Organized sports have been on an upward trend in Calgary with the Calgary Sports and Social Club (CSSC) on the forefront — a not-for-profit organization that sets up social sports leagues and other events around the city.
Founded in 1996, the CSSC has grown significantly in the post-pandemic era reflecting the rise in popularity of team sports not only to encourage physical activity but also as a source of social interaction.
Jon Diment is the director of operations at the CSSC, and has worked there for the past seven years. He has seen the grow in social sports leagues explode in recent years, with a demand for both traditional sports and new sports, like pickleball, an activity that Calgary’s leisure facilities are struggling to keep up with.
The organization boasts a significant membership base with 100,000 people registered in their membership system. Diment explains what the CSSC is about and what role it plays in the Calgary sports scene overall.
Alejandro Velasco: Tell me about the CSSC’s operations, and why you think this work is important in Calgary.
Jon Diment: We are the largest adult rec sports provider in the province. We offer sports leagues, tournaments and social events for adults only 18 up all the way up to 80 plus years old. We have four seasons a year which align with the traditional seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall. Ultimately, our goal is to get people active and to get people back in the game by running these leagues at a recreational level. A lot of people have played sports in their youth, but once they get to 18, they maybe go to post-secondary, [or] they kind of finish their youth sport competitive routine that they were in. This is a way for them to get back to playing sports and being active.
Why we think it’s important? There are a few main reasons. Physically, there are a lot of benefits to it: staying fit and keeping competitive. Then there’s the mental aspect: it’s healthy competition, it’s socializing, and it’s all good for mental health.
I want to talk a little bit about the CSSC. Tell me how the CSSC has grown since 1996.
It has exploded. Nowadays we have quite a lot of older participants who are now getting into pickleball leagues. Originally they were playing with us in soccer or ultimate frisbee back in 1996, so it’s kind of funny how they comment on just how big we’ve got over those 30 years. We’ve grown maybe threefold since the early 2000s, and that’s just a combination of people wanting to play sports while Calgary’s growing, Edmonton is growing. We’re seeing a big influx of people who are moving here from B.C. and Ontario, and they want to continue playing sports. We’re growing fast, and it’s hard to even meet the demand, sometimes just to find facility space to keep up with how many people want to play.
You mentioned pickleball. I wanted to maybe ask you a little bit about not just pickleball, but there’s obviously a massive variety of sports. How do you determine what sports you should be focusing on for new leagues? How do you determine this kind of thing?
We keep our ear to the ground with what’s popular and what’s not. We just get a feel for what’s kind of up and coming quite often. And you hear feedback from players. A lot of our own staff are out there in sports too. So you gotta pick it up and kind of base what we offer essentially on demand.
Let’s talk a little bit about the player base. You said you have 100,000 people registered for the club. Of course, that’s a mixed bag of players where you have amateurs and high-level athletes. What do you do to even out skill levels to ensure the people who want to have fun do so, while the people who want to train get their practice?
The majority of players in the club have played before with us rather than newbies all the time. So usually we have a database of results so we can go back and see how they’ve fared — are they a strong team or are they a weaker team? And for anyone who is on a brand new team, we often do skill questionnaires to get a gauge of how good they are. Then we realign and divide teams into different divisions based on their skill, their previous records, and their skill questionnaire results. It’s important to have lots of divisions, and we have a lot of pickleball divisions — we have probably close to 30 pickleball divisions now. There’s a lot of movement between them and lots of data that we sort through.
The CSSC operates in a city that often falls 40 below zero in temperature for a large part of the winter. How do you organize sports year-round, and what sort of infrastructure do you look for to deal with the issues brought up by the cold?
Calgary in general is a very sporty city — there’s a high demand for sports in the city. It’s like an active kind of community. So just naturally, there’s a large demand for facilities and I think people know that. There’s been quite a lot of development in the private facility space and there are a lot of City of Calgary-owned facilities. We use privately owned facilities, like the MNP Center as an example, or your local community association if they have a gym. We also use high school gyms or private school gyms.
It’s a combination between going through the City of Calgary, the Calgary school boards and private facilities to meet the demand. And honestly, there are not quite enough facilities. If you consider ourselves and all of the youth groups and other sports groups out there who are looking for space in the winter, the supply doesn’t necessarily meet the demand.
