that work okay, so that, even if it's only a transitional phase, but there is, yeah, like every pitch in the country we. We talk about the fact that pitches are at 100 capacity. They're not, they're just. They're at 100 capacity when everybody wants to use them. But that's not necessarily the case exactly, and there are opportunities.
Speaker 2:We see men's sheds, clubs, uh, new mums, clubs who've started up and they want to play a bit of badminton because, again, it's it's a cost-friendly sport in many regards, yeah, and they want to play a sport and they want to have something to do together and you know us. And there's some great basketball opportunities as well for people who just want to play during the day. And we're also seeing a lot of our occupancy. So there's one centre in Dublin, in Terrain Europe, which Leinster Badminton own and it is full from nine right through every day and a lot of it is those who are coming off night shifts. If you ever want to get a taxi, by the way, go to whitehall road at 9 10 in the morning. Okay, a lot of tax drivers who have their own community and they want to go and play badminton before or after they come off and before they're going shift and halls are full so it's not just about six o'clock, even we all want to be there.
Speaker 1:It's all hours of the day we're finding capacity being an issue, a sport that can find the people as opposed to the people finding the sport. Yeah, my wife played. She played in diversity and for ucd as well, so she always speaks incredibly highly of the experience of it. You mentioned about new communities and the fact that badminton, on a global scale, is one of the biggest sports in the world. Tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:We're the number three participation sport in the world. We are unknown to most people in Europe. Badminton has one of the most progressive and best organized world tours of any sport. Okay, it's 52 week world tour. There's events leading up from you know it's, it's it's scale. So there's your four majors, which have been four 1000 series events, one of which is the all england held in birmingham every year, which is the, the granddaddy of all tournaments right down to you know, we host an international series event which is kind of tier two, one step below World Tour, but there is a full World Tour, just like tennis. There is a future series, international series, international sorry, future series. International challenge, international series, world Tour. There's four levels and there's professionals across. International Series, international sorry. Future Series. International Challenge, international Series, world Tour. There's four levels and there's professionals across and it is fully professional across all four levels and it is enormous.
Speaker 2:You look at the tv numbers, like we will stream our matches for the Irish Open and they'll be carried in Europetv, which you see where the numbers are coming from. It's Asia, it's the Asian market and and that'stv which you see where the numbers are coming from. It's Asia, it's the Asian market and that's where the big growth is. The World Tour will change from 2027 onward. Badminton World Federation have just put out tenders for a new structure around the World Tour, which I fully support. I think it's a wise move and I think it will enhance the opportunity for inward investment. We are one of the few international sports that hasn't had a CVC or Blackstone or anybody else invest in us. It doesn't say we don't want it, but the opportunity will be greatly enhanced on the back bit and what you'll see then is that going into greater prize money and greater ability to market the sport to new audiences. We believe the potential is there.
Speaker 2:They're also at the moment trialling a new scoring system in Badminton. Okay, so instead of three 21s, it's three 15s. Okay, so first to 15. Again, shorter time span. What you found was when you moved to 21, games were getting quicker. There was a whole other scoring system which would bore the pants of anyone for that, but 21,.
Speaker 2:As the players have got fitter and they are now ultra professional, the most professional athletes in the world, and they are as fit, aerobic as any athlete in the world. But as they've got fitter, the rallies go much longer, so the games are now going back over an hour again, okay, and unlike tennis, which is fine for two or three or four or five hours, badminton is not built on that. The numbers are not built on that. You've 128 draw that you have to get through in four or five days. Yeah, so bringing it down to 15, they're trialing it at the moment and you're finding some closer games and the rallies that are there are much more high tempo, high energy, because they know that they're not going to have to put another four or five in the back of it and it's making a much more exciting product. Will it be accepted? We'll find out. We'll vote next year's World AGM, but I have a suspicion that there is a, there's a, there's a market and an appetite for it especially if you want bite sized sport.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what younger audiences are looking for. And the beauty of badminton, which it shares with court sports as well, is again comes back to the ease of broadcast. So the ease of streaming a court sport is so much more than it would be by going out onto a pitch of 100 meters or 140 meters and all these simple little things which people sometimes it doesn't register necessarily with them, but you know, streaming a swimming gala, for example, is incredibly difficult because we all demand underwater cameras and things like that and that's just a whole different world of expense, whereas you're on the right side.
