Australia's first professor of sport management, David Shilbury's long-term effort to educate and professionalise the management and governance of sport organisations is bearing fruit with a vibrant and world-renowned suite of courses at Deakin and generations of graduates shaping the industry.
Scoring goals for sport governance
arguably true that as professional sport evolves into a billion-dollar industry driven by a strong on-field culture of performance and improvement, the same cannot always be said of the governance of organisations charged with overseeing this continuous development.
Since being appointed Australia’s first professor of sport management in 2000, David Shilbury has dedicated his career to helping professional administrators and volunteers alike to grow alongside the sports they oversee, building competencies in leadership, strategy and governance.
Recognised internationally as a leading authority on sport management, sport governance, and the organisation and delivery of sport, Prof. Shilbury is the Foundation Chair in Sport Management, and he has also been the inaugural director of the Deakin Sport Network since 2017. He remains the only non-North American sport management researcher to have won the North America Society for Sport Management’s prestigious Earle F. Zeigler award for his scholarship and contributions to the field.
Leading the way in sport management
A member of Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law for the past 35 years and holding a PhD in Strategy/Sport Management from Monash University, he established Australia’s first business-based courses in sport management in Australia.
‘My sport governance research is critical to the evolving sport industry and its professionalisation. Ironically, governance was largely overlooked in the early years…as the focus was on the professional preparation of paid sport management staff,’ he says.
‘That has changed in the last fifteen years as sport governance has demanded an enhanced focus, and the sport community realised the ‘buck’ stops with the boards of sport organisations.’
Prof. Shilbury says many such organisations have transitioned from amateur, leisure-oriented organisations, yet ‘without much focus’ on accountability and transparency.
‘Unfortunately, the sport industry is still reliant on non-executive directors who have little experience in the industry beyond being an ardent fan of their specific sport and having a passion and interest in it,’ he says.
‘An innate desire to educate’
Already possessing a strong pedigree in sport management when he arrived at Victoria College (which later became Deakin University) in 1990, Prof. Shilbury could have become a sport manager himself. But he had “an innate desire to educate”.
‘I took the view that I could make a greater difference by working in education and shaping young hearts and minds as they were prepared for careers in sport management, than working with any one national or state sport organisation,’ he says. ‘This applied to both teaching and the research that I published, which informed our teaching and flowed through to the sport industry.’
Publishing has been a major focus for Prof. Shilbury, who was Editor-in-Chief of the two leading journals in sport management, Sport Management Review (2002-04) and the Journal of Sport Management (2015-2018), and is also the lead author of prominent textbooks including Strategic Sport Marketing and Sport Management in Australia, lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Sport Governance published in 2020 and more recently his edited text entitled A Research Agenda for Sport Management was published by Elgar in 2022. He is credited by Google Scholar with 3545 citations of his work since 2019 and an h-index score of 34. Prof. Shilbury is also a Research Fellow of the North American Society for Sport Management and the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand.
‘Although the research process can be tedious and difficult, getting published in the best sport management journals remains, to this day, a most satisfying aspect of my work,’ he says.
Just as satisfying has been watching the progress of his alumni. ‘I am proud of how our graduates have been accepted into the sport industry, and how they are contributing to the professionalisation of sport in this country and beyond.’
Deakin’s Master of Business (Sport Management) is ranked #17 in the world in the prestigious 2024 Sport Business Postgraduate Rankings