1. Building a culture of risk management:
A Review of the Landscape and Best Practices

2. about Professional Lawyer Licensed Insurance Broker
USA Football – General Counsel & Senior Director of Business Operations
US Soccer Foundation
Personal
Parent of two boys in multiple youth sports
College soccer player – married to a college field hockey player
Licensed Youth Soccer Coach (US Soccer E License)
Volunteer Board member for youth soccer club

3. About Integro entertainment & sport

4. When this session is complete you should…
Know a little more about risk management and insurance
Understand some of the challenges facing football from an insurance perspective
Have shared solutions with us and with each other
Be thinking about specific actions that you can take to build a culture of risk management in your football organization

5. “Remember that success can take months or years to achieve but can be undone in minutes.”
- John Wooden

6. How do we define risk management?
The perpetual process of identifying, assessing and mitigating risk in order to achieve a predictable outcome.
Prevention is the best insurance policy!

7. Strategies
Risk Avoidance
Risk Transfer (e.g., contractual)
Risk Mitigation (best practices)
Risk Acceptance (self-insurance)
Insurance

8. Best Practices – Risk Transfer
Collect waivers from athletes/parents
Waiver enforceability is a state law issue
Even when enforceability is in doubt, a waiver helps establish assumption of the risk
Retention practices
Read your contracts!
Insurance provisions
Indemnification provisions
If you don’t know what it means, don’t sign it!

9. Best Practices – Risk Mitigation
Have a Code of Conduct and/or Code of Ethics – then exceed it with your actions
Comply with your sport’s best practices for safety in training and competition environments
Commit to Safe Sport best practices:
Minimize unsupervised one-on-one interactions with athletes
Conduct individual athlete meetings when others are present and interactions can be easily observed
Get written permission from parent to conduct one-on-one training sessions and encourage parent to attend
NOTE: more best practices in the USOC’ Safe Sport Handbook and online training

10. Insurance Carrier Perspective on Tackle Football
Context
Limited number of insurance carriers in sports
(Shrinking) subset of those even willing to consider tackle football
Primary concerns
Brain injury claims – severity and “long tail”
Class action claims
Sexual abuse and molestation claims
Continued social pressure and negative publicity
Very little upside from a business perspective

11. Insurance Carrier Perspective on Tackle Football (cot’d)
Insurance Carrier Responses/Strategies
Exclude football risk altogether (won’t even offer insurance)
Limit football risk to where it is a small piece of a larger multi-sport organization
Increased scrutiny – loss history, risk management practices, etc.
Coverage restrictions
Exclude brain injury claims altogether
Sublimit brain injury claims – per occurrence and in the aggregate
Exclude brain injury in the excess layer
Defense costs inside the limits
Price increases
Higher deductibles and retentions

12. How Can/Should We Respond?
Commit to risk management
Build an organizational culture that emphasizes risk management
Hire, fire, reward, recognize based on risk management results
Don’t be a late adopter
Proactively implement best practices
Don’t limit your view to just football – look at other amateur sports
Do what you say you’re going to do
Ensure that you are in compliance with your own rules, policies, & procedures
Keep an open mind
Honor the history of your sport but be open to structural changes intended to improve player safety
Prepare for increased scrutiny and requirements from insurance carriers
Document/develop your risk management story over time – try to lead the narrative with your carrier
Example of potential new requirements coming from carriers = video waivers

13. “We are what we repeatedly do
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.”
- Aristotle

14. Matt Sicchio