Speaker 2:I, I, I disagree on this one. Actually we we broadcast sorry. We stream all of our nationally sanctioned tournaments and quite a number of the provincial tournaments are also streamed by the branches at no additional cost. We bought the equipment piecemeal over a number of years and we've upgraded to broadcast quality as we've gone along. We've gone from one camera behind court to our national finals and the European London 19s, which we did the streaming for. We have three camera final. Okay.
Speaker 2:We've quietly bought a camera here for a grand, bought a camera there for 500, bought a switcher for 600 quid. We've now got a new laptop coming in, which we're buying a refurbished laptop, but it's much better than the one we had. So we can do two courts with three cameras, for example, and we have commentary. Our high performance director and others will all chip in and then do it.
Speaker 2:Now you'll say that's fine, but if you're not expected canoeing, because I love canoeing, but if you had seven cameras that you bought over seven years and you have a little bit of a wi-fi receiver working along the line, you can do it okay, and most cameras are ai enabled now, so they'll follow the action, they'll follow what comes in and goes out of shot. Swimming underwater there are underwater cameras that you can buy for two or three grand. Yes, you'd have to put the track on, but you don't have to be as good as what you see at the olympics yeah, you don't have to be an olympian all the time and there is an enormous audience for the Olympic sports to be packaged up.
Speaker 2:And for those of us who are old enough to remember sports stadium, I will sing this off the rooftops for the rest of my life. There is an appetite for a magazine type format on Saturday evenings or Saturday afternoons yes, live, sport dictates. And you've live rugby more Saturday afternoons. You've live GAA. We get a live window for the Irish show up in every year. That's great, but there is actually an appetite for the Olympic sports. People love watching them but they can't access them easily. How many people downloaded the Eurovision sport app last weekend to watch the Division 2 of the Athletics? I did Very few. Virgin put on the Diamond League meets. They put them on because, a they get the feed and B it's good and people are watching it. So it's easier for them to put that on than come down with me. Special or whatever goes on it is. There is more numbers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's great content it's great content and it's being provided to you at a relatively low cost from a broadcaster's point of view.
Speaker 2:So I've been banging the drum with the broadcasters and with the independent bodies who are trying to bring this idea, and I know the other sports shares. Look at the numbers in the Olympics. Even if a tenth of some of those Olympic events were watching in earned.
Speaker 1:There is a massive opportunity out there for our sports to grow and they can live alongside the big three or four yeah, and we, we champion diversity at every level and the ultimate diversity is that there are multiple different sports that people can participate in, because, you know, the collision team sports are not for everybody. Um, they, you know, the running, the walking, the cycling, the swimming, the individual sports again, which are, you know, are very easy to organize from an individual perspective, but they, they miss out in terms of that community side of it, whereas you say, yeah, bringing together, bringing together a group of people to play in a mini pickup badminton tournament and it doesn't have to be high cost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, um, if you're, you know, if you're smart about some of your capital, grant money that comes in, or you apply for smaller grants, chip away at building the infrastructure over a number of years. My colleague, colleague Conor Darty, and our team has done it and has done an amazing job. To the point, where do we need to have badmintonyorktv streaming our, our, our show? Nope, we can do it ourselves. Yeah, will we bring them in? Yeah, there's, there's benefits that that they will have in terms of distribution, but it's all on YouTube, it's all there, and I don't care if one person watches it or 40 people watching it.
Speaker 2:We had the national primary schools finals streamed last December. Okay, there were families, there were schools great story. There's a school in Aldersgall in Kerry they are a two classroom or three classroom school, apologies and they qualified for the national primary school finals and the whole school were in one of the classrooms watching the live stream of their team and all anybody had to do was we had a qr code on the back of the wall of every court. Scan the qr code, gives you the link. Send the link home to the teacher in the school or wherever.
