Is the Mission You're On the Mission You Intended?

The Premise

I spend a lot of time talking with leaders of sports organizations. The question I find most revealing isn’t what their mission statement says. It’s this: if someone observed the day to day actions of your club, how closely do you think they would describe what they saw as reflecting your stated mission and values?

Most directors have never sat with that question. Not because they don’t care about their mission. They’re simply too busy running the program to examine it.

Most clubs have a mission statement somewhere. It’s on the website, maybe in the registration packet, possibly on a banner in the gym. Most of them state good intentions. They talk about developing the whole athlete, building character, creating a love of the game. Then the season starts.

Practice structure gets built around what coaches know best. Tournament schedules get built around budgets. Team selection gets built around coach preferences and hitting the right number. Somewhere between the mission statement and Monday’s practice, the gap opens. And most directors never see it because they’re too busy running the program to step back and examine it.

Jim Collins spent years studying what separates organizations that achieve sustained greatness from those that don’t. One of his central findings in Good to Great is that breakthrough organizations achieve clarity about what they are actually built to do, and then align everything around that clarity. He called it the Hedgehog Concept. The honest answer to that question doesn’t come from what a director believes about their own program. It comes from what athletes, coaches, families, and competitors would say the program actually does best.

That’s the kind of lens The LnUP Letters tries to bring: taking what leadership research has already figured out and asking what it means for the people running club programs.

The Hedgehog Concept, Translated

Collins built the Hedgehog Concept around three questions, represented as overlapping circles. Greatness, he argued, lives at the intersection of all three.

What can you be the best in the world at? Not what you want to be, but what you genuinely have the conditions, talent, and structure to do better than anyone else in your market.

What drives your economic engine? What sustains the program financially and operationally, keeping coaches paid, facilities available, and the program running season to season.

What are you deeply passionate about? What genuinely drives the director and coaching staff at their best, not what sounds right in a mission statement.

Most clubs design their programs around one circle and call it their mission, and their differentiator Some build around what others are already doing, mistaking imitation for strategy. Some build around what parents pay the most for. Some build around what their coaches love to teach. Some build around what wins tournaments. These are factors to help you create your hedgehog.

The programs that actually deliver what they promise live at the intersection of their unique three circles. They live out their ‘Hedgehog’.

Where Club Programs Break Down

The honest diagnostic most directors avoid: look at what your program spends the most time on, talks about most, and puts the most money behind, and ask whether those things live within the intersection of your three circles.

The problem is when the mission statement claims something but the program’s design and actions say otherwise. This creates confusion for athletes, coaches, and families. But more importantly, it is frustrating for directors. The farther you drift from executing on what you truly believe and value, the less effective you become. Drift leads to apathy, market confusion, and a lack of differentiation. The opposite of what any director sets out to build.

Collins found that the Hedgehog Concept isn’t about trying to be great at everything. It’s about having the discipline to stop doing things that fall outside the intersection. For club directors, that means being honest about what your program can genuinely be best at, not in the abstract, but given your specific coaches, your community, your resources, and your athletes. Then designing around that truth rather than around what sounds right in a mission statement.

The Question Worth Sitting With

What would an honest look at your program reveal about what it’s actually optimized for?

The gap between that answer and what your mission statement says is your alignment problem. And unlike most organizational problems, this one is entirely within the director’s control to fix.

A future issue will look at how directors can begin closing that gap practically, starting with the conversations they need to have with coaches before the season begins, not after it ends.