We talked about the sporting aspect, but as you said, there are two sides to what you guys do. You mentioned you guys put on events and stuff like this. Can you maybe tell me a little bit more about how the CSSC works as a social club?
Obviously the social element of our name. And so we kind of almost split our business in two. We have a side of the business that operates our leagues, that is our bread and butter, and then we also have another side of the business that operates our tournaments, the social events, the one-day events, and definitely post-COVID, those social events have become more and more popular.
So we host date nights where you and your partner can come and play golf or do a series of activities together, meet other couples, and meet other people who are similar to you. Likewise, we have speed dating. So a lot of events for singles, if they want to, you know, go out there and meet someone who is a CSSC member who maybe is sporty. We run those events. We run trivia nights, so some stuff that isn’t sport-related at all, but there’s demand for it in the city to try and just go out with friends, something to plan for that is affordable. And you just know, it’s with like-minded individuals.
I wanted to talk about membership, joining and actually goin. How do you work to keep sports accessible and affordable?
We are a not-for-profit organization, so naturally that allows us to keep our prices lower than our competition, usually, because we’re not trying to make a big cut on it, we’re not trying to make a big margin of profit. That’s one advantage for players — we are a not-for-profit, and many of our competitors are not.
In general, what allows us to keep our prices low is scale, a smaller margin on our offerings or sports. But because we have so many teams, it adds up to cover our overhead business and pays for our staff and whatnot. A lot of our margin that is generated goes into our staffing and just operating the business. Or goes into the leagues directly themselves, as opposed to someone’s back pocket.
When looking at the future, the space for these kinds of leagues is quite limited and contested in the city. As Calgary continues to grow, what kinds of things would you like to see change to help the development of more sports leagues like the ones at the CSSC?
The tough part with sports facilities is they are large, so it’s a lot of square footage for a limited return on your investment. Sometimes the fact is you can probably make more money elsewhere rather than investing in a sports facility.
Calgary facilities are just lacking in comparison to say Edmonton, where it’s a smaller population yet they have more facilities than us. If we could change anything, it would be like that — access to facilities or subsidizing of facilities.
As you mentioned, obviously there’s the snow factor, so a lot of Calgary facilities have to be indoors. Whereas, let’s say in Vancouver, you can have a lot more outdoor sports happening. So it’s a little easier. You don’t have to build a structure above a field, whereas in Calgary you have to — it’s an investment, particularly in turf facilities. The city has the Calgary Soccer Center, but that’s the only turf soccer facility owned by the City of Calgary in a city of one and a half million people. So ideally, building facilities or subsidizing facilities that are high in demand from the city would be nice.
You mentioned turf facilities, first of all, but you said that Edmonton has a much more developed scene when it comes to this. Could you maybe provide a couple of examples of things that you think Calgary is lacking, and maybe where you would like to see improvements?
Turf fields are the big one. There are probably six or seven turf facilities in Edmonton. In Calgary, there are probably four or five, and only one of them is owned by the city.
So there is a big need for turf facilities, volleyball facilities, and basketball facilities. There are no real publicly owned big volleyball, basketball centers. The City of Calgary only has two leisure centers that they operate, Southland Leisure Center and Village Square, whereas Edmonton has about eight.
Edmonton has a little more of that public funding going into the building of sports facilities, which allows them to have more soccer centers, more leisure rec centers with gyms and all sorts of other facilities that in Calgary just don’t seem to be a priority for City Hall.
The CSSC has exploded in size. In the short-term and long-term, where do you want to see the CSSC go?
Expanding our offerings is something we’ve been pretty hard on. Obviously, I’d say even 10 years ago, we went from 15 sports, now we have 25 and we had this whole new or developed branch of social events. So I think in the short term, the next few years, that’s what we’ll continue to do — just continue to get our feet into as many sports and social events as we can so we’re really touching on every area of demand that exists in the sporting sphere and in a social event sphere.
And then beyond that, there’s still a whole bunch of different sports, sporting events, I would say, or one-day events, that we want to offer. But I can’t really give away too much on that front.