Speaker 2:We had people tuning in from all over the world because their niece or their nephew or their grandchild or whatever our moms and dads couldn't get home from work. They would watch their kid play in the All-Ireland Finals and it was no extra cost to us. It was a staff member doing just an hour of setup. That was more than what we needed for the tournament, but they did it and it's little stories like that you're going that matters and for us, one of our values is fun and you have fun when you're watching your family and your friends play and we're enabling that fun and that crack.
Speaker 1:It's the most basic of sporting opportunities to actually see the action taking place live, and yet it is the one which is perhaps most technologically advanced now in terms of the capacity of what we've got. We've actually got an coming up at the end of august now on future proofing irish sport and you know, I think that we should get the badminton ireland team to come along and record happy to just make sure it's not on the week of the irish under 19 open, because that's one of our two big events yeah, I tell you we won't live stream it because I like to get people in the room.
Speaker 1:I think there's a huge value to that. But we can bring along and record it if we're not clashing with it. We'd love to tell this.
Speaker 2:We've told the story before ourselves. Basketball and look, there are great streaming companies. Some have struggled in recent times and the people behind them are great people with good intentions. I'm not saying that we should do it all on our own, but if you can't afford to do the full broadcasting piece, all people want to see is basic, good action and they will be happy with that. And that's not to dismiss our supporters, but they know it's not going to be Olympic streaming quality or broadcast quality. It's not going to be the red button on your TV with every event on live at the same time, like in Paris, but they get to see their sport. The biggest audience we have is rewatches from athletes who go home and watch their game again.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're part of the coaching set up then, as well, we really are.
Speaker 2:We are providing coaching service effectively and a data service to our young players. A huge number of young players who go straight home, go back on the stream and watch their tournament with their coach and go. What did I do here? What did I do there?
Speaker 1:speaking of young players, you uh revealed the badminton team initiative. Yes, uh, last year, at an event that we did in relation to sponsorship, how's that gone?
Speaker 2:we've got? We've got two sponsors, brilliant. We have EPS, who are a water and infrastructure water company, and we have Ashgrove Renewables, who are a renewable energy company, both based in Mallow, and we found one and the other found the other, and they're an amazing group of people to work with. They also believe in the power of digital, by the way, and they have their own full-service studios green screen, the whole lot to create their own content for this other market their products, and they've actually given us access to that to create our marketing content for Babantine. We have gone from a trial school two years ago to 20 schools this year. We will be at 30 schools next year across the 32 counties. We're at 26 countries by october of this year.
Speaker 2:Uh, we have, uh, over a thousand girls, directly or indirectly, because part of badminton is you upskill the girls in either running a club or becoming a coach or a better player, and they'll find their vibe. Therefore, it's it's a tribe of girls finding what. If I worked for me in this group and what we're finding is they're actually challenged then to set up their own coaching and go into primary schools, which puts a shuttle time, which is the first grade of coaching, yeah, and they're able to go in and they're able to set up coaching in primary school. So that's part of their task when they're finishing up badminton. So they're all going to primary schools and they're coaching the kids there and they're setting up their own clubs, and one of the reasons our club numbers are growing is because the schools are actually setting themselves up as full clubs for the girls to get involved, and you have whoever the tiktok legend inside the girls school will suddenly become the PRO for the club. Yeah, and they're setting themselves up and they're having great fun, and we're just empowering young girls to have fun in a cheap and easy way with an easily accessible sport.
Speaker 2:We're also seeing, though and we're just beginning to get the first data back, because we're only two years in, but we're seeing drop-off rates fall. So the main purpose of badminton is to decrease the drop-off rate. We know the precipitous fall-off in girls playing sports through their teenage years, and in the schools where badminton is going in, that number is falling, and it's falling below 50. That's great. So we're confident we're on the right step, and there are other organisations who are now working with. The sports organisations are going. Can we take the idea? Can we move it around or whatever? Yeah, it's open territory. Lads, let's go. Let's just get girls playing sport.
Speaker 1:It's the ultimate in sustainable sport, really, isn't it, if you're building your own future.
