Sport and recreation organisations have a special nature that causes difficulty in communication and often results in issues in the delivery of services.
Sport and recreation organisations are staffed in the main part by voluntary (unsalaried) workers. While volunteers may be passionate about their organisation, the voluntary work they perform usually has a lower priority than their paid work and family responsibilities. As a result the amount of work carried out to organise services, programs and events may be inconsistent.
The majority of people who perform work for the sport/recreation organisation will often not have contact with each other on a day to day basis. Contact is more likely to be on a weekly basis or even less frequent.
Members or customers of a sport and recreation organisation are often spread over a wide geographic area. This is especially true of state organisations. The tyrranny of distance is very difficult to conquer and thus, members who reside in different regions will have neglible or no contact with each other.
People are often passionate about their sport or recreation activities. For most people, their principal reason for participation is enjoyment. Emotions can run very high if someone or something gets in the way. It is not uncommon for people in sporting organisations to expend considerable energy in power struggles and infighting, and therefore energy devoted to service delivery is reduced.
People who undertake specific roles in a sport and recreation organisation often learn "on the job". This would include office bearers (President, Secretary, Treasurer, etc), coaches, referees, fundraisers, event managers and so on. It is also the case that when they resign their positions, the knowledge and experience they have gained is lost to the organsiation as there is inadequate knowledge management within the organsiation.
Sport and recreation organisations are limited in the quality of service delivery by the amount of funds they collect from members/customers. As it is often the case that managing committees of sport organsiations endeavour to keep fees and charges to members as low as possible. Thus, sport organisations are self-limiting inw hat can be achieved in service delivery.