Certificate in Executive Leadership in Sport (CEO)
Built for the leaders coming next
- Middle and senior leaders in sport ready for the next level
- Heads of department and executives
- Coaches and players transitioning into leadership
- Sporting administrators and board members
- Business leaders with a serious interest in elite sport
Bottle a career’s worth of CEO judgement
This course captures the thinking behind building successful clubs, leading change, and translating off-field strategy into on-field success. You finish with a practical leadership framework you can apply inside your organisation the very next day.
Define Leadership On Your Terms
Separate leadership from management and build a model that fits the modern game.
Shape Culture Deliberately
Understand culture as the behaviours you reward — and learn to change it on purpose.
Build High-Performance Environments
Balance psychological safety with accountability, and design out groupthink.
Make Better Decisions
Recognise the bias and blind spots that quietly derail executive judgement.
Lead Through Adversity
Understand the causes of decline and how to lead a genuine turnaround.
Sustain Performance Over Time
Maintain hunger, standards and resilience long after the first success.
Ten focused modules
What Leadership Really Is
Leadership definitions, direct versus indirect leadership, and empowerment over control.
Culture: The Behaviours You Reward
What culture really is, why culture change is hard, and the leadership behaviours that shape culture.
Psychological Safety, Accountability & Groupthink
Safety versus accountability, groupthink risks, and inclusive leadership behaviours.
Values-Driven Leadership
Values in action, recruitment and reward, and evaluating performance through values.
Purpose, Strategy & Competitive Advantage
Purpose versus strategy, competitive advantage, and what endures in organisations.
Performance Indicators & Alignment
KPIs and KPAs, aligning people to strategy, and avoiding vanity metrics.
Bias, Decision-Making & Blind Spots
Confirmation bias and overconfidence, status and comparison traps, and improving executive judgement.
Resilience, Motivation & Sustaining Performance
Resilience under pressure, post-success letdown, and reframing goals.
Turnarounds, Decline & Leading Through Adversity
Causes of decline, common leadership errors, and leading effective turnarounds.
Your Leadership Framework & Final Reflections
Personal leadership frameworks, support teams and development, and final advice and reflections. Closes with a live-style Q&A.
Brian Cook AM
Brian Cook AM is one of Australian sport’s most respected administrators. Across more than three decades, he has led three of the country’s most significant football clubs as CEO: West Coast Eagles, Geelong Cats and Carlton. The breadth and longevity of that experience is rare. The premierships, finals appearances and organisational transformations built across those tenures are rarer still.
This course distils what he has learned about leadership, culture, decision-making and sustaining performance at the highest level. The judgement that drove the turnarounds, the culture work that built premierships, and the executive thinking that holds an organisation together through pressure are captured here for the next generation of leaders in sport.
Choose how you pay
- 10 self-paced modules
- A practical leadership framework you can apply immediately
- Flexible payment — pay in full or spread over 6 or 12 months
- Certificate of completion from Apogee Sports
Frequently asked questions
Who is this course for?
It’s built for middle and senior leaders in sport ready to step up — heads of department, executives, administrators, and coaches or players moving into leadership. Business leaders with a genuine interest in elite sport get just as much from it.
How is the course delivered?
Entirely online and self-paced. The content was filmed across one structured day and broken into ten focused modules, so you can move through it on your own schedule and revisit any module whenever you need to.
How long does it take to complete?
There’s 4–5 hours of core content. Most people work through it across a few sittings, and you can move at whatever pace suits you — there’s no deadline.
What will I walk away with?
A practical leadership framework you can apply inside your organisation straight away, plus a certificate of completion from Apogee Sports. The focus throughout is judgement you can use, not theory.
Do I need a background in elite sport?
No. The lessons are drawn from elite sport, but the principles — leadership, culture, decision-making, turnarounds — translate directly into any high-performance organisation.
How much is it, and how do I pay?
The course is $990 AUD. You can pay in full, or spread it across 6 monthly payments of $165 or 12 monthly payments of $82.50 — choose your option at checkout.
Lead like the people who built the game
Thirty years of executive judgement, distilled into one course you can start today.