Speaker 2:We are and and if we can create, if we can sustain that, and that's Ashgrove and EPS are about sustainable systems and sustainable energy and they're helping us create a sustainable programme which allows girls to create a sustainable circle of engagement and support. There's also a, I think what we call badminton or shuttle rocks, which is when you finish your parenting program. There's an indoor disco and it's all uv lights and it's uh, there's a whole pile of stuff but it's in the dark and it's all great fun. It's all lit by uv lights and everything, and the shuttlecocks are dripped in uv and everything and you play it, but it's in a safe space where they have fun and they choose the music and they have a huge canvas up in one wall that they can do graffiti on all kinds of stuff, and it should allow girls to experience fun while playing sport as well. It's not all competitive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, geez, fantastic. Let me look at at your own position now for a moment. Growing up through the sponsorship ranks with o2 and then moving into rugby and a number of different roles within within months to rugby, stepping into the role of ce, of Badminton Ireland. Was that something that you looking back now that you can say, yeah, this was always part of the plan, or what was it that persuaded you internally that you were ready for this role now and that you could bring something to a sport that was outside of where you had been up until that point?
Speaker 2:I can't say that I was ready. I don't think you're ever ready to be a CEO for the first time. Go back a step. I've been working in sports sports sponsorships since 2000,. My first job Slattery PR Great Park, slattery, and John Redmond.
Speaker 2:I've been fortunate to work alongside great bosses all the way up and observe how leaders do great work. When I was and you know I could name them off Johnny Cahill and Damien Devanevich, two examples in O2. Johnny's now a global VP for Pepsi Foods, for example. Damien revolutionized Smurfett Kappa. And amazing people to work with Gareth Fitzgerald in Munster Rugby and Ian Flanagan after Gareth Lerner Great people.
Speaker 2:What I learned from all of them helped me form an idea as to what leadership in sport could look like. Then I was given the opportunity to set up the High Performance Leadership Program in Munster, which was to create a sustainable business that was outside of the requirements of results on pitch, so it wasn't predicated on. What was happening on pitch was can we create a revenue stream from within our brand? Dna created the high performance leadership program. It's going well and they're in partnership with Liam Sheedy and the team now and they're still trucking along and they're doing great numbers and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:But by sitting in those I was able to apply what I thought leadership should be into creating a new enterprise. And then it was all about leadership. So I was able to learn from great leaders again, yeah, people that I invited to speak in the programs like uh, now it was Gerald and Anne O'Leary and and Tony Cohan and others amazing people. I know he's feeling in those. So then, after about 11 and a half years, 11 years, just over 11 years in Munster, I just knew that I my my time there was done. I just felt I wanted to change not just an area in a sport, but I wanted to help change an organization, and I felt that the only way to do that is lead. And simultaneously five CEO roles came up in our sport.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was a rush, this was in.
Speaker 2:November December 2022. There was five CEO roles came up at the same time and I just chose Badminton because I felt they were a great organization, huge potential, really solid financials. So even if I actually completely made a mess of it, they probably wouldn't die a death on the back of me, which is actually what my own mentor told me at the time when I was thinking about it. Die a death on the back of me, uh, which is actually what my own mentor told me at the time when I was thinking about it, and I loved the story of nat and the international community in that sport. I I fell in love with it.
Speaker 1:I want this to be something I can work with and his sister, tammy, and his sister who spoke at our event last year, and everybody fell in love with tammy oh, tammy's amazing and and nat has been in the shadows a little bit sometimes, but Nat is.
Speaker 2:He's top 30 in the world now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Top 30 in one of the hardest sports in the world. Irish people should cherish what we have and we do in our sport. Long story short, I just felt I wasn't fully ready, but I had an opportunity to try and take all the learnings I had and go. Can I make a difference to a sport? And that was my hunger. Can I make a difference to a sport? Because when you're number two or number three in a foreign organization, you're beginning to gather all these ideas but you only have a certain amount of influence.
Speaker 2:I wanted to be able to extend that and get out behind the commercial desk and look at. I've been sitting in the room talking about high performance in Munster for donkey's years and I sat aside the development team in Munster and when I was in O2 we sponsored the RRP team and we sponsored other initiatives and all that kind of stuff. You're learning all this information. I was like there's a lot of me. Can I just let little bits of release out now? But I had a clue when I was getting myself into it. I was going from. I was my last couple of months. I was a single contributor because we were moving things around, so that I was moving on, but then I was going into managing an Olympian in Chloe McGee. What do I know about that? I've got to figure it out somewhere.
