The Conveners Podcast: Summer Round-Up
Read the highlights from the latest episodes of the Conveners Podcast.
Read the highlights from the latest episodes of the Conveners Podcast.
Three conversations, three very different corners of the leisure and wellbeing sector, but a similar story keeps surfacing: individuals who have inherited something broken, unglamorous or overlooked, have quietly turned it into something that works. Across exercise referral, national aquatics strategy and municipal golf, the throughline is the same: credibility isn’t inherited, it’s built one conversation at a time.
Andy King sat down with John Keating (GM Active) and Graeme Hindes (LFX) fresh off the back of their two-day “Reimagining Exercise Referral” conference, an event that, by their own admission, exceeded expectations, drawing around 140 delegates and still generating LinkedIn conversation a month later.
What started as a discussion about exercise referral schemes quickly widened into something bigger: a full reckoning with “movement for health” as a concept. Speakers ranged from Scotland’s Dr Coral Hanson, whose work on national referral standards with Edinburgh Napier University highlighted inconsistencies in England’s approach, to a clinical psychologist unpacking behaviour change as a genuinely distinct skill set, one most leisure staff have never been trained in.
That distinction became the episode’s defining idea, delivered by John Keating: “Exercise is the tool and behaviour change is the intervention.” It’s a small reframe with big consequences. If behaviour change is the actual work, then everyone with a touchpoint in a leisure centre, not just referral specialists, needs training in it, and the sector’s workforce development plans need to catch up quickly.
The conversation also turned candidly toward credibility: John pointed out that at a recent NHS Confed Expo, an entire session on prevention was built around arts and culture, with physical activity nowhere to be seen… a sign, he argued, that the sector has the data and the outcomes but isn’t yet in the minds of the individuals making funding decisions. The episode closes with an ambitious pitch: a joint GM Active/LFX virtual club to keep the collaboration alive beyond the conference, and Andy’s hope that within five years, other countries will be talking about the UK’s exercise-referral pathway the way people currently talk about the NHS itself.
Twenty-five years after she and Andy first worked together, the conversation turned to how narrowly the national governing body continues to be perceived. When Andy admitted his own first association with Swim England was “clubs, competitive swimming,” Becky offered a candid response: “I’m a bit disappointed if I’m honest… but I’m not surprised.” From there, the discussion moved into the comparatively under-explored territory of aquatics and GLP-1 medications. Research cited in the episode found that when people on weight-loss medications were asked which activities they actually wanted to pursue, walking ranked first and swimming second, yet the role swimming pools could play in that picture appears to have received relatively little attention.
Becky also challenged the assumption that swimming attire presents a barrier operators can afford to overlook: “there’s not any one operator in this country that will say no to whatever you’re wearing in the gym,” raising the question of why aquatics should be treated any differently. The conversation turned to school swimming provision, noting that approximately 1,200 pools have closed since 2010 (a net loss of around 500 once new facilities are accounted for), and that Wales now fully funds school swimming, including transport, while England does not.
Becky posed the question directly: is a Welsh child’s life worth more than an English one? It is the kind of statement that reads as a headline, yet it is fully substantiated by the figures underpinning it, including the £2.4bn social value attributed to swimming in Swim England’s 2022 Value of Swimming report.
Having taken over a struggling municipal course in Rochdale that Andy King himself once ran, Andrew’s early strategy was simply showing up in person. “For the first three months I took more money outside of the shop than I did inside the shop,” he recalls, describing weeks spent physically walking the course with a mobile card machine to stop people, some of them people he’d known his whole life, playing for free. That unglamorous groundwork funded everything that came after: Trackman technology on driving ranges, refurbished clubhouses, free junior coaching every weekend, and a growth story that’s taken Link Golf from one course to ten sites nationwide, with private members’ clubs now approaching them too.
What makes the episode land is the honesty about what it cost personally, awkward conversations with former golf-club teammates and his own father’s old club, years of pushback from governing bodies over Link Golf’s no-dress-code policy, and a candid admission that private members’ clubs are now facing the same volunteer crisis hitting grassroots sports clubs everywhere, as committee members retire with no one willing to take their place.
Together, these three conversations make a compelling, unintentional case for the same underlying idea: nothing here was solved with a strategy document alone. It was solved by measuring what was really happening and being willing to have the uncomfortable conversation that gets you there; whether that’s confronting a friend over an unpaid green fee, admitting your organisation is misunderstood, or standing in front of 140 peers and saying “here’s what we got wrong, and here’s the plan to fix it.”
The Conveners Podcast is an essential listen for anyone working across fitness, leisure and health. Whether you’re an operator wrestling with referral pathways, a governing body figuring out how to stay relevant, or an independent trying to turn around a struggling site, there’s an episode that can offer you insight.
Catch up on all episodes of the Conveners Podcast here.