I wanted to start this blog for quite some time, to share some observations made in the past 3 years of building up a new sports structure in Luxembourg and the analogies I found to the world of business and politics, and the lessons I drew from them.
Luxembourg Lacrosse, a brief history
Let’s start by the beginning: I started playing Lacrosse in 2009 during my PhD in Heidelberg. End of 2013 I was back in Luxembourg and 6 months later, I found two people that also had some basic Lacrosse experience. We started playing in local parks and invited friends to join us.
In 2015, we were then able to recruit a small divers group of player, with a training participation of 2-6 people throughout the year. Some also drove to the closest teams in Germany and Belgium for a more competitive setting. Our first appearance as “Laxembourg” (Lax standing for La + Crosse, Lacrosse) was at a summer tournament in Trier in that year.
2016 continued similarly and we told ourselves that “if we find 6 commited people, we’ll create a club”. On Sunday 4th December 2016 in my parent’s kitchen, we then founded the Luxembourg Lacrosse Club asbl with 9 founding members. The team was called “Blacksmiths” because of Luxembourg’s history in the Steel industry.
With a formal entity created, our next aim was to gain national recognition by the ministry of sports, in order to get coverage by state support mechanisms and access to infrastructure. After unsuccessful attempts to join other federations, the decision was taken to create the “Luxembourg Field Sports Federation” (LFSF), together with the federations of Gaelic Sport and Ultimate Frisbee, which was formally accepted as member of the national Olympic and sports committee (COSL) and official recognising by the ministry of sports in May 2018. In July 2017 we also gained membership by the European Lacrosse Federation (ELF) and by the Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL). In July 2018, after only 6 months of preparation, the Luxembourg Men’s Lacrosse National Team then participated for the World Championships in Israel. In September 2018, the Blacksmiths started competing in their first season in the Belgian Lacrosse League. In January 2019, the Lacrosse Federation was formally separated from the Club. In May 2019, the first Luxembourg youth Lacrosse team of Lycée Guillaume Kroll (LGK) won their first Lacrosse tournament in Belgium, 6 months after first being introduced to the sport.
I am now the president of a club, a national federation, and a confederation of niche sports in one of the smallest countries of Europe, but this is not about me. Objectively it’s not a huge responsibility given the number of people involved, limited financial scope, and amateur nature of the activity. Nevertheless, I find it an exciting opportunity to try to building a community and organisation from scratch. As an outlook of what observations I’d like to share, here a few topics that one has to deal with in a sports club, and that will be outlined in future articles:
- Recruitment and onboarding of players
- Competition and excellence (National team)
- Sustainability (Youth Development)
- Public communication, marketing, outreach and networking
- Internal communication and team engagement
- Vision, Focus, and Team cohesion
- Team management & Volunteering (jobs without money)
- Financial planning
- Risk management (Insurances, Covid)
- …