Speaker 2:I've learned all these lessons and the biggest lesson I learned was and it was from Liam Sheedy and Gareth Fisher. Both said exactly the same thing Surround yourself with people who know more than you do. Just be able to orchestrate. What you need from them when the time is right and that's my job is to get the better people around me and know when to pull the strings to get them involved, or to let them go and do their own thing, or them to cover mistakes that I may make, or me to cover their mistakes and trust in them and give them the freedom to live a their life and be do their job, not the other way around. Never work to live, you live, sorry.
Speaker 1:Never live to work, work to live yeah, I feel almost as if there was a post-it note of description of what's bought, for business is about it's surrounding yourself with good people who you can call upon from time to time to actually help you to bring things to life.
Speaker 2:And Chloe Dan McGee, conor Daugherty, greg Farrell, tom Couser we brought in the coaching when our great friend Craig left for Sport Ireland. Orla Fulham-Smith, who came from the RFU when Conor Fadjen left. They are amazing people who do great jobs, and the teams along them, lauren now, who came from Kong to work in Ireland and work in Babington. My God, what a genius on data she is. They're better at it than I am. I'm always the one asking questions. Let's see if we can have an intelligent conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah but that's an important part of it is questioning, learning, adapting, adopting all of those things which need somebody at the top of the table to actually empower, as you've said, everybody else to do it. Is there a particular trait that you've seen in the leaders you've worked with, or the people that you surround yourself with as well? It's not something necessarily that is evident when people get to the very top of their chosen profession, but is there something in the psyche, something in a personality that you look for?
Speaker 2:The best people are A they're accountable, and I love working with people who are accountable because when things go wrong, they may say to you you trust that they're doing it for the right reasons and you can support them and cover behind them and help them get through the problem and make it your problem and help them get on with the bits they've been brilliant at. So I love accountability and all my great leaders were accountable, for when things went bad sorry for the language when things went badly, they were always there to stand going. Yeah, that's me. Bring the boss on and let him hit me, because I know this is my time to take the slacking, but I'm going to protect my team behind me and that's my job. And I love people who work with me who are accountable, because then I know when I stand up to take the boss that's coming at us.
Speaker 2:I know that the information is correct, that the honesty and integrity was there and that they had the the right frame of mind and they had listened at the right times. But it just didn't work out, and that happens. Support is not a perfect science, otherwise everybody would be willing to go on. Medics yep, and we don. There's always one better than the other. So I love accountability. There was one trade that all my great bosses had and that was accountability. Okay, and seeing it in Gareth Fitzgerald and those when we were going through rotten results and poor Anthony Foley and the Irish coaching team and things were at their, we were on our knees but we all sort of going we know what's going wrong here, it's okay, we'll make it better, but we know what's going wrong.
Speaker 1:Okay, which is incredibly important, you're on the board of the federation of irish sport, the, the, the sector as a whole. How do you feel about that? Without without breaking any windows or without throwing too many flowers, but you know, it feels as though Irish sport is in as good a place now, perhaps, as it has ever been. That may be a glow still coming from Paris and the Olympics and the Paralympics, but how does it look from your, you know, if not unique, then certainly, you know, decent position.
Speaker 2:We are general in ireland is in a very solid position. We have great people working in it, we have great volunteers, we have the best athletes in the world. For the facilities we have in our population size we are outperforming across so many levels. We may not be qualifying for the women's Euros which starts tonight. We may not be qualifying for a men's World Cup in 2026. We might, by the way, I hope we do and it'd be amazing because we'd rather go back to America and sweat it all over again. But you look at the diversity of sports that we are brilliant in, that we win medals, in that we outperform based on our size, and we are in an incredible position.
