Data now plays a role in changing Canadian sport culture

Data science is holding a mirror up to Canadian sport.

Boxing Canada and Sail Canada were among the first half a dozen national sports organizations (NSO) to adopt a Culture Audit and Assessment Tool, which crunches data to reflect the health of the NSO's culture.

Athletes, coaches, support staff and leaders answer questions anonymously about people and performance in their organization.

Respondents give numeric values to questions such as:

The data is fed back to the NSO on a bar graph with people on one axis and performance on the other.

It shows, numerically, alignment or misalignment in beliefs and opinions within the organization.

"The topics, the subject, it's not like we've talked about culture," Canadian world champion boxer Tammara Thibeault said. "It was new in the sense that we had a say in what we want it to look like. A lot of the questions were things we should be asking, but we don't."

The Culture Audit and Assessment Tool, or CAAT, arrives amid what Canada's former sports minister called a safe-sport crisis.

Tearful elite athletes have testified before parliamentary committees about physical, emotional and sexual abuse they've experienced, and fears of career repercussions if they reported it to their sport leaders.

How sport operates in Canada is under the microscope, and there have been calls for a national inquiry.

Thibeault and Canadian teammate Wyatt Sanford, who will box in the Pan American Games opening Friday in Santiago, Chile, answered CAAT's survey questions earlier this year.

"We've been centralized as a team now for about seven years," Sanford said. "This was the first year that we actually talked about the culture of being with the team, so it was a very new, very different thing when we