Birmingham you were remark-a-bull.?

That’s all for now. I’m still recovering. ?#Birmingham2022 pic.twitter.com/mh2fB3TK6Z

— Laura Hillyard (@LauraHillyard1) August 11, 2022

An athlete turned events director and producer, since beginning to hone her craft at the Loughborough International 10 years ago she has worked across some of athletics’ very biggest showcases – from the Commonwealth Games to the Olympics. However, she also decided to step outside of her favourite sport to see what others were doing.

This led to her working within the British Basketball League (BBL) and, in particular, revamping the London Lions team Game Nights at the Copper Box Arena and Wembley Arena. The lessons she has learned through doing so, she believes, could help athletics to re- establish the foothold it once had on the sporting landscape.

Hillyard was at both Night of the 10,000m PBs and Loughborough International back in May. She agrees both provided reasons to be cheerful but she also couldn’t escape the feeling that they were already preaching to the choir. There should be more focus, she believes, on those new disciples.

“What Highgate has done brilliantly is to tap into a community within the sport and it has reignited a fire within people to get involved,” says Hillyard, who can still be found most days at London’s Mile End track, training under the guidance of coach Chris Zah, as well as regularly competing at National Athletics League meetings.

“But the community being tapped into – ie the running community – was one that already existed. It attracts distance running people, distance running brands, but does distance running actually attract kids? I didn’t see many running around. And how many people in the crowd at Loughborough weren’t already connected to athletics in some way?

“I think the events that are going to attract new people to the sport will be the sprints, the explosive stuff – the stuff that today’s kids have that short attention span for and that they’re doing in school. No kid is running for 10,000m at school. If we want to inspire the next generation, we need to activate events that kids are familiar with.”

A key part of that process will be education, which applies to prospective spectators and fans of all ages. While there will always be those in the crowd who know everything from the hurdles to the high jump, in the current climate how well are the ins and outs of an athletics meeting really explained to the watching public?

“Not everyone automatically knows what’s going on,” says Hillyard of an area in which she has seen basketball excel.

“When there’s a three-pointer, for example [a basket scored from beyond the three-point line], we’ll play a specific sting to the crowd, which is a cue for them to shout and show three fingers. We’ll do the same for various other aspects of the game but it’s explained to the crowd before play begins and it makes them better understand what’s going on.

“In athletics, we could be replicating that with things like the start of the 100m, too, where we encourage the crowd to shush themselves rather than the stadium announcer doing it. It makes the spectators feel like an active part of it, in the same way as clapping for the long jump does.”

This is all part of what’s called “the show” in basketball. The game is the performance and Hillyard feels athletics would do well to think of a meeting in the same way.

Last year’s Commonwealth Games was a success story, with crowds flocking to and lapping up all of the athletics sessions – even the ones which only featured low-key qualifying heats.

There were activation areas on the way to the stands, clever use of music and then presenters in specific areas of the stadium whose job it was to showcase different aspects of the action and to activate the crowd.

The fans need to be welcomed into the fold, to be given a reason to care about what they are watching – the equivalent of being the 12th player on the football pitch – which brings us to another crucial aspect of an event. The storytelling.

Rather than waiting until the athletes have arrived on the start line to highlight who they are and what they have achieved, could there be snippets about them broadcast to the crowd in advance? What about a drip feed and hyping up of the current crop of stars across social media in the days leading up to the event?

As Hillyard points out, there are content creators in the community chomping at the bit to be involved. She feels more could be done to make their skills feel valued by the sport before they are lost to another sport or industry.

“Tell the crowd what the athletes have done, where they’re from, build that anticipation up and up and up, perhaps encourage the crowd to choose a side” she says. “A big challenge is the duration that you’ve got to keep that level of entertainment up for but you could do that easily if the audio is good across the arena, and you could have someone conducting that whole thing.

“It just takes someone stepping back from the competition schedule, and going: ‘Where are the downtimes? And what are we going to do in the downtimes?’ Because that’s where sport presentation is paramount – it’s what’s happening when the sport isn’t happening, because that’s when you lose people. We’re just using what’s been tried and tested before.”

There is a major opportunity to come with the London Diamond League returning this weekend (July 23).

To upscale events doesn’t necessarily have to take vast sums of money, which UK Athletics currently doesn’t have in any case. However, Hillyard feels more financial support could be out there for events and in turn the athletes – again, if organisers start to think a little differently.

“In a similar way to cycling, there are people in the running community who have a lot of money and are engaged with our sport, whether that be personally or via friends. But are we engaging them about legacies in the right way?” she says.

“It occurred to me on my Sunday run before the Loughborough International, look at the number of lower league football clubs which will have advertising from smaller local businesses around the pitch. What’s to stop that happening with an athletics track?”

Hillyard also cites what cricket has done with The Hundred – a new format of the game introduced two years ago which has successfully brought in a new audience without detracting from the “core” product.

“What The Hundred have done well is to engage brands that may have not necessarily previously aligned with cricket and I imagine that’s because they’ve educated them on its sports principals. I fear we are quick to assume everyone understands our sport. We also don’t open ourselves up to aligning with current cultural trends that brands would be attracted to.”

The first step towards success is to persuade people to come through the door at all, which involves shouting about the event and constantly underlining why it’s worth buying a ticket.

“My role with the Lions was, first of all, to get the product up to a level where people want to return,” says Hillyard.

“Then we spent money on marketing and elevated the level again. That way you retain more people. You evaluate what works, doesn’t work, you put concepts that contribute to the elevation in front of potential sponsors and you keep doing that.

“With athletics we focus a lot on quantity, not quality, and that’s across all of the sport.”

Even the most traditional of athletics fans will acknowledge that the time for change is very much upon us. The sport simply can’t afford to keep doing the same thing. Highgate has been a success because event director Ben Pochee set about doing something different.

Look at the current demographic of your average athletics crowd and it’s clear the younger part of the population are not being incentivised.

There are many individuals who want to be involved in helping make that transformation but there are fragments of change scattered here and there. Athletics’ great strength – and weakness – is how vast it is and how many events it encompasses. Some joined up thinking could go a long way.

“I think the problem in athletics is every single event seems to be trying to reinvent themselves,” says Hillyard, who points to the fact that the BBL is appointing a Team Services Director, whose sole role is to ensure that the game day delivery has a level of consistency across all the clubs, both in terms of the sport and the show.

“No-one’s working collaboratively. Everyone’s got little pockets of ideas but there is nothing to pool these ideas, to start creating a template or a best practice. Whether that’s done through federations or not, I’m not sure, but it would definitely help to gather it all.

“I was listening to a podcast the other day featuring the Scottish couple who have just bought the Caledonia Gladiators basketball and they said: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be part of a team delivering something bigger rather than just being an individual delivering something much smaller? And I think that’s where athletics mindset needs to go.

“It’s an individual sport and everyone’s individually competitive, perhaps this personality trait is a contributing problem, but it can’t be a competition between each other if we want this sport to grow.

“We are a performance sport, which can come down to millimetres and fractions of a second. To survive in this day and age, it has to have personality, and it has to have a platform. Athletics has lost its personality and its platform.”