Speaker 2:But there's a but. We Irish, or those around the commercial side of Irish business, haven't fully embraced the value of sponsorship like those who are in the circle. So there's great brands in the circle and there's more coming in all the time. But there are brands and organizations out there that will view it as either I get my name in the jersey or branding and ticketing, et cetera. But we're lucky with Ashgrove and with EPS, for example, where it's about actually creating a sustainable community. More commercial organizations need to think that way. Yes, there is a bottom line for every organization and yes, they need to account for the P&L, and marketing is always seen as the black hole of any P&L, the first to go when things are tough. But if you want to engage your employees and you want to engage your new communities that you're trying to hire from, then you should be looking at what makes their community tick and supporting the sustainability of that community, because if that works and their families are happy and they're happy, then you've better workers inside an organization and organizations aren't looking at it.
Speaker 2:Sponsorbee is brilliant. I've been there. It's not just commercial. We are not going to grow government funding dramatically again. You see the papers this morning talking about reintroduction of new university fees. You see that every department has been told that there's no cost of living increases coming this year. Read between the lines, folks. The gravy train is going to slow down. It's not even falling off a cliff like it did in 2008, but there is going to be a slight drawback in government accounts funding women's support grants and et cetera. We have to be cognizant of that. Can we find the money just from rich people? No. Can we find it just through philanthropy? With the change in the revenue model recently. No, there's an expertise in that that most organizations, I would say, don't have in identifying high net worth individuals who want to support you. But there are thousands of companies out there that turn a decent profit and they can support their community through support, and it doesn't have to be about the name on the jersey or the chairman's choice, et cetera. It's about what is right for your employees and supporting their community. That's how we need to fund our sport into the long term. We are going to reach a funding challenge over the next three or four years.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying this for me. I'm saying this across sports. Sports is one of the worst paid industries you can work in. For the per hour that you put in it is, there are people toiling there on really poor pay compared to their peers in other industries. You fall apart. Most people in this will know they're in sport. I'm losing staff to better paid roles. I'm losing staff to roles outside of sport and in sport in some cases, where it's better paid. But it's an organization. It's a large organization. For the smaller organizations, we are constantly struggling to retain staff. As I go back to the first comment I said, without staff on the ground. There's no point in me doing a marketing push for an event or whatever. I need people on the ground preaching our message and getting communities engaged in sport. We're going to struggle in the future if we continue on the road we're on.
Speaker 1:Okay, part of the avoidance of disaster is spotting the fact that it's potentially there and acting in a timely enough fashion to actually get there.
Speaker 2:So we'll heed that warning there is a CSR tax-based initiative that possibly could be looked at in the long term by ourselves and the Federation. We'll get there. There's other, like the betting tax levy, a secondary, separate to the racing industry. One, a separate one for the sport industry would would certainly strengthen the dam over the next five to ten years. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:We have to be on that again if we really want sport to grow okay, let me ask you one last question before we go into some some of our quickfire ways in which we we like to finish up these interviews. You were voted this year as the national governing body of the year at the amish sport industry awards. What, when? When that was unveiled in the college green hotel back in may, what was the? What was that first emotion that that bubbled up? What was the thing that you thought?
Speaker 2:wow, what's the rating on this podcast?
Speaker 1:we'll, we'll keep, we'll keep it polite okay oh good god we had.
Speaker 2:I had brought the team who oversee badminton, all my activation officers and their, the national women's work development manager, troy mcgee, and our president and our chair, because we thought we were really in with a shot for BAMG. Okay, we'd won the BAMG World Federation Award, recognised as the best new initiative in the world for BAMG. We were chuffed a bit. We might have a real chance. We got nominated, we're going for it and Aspoil Ireland won that and fully deserved it. It's an amazing project that they won it with and we're like oh right. So we thought our night was over. So when we won it, my first sense was oh good God.
Speaker 1:Four words to that effect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my second reaction was to get everybody up on stage, because it's a team effort and when you win awards, I don't like to go up on my own. It's like no, everybody has won this, so let's all go up on stage. And it was commented on. I was like you all went up on stage. We don't normally do that. Well, we should. We should all go up because we should all celebrate these moments.
