Risk Management

Risk management is important to all sports organizations. Any injury or accident that could be prevented could cost the team or organization dearly in terms of monetary damages or public opinion. There are three phases to risk management: Recognition, Analysis, and action.

The first phase is recognition. This involves thinking about hazard categories and specific hazards within those categories. For example, if an organization sees “slipping and falling” as a hazard category they would then identify areas that present the most danger like bathroom floors, stairwells, and entryways. Once the organization recognizes a hazard they must then decide whether the hazard is significant enough to be addressed. If so, they can then move on to phase two: analysis. Analysis is broken down in to two parts, risk identification, and risk evaluation. Risk identification involves finding hazards and determining the potential liability that might result if the hazard is not addressed. There are several ways to identify risk. One is to review incident and accident report forms to determine if there is a pattern or cause of past incidents. Another method of risk identification is using simple common sense to determine if something is a hazard, hazards detected by common sense are probably obvious and should be addressed first. One example is the netting behind the goals at a hockey game. These were not always in place despite pucks flying into the crowds at high speeds. It was only after a fan was killed that the nets were used even though common sense could easily see that it was a problem. Risk evaluation is determining the extent of risk that the hazard poses. They must assess how likely an injury or accident is to occur, and if so, how severe the injury. Finally, once risks have been recognized and analyzed there must be some sort of action. There are four options for action: retention, treatment, transfer, and avoidance. The actions that are determined must be formalized and implemented in the form of policies and procedures. It is very important that all of these are understood and put in place because they organization could face further damages if someone is injured and the policy was in place to prevent it but not followed. Preventative action is much more cost effective than paying damages in the courtroom later.

Link:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=6229876

Barry Bonds perjury trial begins. This is interesting because of the implication it has for baseball and the record books. Even though Bonds is already guilty in the court of public opinion an official revelation that he lied could be even more damaging for baseballs reputation.