Partnership & Community Leader
5+ years turning corporate partnerships and community programs into measurable outcomes and lasting relationships in professional sport.
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How I work
I build the infrastructure that makes programs repeatable, scalable, and hard to break. Every event, every season, every new staff member runs on the same documented system.
Every event runs from a documented plan, not institutional memory. Each has a written run-of-show in Excel with time-blocked programming, named staff owners per task, location assignments, and contingency notes. Critical paths are built by department and track every milestone from initial planning through post-event reporting.
Post-event reports track twelve categories of KPIs and go directly into renewal and upsell conversations. The Master Tracker is a 27-tab, 27-column Excel workbook covering every game across both clubs, with colour-coded sections for received tickets, distributed tickets, and vouchers.
Partner work across TELUS, Access Storage, Egg Farmers of Ontario, FirstOntario, Interval House, and others runs on documented frameworks. Every obligation type has a defined intake, execution, and close-out process — and every staff member knows which tasks belong to them.
The work in the room
Forge FC's School Day Match is a full-stadium school engagement event that brings thousands of students to a professional soccer match. In 2025 it became the largest in the program's history. Here is how it was built and what it produced.
The challenge
School Day Match brings thousands of students to a professional soccer match. The operational complexity scales with every school added: each brings its own ticket count, transportation requirements, F&B preorders, accessibility needs, billing logic, and teacher communications. Coordinating that across 122 schools and 11 school boards, including French-language boards, while managing 285 buses, road closures, and sponsor integrations required a purpose-built operating system rather than improvisation.
Event folder structure
Each event runs inside a standardized folder structure. School Day Match is the most complex instance of it, but the same architecture governs every program from Be Fit Day to the HWCDSB Flag Football Championship.
Registration and billing system
Each school registered through a Jotform intake form, selecting ticket quantities by category (student, volunteer, staff), transportation needs, F&B preorders, accessibility requirements, and lower-bowl upgrade preferences. Because pricing and ticket logic varied by school board and priority status, the data fed into a custom Excel billing sheet with 18 tracked columns per school. From there, invoices were generated and sent, payments collected, and revenue reconciled before event day. Every school had a clear record from first submission through final payment.
Food voucher operations
Schools pre-ordered meal vouchers through the intake forms. Vouchers were mailed ahead of event day with each school's lanyard package. On the day, students redeemed them at a centralized pickup location. Redemption was tracked post-event by item: Popsicle came in at 91.2%, Pizza at 99.7%.
Transportation
86% of buses were provided by HSG, coordinated with First Student and Attridge as primary vendors. Transportation planning covered route assignments, bus staging zones, one-directional traffic flows (Cannon onto Melrose), road closures on surrounding stadium streets, and school-specific arrival and departure windows. Bus information was emailed to teachers May 4, nine days before the May 13 event. Planning for 2026 is modelling potentially 400+ buses.
Cross-functional execution
Execution required coordination across twelve internal and external groups, each with a defined section in the event critical path with named tasks, assignees, start and end dates, and milestone dependencies from pre-launch through post-event reporting.
Teacher feedback
Teacher surveys were collected and reported after the event. Staff support and overall student experience both scored 4.8 out of 5.
Who I bring with me
I manage people the same way I manage programs: with clear structure, high expectations, and genuine investment in what comes next for them. My team isn't support staff for my ideas. They're the people I'm building toward something with.
"The best measure of a leader isn't what they accomplish. It's what their team can do without them."
Over four years at Hamilton Sports Group I built the operational infrastructure for my department and then trained people to run it. My coordinator owns player appearance bookings for Forge FC and all day-to-day operational task management. Interns are assessed in week one on data entry accuracy, system discipline, and task prioritization, not just completion. The onboarding suite I built includes a 5-day plan, a coordinator guide with scripted tone notes for sensitive conversations, team overviews for both clubs, professional boundaries guidelines, and individual player reference pages for all players across both rosters.
One of the projects I'm most proud of is developing the HSG Community Impact Report. For the first time, instead of presenting a high-level overview of numbers, we went deep: what the programs actually were, who they reached, what partners made them possible, and what the outcomes meant. It was the first time community work at HSG was communicated at that level of detail, internally and externally.
The same approach runs through my work as head coach and Girls Basketball Coordinator for Hamilton's CANUSA Games delegation. Developing athletes isn't about one season. It's about what they carry into the next one.
What I believe
"Sport is one of the few spaces left where strangers choose to be in the same room together and actually feel something."
That's not a soft belief. It's why I do this work and it's what makes the work matter. Corporate partners aren't just sponsors of a logo on a jersey. They're the reason a student gets to sit in a stadium for the first time. They're the reason a family that can't afford a ticket gets to go anyway. When I manage a partnership, I'm managing access. I take that seriously.
The best partnership programs don't look like marketing. They look like community. My job is to make those two things point in the same direction.