Speaker 2:The third thing and the lasting piece was I'm so happy for my team. I know that when I was in O2, we were a marketing team of the year two years out of three, under two separate marketing directors that you knew that's the team performing at a high level and the results were coming and we were, in telco terms, we were cleaning the clock at that stage. We were absolutely flying through it and I just knew it gave every single person in that marketing team a lift and made them confident in I'm doing a good job and this is validation for it and I can now drive on a bit harder and do better things and take that idea out of the press and dust it down and get it going again. And you look at the people who worked in that O2 team at the time. They have all gone on to incredible roles. I'm the lucky one They've all worked on to incredible roles. I expect to see that out of the team I'm with.
Speaker 2:So my overriding thing was that's amazing for my team. I'm probably going to have to rebuild it over the coming years because they will all go to better jobs and be poached by people who want winning staff. Absolutely that's what this should be about. It's not justifying our work, it's justifying the efforts the team and the volunteers have gone into. Okay, and that still is my overriding emotion. Everyone else saying oh, you should be talking to more sponsors now. We're the 10th most popular sport outside of the big three I know our targets.
Speaker 2:We know where we're going to go.
Speaker 1:This was for the team and for the volunteers yeah, that's a lovely way of summing it up and full transparency. I was on the, the panel that was voting on all of the awards, and you know it was a uh, it is always an incredibly strong category, so, yeah, so, having won it, you, you fully deserved it. Thank you very much. Look, it's been. It's been great chatting to you about badminton. As I said before I let you go, I just want to hit you with a few little quickfire questions so that we get to know ender lynch, the person, as opposed to ender lynch, the ceo one of the same, but still has a nice ring to it though.
Speaker 2:Um, give me one of your earliest childhood memories uh, my very first memory was being in my cot and I had a toy car and I was crossing the cross. Kid, I was a cranky kid and I had thrown it out of the cot and then I wanted to get it back so I actually turned the cot over and outside was one of those metal barred cots that looked like you know, the ones that you'd see in an awful place, as he says. You know, communist era in the 1970s vibe about and the cot turned over on top of me. Oh, so I was in a prison, okay. So there I was trying to get the tie and my mom my mom heard the screaming. He came in. I was about two at the time. I remember that vividly tiny little yellow, dinky of a car, the whole lot I still remember right.
Speaker 1:I thought you were going to say you've still got it.
Speaker 2:That'd be funny, god no if it's there more than six months, it's drawn out okay, maybe.
Speaker 1:So uh, how about in sport? What's your earliest childhood memory in sport?
Speaker 2:uh, my dad was vice chair of Austin Stacks GAA club and I remember going down to play Gaelic football. I was the worst Gaelic footballer known to mankind. I could write a book about the great dugouts of Cary football because that's all I saw. And then I found rugby and I went to play rugby and I just found my calling and my love in life. But I grew up in an absolutely sports bonkers house. So where people think that tv screens were you know a new invention, where you know it's our kids are looking at screens. During the summer the tour de france was on every day, wimbledon was on every day. I remember coming home from doing my first thing which, by the way, I repeated the leaving and I struggled in the maths exam and I sat down to watch england, india and edgewist and my first ever time watching cricket, and I was. I didn't know what was going on but I was fascinated. My parents said no issue if sport was part of our currency.
Speaker 2:In the house it was everything we talked about and cricket is the original data and numbers, so you could always justify it by saying that you were studying for maths by looking at it baseball and cricket are the originals and baseball even when I was 10 I've watched baseball movies and I feel dreams, favorite movie of all time, and I watched field dreams and from then on I started trying to find out where could I learn more about baseball? I did a paper in college on baseball. I adore the sport. I pay my mmbtv subscription every year. It is the original nerdy sport mix. It's great it is.
Speaker 1:I'm a red sox fan. Yeah, the uh wade boggs. I remember from back in the back in the day and when they uh, when they won a world series the first in a long long time and uh, yeah, great, great emotion. The storytelling in us sports is just fascinating.
Speaker 2:By way, if John Henry's listening, you shouldn't have saw Mookie Betts. End of story.
Speaker 1:Okay, you heard it here first. Well, actually, no, you probably heard it here for the thousandth time, or. John Henry has heard it for that time anyway. Netflix or a night at the movies. Night at the movies. What was the last movie that you saw?
