BBF Participation Study

BRITISH BASEBALL FEDERATION PARTICIPATION STUDY

Our measure of understanding the landscape we operate in relies on a multitude of factors. For example, the stakeholders we serve (baseball clubs, participants, officials, coaches), how to position our strategy, to better benchmark, verifying third parties data and oversee our sport as the National Governing Body of our game, relies on collecting the appropriate data (contextual, financial and non-financial) to base our decisions, measure performance and plan accordingly. Baseball is a fun game, a means to better health, promotes diversity, brings us together to share in competition and have fun. Baseball also brings us innovation in numbers (statistics, sabermetrics etc.). In keeping with the mentioned numbers theme, we intend to collect data from as many sources, e.g., baseball clubs and market research, to ensure we can get a greater understanding of the number of participants and teams involved. Afterwards, the mentioned will go into our strategic decision process and planning.

Currently, the way development works for baseball in our country, is the British Baseball Federation (BBF) is the National Governing Body (NGB) of our sport. We outsource the development of our sport to BaseballSoftballUK (BSUK). Also, BSUK is assigned the development of the sport of softball (which includes fast pitch). BSUK receives public funding from Sports England e.g., over £6 million over ten years. However, there is no pass-through of the mentioned public funds to the BBF. Below is a summary of development data from BSUK since 2008. The below metrics are based on the criteria required by Sports England, which aggregates the parameters of both baseball and softball participants and teams. Our aim is to solely collect data regarding our sport which is verifiable and comes from the source (schools, clubs, leagues etc). That is if we are to assess the performance of our development agency and take the corrective actions to improve the decline of baseball development in our country over the previous years, we need to accurately collect such data.

Below images describe the development figures from BSUK for the development of the sport of softball and baseball, since 2008.

Our survey for the collection of data will centre on the following criteria:

We will be the primary collector of data for our study.
No double counting of players.
Residents of Britain only.
Ages of players eligible are from 9 years to 65 years of age.
Baseball players and teams only.
A financial transaction (>£5) must take place for the player and team to be considered e.g., a player pays a fee to a club or school to play baseball.
A player or teams need to take part in organised play through a recognised school league, team, or club.
Period 1 Jan to 15 November 2019.

Our analysis and approach to promoting and development of our sport will rely on what data we collect and the feedback from our clubs and other stakeholders.