Curling Canada aiming for new heights with new CEO

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This article was published 21/02/2016 (3743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. — She’s sliding into Canadian curling’s top gig at a delicate time for the sport, and Katherine Henderson is ready to come out throwing.

Good thing, because the job is not for “the faint of heart,” Henderson said with a laugh. “Everybody has an opinion on a lot of things. Especially curlers.”

Truer words have rarely been spoken, and now it’s Henderson’s job to sort those opinions out. So just four days after she was announced as the new CEO of Curling Canada, the longtime marketing executive met the media Saturday to chat about what she sees as the challenges and opportunities for the sport.

Henderson won’t officially assume the position until April 1, and admitted she’s still getting a handle on some of the curling world’s finer points. You know, stuff like playoff formats or the ballyhooed Broomgate that dominated curling chatter for the first half of the 2015-16 season.

“I understand a little bit of what’s going on,” she said. “But if someone asks me about directional fabric right now, and what that means, I would immediately be looking desperately over your shoulder, to see if someone from the technical team could come help me out.”

What Henderson does see, she said, is opportunity — particularly when it comes to building on Canada’s wealth of world champions and curling greats.

“First and foremost, you want to keep your high-performance athletes at the top,” she said. “The good opportunity related to that is that these are role models. These are people that Canadians admire… and some of the bigger opportunities are to get young people, or people my age re-engaged in the sport.”

She’ll have to find a way. Curling is at a critical juncture, caught between its folksy traditions and the more lucrative draw it is becoming. The sport’s participation numbers are declining, while elite play is rising; there is more TV exposure and more viewers now than ever, but fewer people in the clubs.

To understand why Curling Canada selected Henderson to steer the ship through these waters, a glance at her resumé offers a big clue. She is fresh off serving as vice-president of marketing for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto, where she oversaw negotiations for broadcast rights and sponsorship deals.

She finished that contract at the end of 2015, and found herself more energized by sport than the private sector. She also sits on the board of Rugby Canada. So when Curling Canada sought her out to replace former CEO Greg Stremlaw, who left last year to head up CBC’s sports programming, Henderson was intrigued.

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“It just spoke to me in all kinds of different ways,” she said. “It was the people, the opportunities, the challenges, the excellence of the athletes.”

Fast forward a couple of months later, and Henderson is now taking curling lessons. She wasn’t entirely uninitiated to the roaring game before; she played a little as a teen growing up in Thunder Bay, where “you really couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a curler,” she said.

But the game has changed a lot since then, she added. And it’s changing a lot now, and underneath the hot-shot high end, the base will need some tending.

“(One part) is to make sure that you are designing a national and international competitive strategy that caters not only to elite athletes,” she said. “Because you’re right, that gap is becoming larger. And perhaps that’s something that we sit with our member associations on, and say ‘what do you want to do?’ ”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.