From Player Pathways to Life Pathways: Why Charity Deserves a High-Performance Strategy  

In elite sport, we don’t expect to succeed overnight. We build systems that assume – and allow – young people as players to fail again and again – and grow through it. We surround them with coaches, structure, and support. We stay the course.  

In the charity sector? Programmes are launched, impact often reported on in six to twelve months to show progress to funders, and repeat. Transformation is anticipated without adequate time, trust, or continuity. And then we wonder why progress doesn’t stick.  

We know what it takes to build performance in sport. So why don’t we apply the same thinking to systems that support our most vulnerable young people?  

I’ve spent most of my life in sport, playing at the elite end, then coaching, managing, and ultimately working on the ‘how do we win in 10 years?’ problem. At Saracens and England Rugby, success meant international caps, premiership wins, and to those of us working in it – young people fulfilling their potential under pressure.  

I aimed to be judged, not by trophies, but on how young people exited the programmes. Did we help them grow? Did they leave with more confidence, opportunity and resilience than when they arrived?  

Uncomfortably, it’s easier to create the time, programmes, and resources for young ‘athletes’ than it is to raise money and deliver to children facing poverty.  

The need is just as great. The stakes are even higher. But the time, funding, and infrastructure to deliver that kind of journey? Too often, it’s simply not there.  

My arena is now different, but the challenge is the same. Because what elite sport understands, perhaps better than any other sector, is that success is never accidental. It’s engineered. It takes time, care, and relentless intentionality – backed by systems built to support long-term growth.   

But in the charity sector, we leave too much to chance. We don’t get the luxury of working on the ‘how do we win in 10 years?’ problem. We ask underfunded charities to do complex, life-changing work, while operating on short-term funding and reporting cycles. We chase impact headlines instead of building impact systems.   

No one’s asking how we really solve poverty. They’re asking for data to justify next year’s support. The result? Programmes are designed to impress, not to last. We would never build an athlete this way. So why do we try and build our social system like this?   

Young people deserve better. And the sector that supports them needs investment that reflects how real progress happens – over years, not weeks.  

Reflecting on all this, I’ve become increasingly drawn to an old, almost-forgotten word: liznojan. Robert McFarlane explains this in ‘The Old Ways’. To learn means, at its root, to follow a track’. Not arrive fully formed, but to stay on the path, be developed by the journey.  

This is what we lose when we build systems that only fund outcomes. When we reward speed over depth, and scale over relationships.  

Elite sport understands this instinctively: Development is messy, personal, and nonlinear. No one expects a 15-year-old to perform like a seasoned international. We curate journeys, give that 15-year-old a compass, and trust the journey.   

But in the charity sector? We too often expect transformation without track. We confuse interventions with journeys and we measure the wrong things.  

Liznojan reminds us that growth is a process. You don’t get there through flashpoints – you get there through staying the course. If we want real change, we have to stop chasing moments, and start backing the journey.