Canada Basketball must cash in: Grunwald
TORONTO — Having already played a significant role in one chapter of Canadian basketball history, Glen Grunwald has his eyes set on another.
One of the first employees of the Toronto Raptors, coming on board long before the team played its first game, Grunwald was instrumental in negotiating a rocky first few years for the now well-established franchise.
He’s soon to take over the controls of Canada Basketball, hoping to play a large role in building that group into some kind of financially sound, competitively relevant global organization.
“I think it can be very successful, I think it’s a great opportunity,” said Grunwald, who officially becomes the group’s president and executive-director on Oct. 1. “Like Steve Nash (the Hall of Famer who calls playing for Canada at the 2000 Olympics the highlight of his career), it would be a wonderful thing to say, we got this medal out of the World Cup or Olympics and to be a part of that and to help move that along I think would be a great achievement.
“If I can be a part of that and help that, that would mean a lot to me.”
Grunwald, a Chicago-born, Indiana-trained lawyer who became a Canadian citizen in the 1990s, knows the task he’s taken is a gigantic one.
Canada is enjoying success on the court at almost every level but funding, as always, is an issue, as is fundraising.
Finding a way to have the resources to let the programs flourish is his biggest challenge. Canada Basketball has a working relationship with TwentyTen, a sports management group, and Grunwald and Canada Basketball’s board are searching high and low for resources. Sources confirmed a Sportsnet.ca story from about a week ago that there have been preliminary discussions with ex-Raptor president Bryan Colangelo about some kind of role.
“There have been great people who have been supporting basketball for a long time,” Grunwald said. “I don’t want to name names but you know who they are and corporations, too.
“There’s a lot of good support but, frankly, we need some more.”
The basketball operations side of the organization has flourished in the last few years. The senior women were fifth at the worlds in 2014 and top eight at both the ’12 and ’16 Olympics; the junior men won a world championship in ’17 and the junior women were bronze medallists.
What’s seen in some circles as the marquee team — the senior men — are closing in on a berth in the ’19 FIBA World Cup which would return them to the top echelon of the sport worldwide for the first time since ’10.
Part of Canada Basketball’s financial issues can be chalked up to the inability of the men to qualify for the 2016 Rio Olympics and the lost marketing opportunities that went with it.
“When they stumbled … not qualifying for the Olympics in 2016 … that hurt,” Grunwald said. “That set back the momentum some but at the same time, we’ve got momentum coming again, we’re doing so well in the FIBA World Cup qualifiers and hopefully that will continue, hopefully we’ll qualify for the World Cup and then hopefully the Olympics and that’ll help.
“(But) it’s sports so there’s no guarantees.”