Speaker 2:Formula One. Sunday morning I was given a free pass from my wonderful wife, my two daughters instead of father's day, which was chaotic day in the house, they said do whatever you want on the sunday. So I went to see formula one and then I went up to crow park. Okay, so it by max, followed by crow park.
Speaker 1:What a day right, okay, well, particularly for a carry man, all right yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, formula one was a cracking yard okay, great fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great stuff, all right. What a great way to spend a sunday morning as well, yes, when you know that you've got pro park to follow in the exactly in in the evening, tea or coffee neither don't drink hot.
Speaker 2:I just I couldn't stand the taste as a child and I don't do hot drinks at all. Probably all here in front of me is about as posh as it gets okay and you've admitted to, to listening to the sport for business podcast.
Speaker 1:Any others that said that that float your boat at this moment in time.
Speaker 2:I try to get Away from work when I'm listening to podcasts. Okay, I, you know there are some amazing sports and leadership ones out there and Jay Comfrey's and all these guys. They have amazing podcasts and I've listened to them and just take me straight back to work and going oh god, I need to just stop for a minute. I can find my information in other ways. As smartless by the tree American actors is mind-numbingly fun. It's just stupid. It's great fun. Yeah, movies there's a Edith Bowman does her own pockets are of movies, music movies which I listen to every week and I will try and pick up on one or two of the outputs, a from yourself and B from the After Ball team, if I can, but I generally try to listen to After Ball in the evenings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've just discovered Max Rushton and David O'Doherty, who I've got a vague connection to through a friend group. What did you do yesterday? The most simple format and it is just a constant joy Comedians being comedians, with comedians. We need it sometimes. We do. We do particularly to get away from.
Speaker 1:The rest is politics and all of the rest of it because that's a dark space at the moment, but we'll stick with that. Last thing I've got a table booked at a nice restaurant. My particular favorite is chapter one. I must admit I like that, but I'll give you my table. One seat is yours, three others to be filled from somebody who you're not related to, because that would be too easy. So who would you pick? Dead or alive sport, non-sport your canvas is empty at the moment very generous offer of you, mr hartnett.
Speaker 2:Um, if you don't mind, I might extend that to two tables of three. Um, I'll pay for the second one myself. Um, sport and life on the life front billy connolly, robin williams and jesus. Uh, billy and robin are the life front. Billy Connolly, robin Williams and Jesus. Billy and Robin are the funniest individuals I've ever listened to and I think they did not create a crack out of Jesus being there. Some of their skits on Christianity are brilliant and I'd love to see if Jesus was what we've all read about for 2,000 years and see what the fuss was all about and explore some of that with him.
Speaker 2:On the sporting front, martin Johnson has been an enigma, but since Lions Tour 97, to me he has been a colossus, an enormous leader and somebody I'd love to just engage with Tammy Gray Thompson. Tammy is quite a legend legend, but if you ever listen to her commentary and and her, her work, she's incredibly insightful individual, understands the bigger picture, is a leader, brilliant communicator and I I just have huge admiration for her and I'd love to to spend time understanding her a little more and, being from Kerry, I'd have to have one of the, the Kerry footballers. Um, we've been best of so many greats. Potty, I think Potty'd knock Ray Crack out of an evening um, and I'd love to have him around the table. Lord, have mercy on him. It has been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1:It's been far too long in the making getting you to sit down with me for this. Um, we're going to have to do it all over again, but for the time being, ender lynch, ceo of the national governing body of the year, badminton ireland. Thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 1:It's a pleasure thank you so much, rob thanks for being with us over the last 50 minutes. An interesting conversation with a very interesting character. I think that Ender puts a huge amount of thought into what he does, how he operates and how he is guiding the sport of badminton to ever new heights at least in an Irish context, because those heights are already being reached internationally and perhaps, maybe we could be one of those countries that comes from out of the woods and into potential medal positions at world championships and major events in the years to come. We cover the business of sport every day on sportforbusinesscom. If that's what you're interested in, I think that you will find what our content is of interest. Our sport for business podcast drops every week and we will be back with you next week again with interesting characters from the world of sport for business. Thanks very much for taking the time to be with us today and do take care. Bye.
