RECAP: RESEARCH WEBINAR, MARCH 2026
Last month we released the Power in Numbers reports - the culmination of a multi-year study on how sport equity coalitions work and what makes them effective. Recently, we got to do something different: sit down with the researchers and talk through what it all means in practice.
The March 26 webinar brought together Dr. Gareth Jones (Temple), Dr. Julie McCleery (University of Washington), and Tracy Myers, Executive Director of the King County Play Equity Coalition. What followed was less a presentation of data and more an honest conversation about what coalition-building actually looks like from the inside - and where the research confirms, complicates, or raises new questions about what many of us have long suspected.
Here’s a written summary of the takeaways from this conversation:
On structure - and what it does and doesn't explain
One of the questions the research set out to answer was whether certain coalition structures work better than others. The short answer is: not really, at least not in the ways you might expect. Governance model, size, how long the coalition has been around - none of these factors had much bearing on how members perceived the coalition's effectiveness. What did seem to matter was the quality of the underlying collaborative process: communication, shared goals, trust, and a sense of cohesion among members.
One finding that generated a lot of conversation: only about half of surveyed members were aware of both their coalition's common agenda and its leadership structure. Members who were aware of those things scored higher across the board. The interviews helped explain part of why - leadership turnover in member organizations means institutional knowledge doesn't always get passed along, even in coalitions people have been part of for years. It raised a real question about how backbone organizations communicate not just at onboarding, but on an ongoing basis.
On why members show up - and what they're looking for
The research found that members come to coalitions with pretty different motivations. Some are looking for practical things - connections, resources, funding leads, partners for their programs. Others are drawn more by a shared vision of longer-term systems change. Both groups showed up in the data, and they tended to evaluate the coalition differently.
Members with more practical goals were generally more engaged in coalition activities and more positive about impact. Members who came in with a stronger systems change orientation tended to be somewhat more critical in their assessments - the researchers suggested this may be because they're measuring the coalition against a longer-term bar that's harder to demonstrate over any given time window. The conversation touched on the challenge this creates for backbone organizations trying to serve both groups at once, and how much of that comes down to members trusting that the work is moving in the right direction even when they can't see all of it.
On what members say the coalitions are actually doing
The survey results were fairly strong overall - 79% of members agreed their coalition had improved the quality of sport, recreation, and play services in their area, and 69% said their coalition had empowered communities to advocate for their own needs. But some of the more interesting conversation was around how members described that impact: often as something indirect. The coalition made an introduction. The coalition shared an opportunity. The members took it from there.
Tracy offered a concrete example from King County - the phrase "play equity" is now widely used across their region, by funders, by professional sports teams, by organizations that aren't even members of the coalition. Tracing that back to any single action the coalition took is hard. But the shift is real. Gareth described a similar dynamic in the data - a lot of backbone work happens beneath the surface in ways that are genuinely difficult to measure, which is part of what makes this kind of research useful.
