When attention matters

Shane Coppin has spent his career leading organisations through change, often at the moments when they needed it most. He is co-owner and director of Engage Sports International. He brings a mix of sport leadership, commercial business and construction experience that few people in sport administration share.

Shane started in fitness and sport administration in Canberra. He worked his way up from Volleyball ACT to General Manager of Basketball Canberra, where he secured partnerships with major brands including Coca-Cola Amatil and Kellogg’s and held executive responsibility for the organisation’s national-league teams. He then ran his own sports services business before moving into construction and manufacturing for more than a decade. He built and ran businesses including Shade & Play Australia and the structural steel detailing firm Coppin Group, and completed a Graduate Diploma in Structural and Civil Engineering along the way. That grounding in how things are designed, built and held together still shapes how he reads organisations.

Shane returned to sport in 2013 to lead Mountain Bike Australia, first as interim and then as chief executive. Over seven years he grew membership revenue by more than 63% and built more than $3.2 million in platform sales. He also led BMX Australia.

His defining piece of work was AusCycling. As one of the architects of the unification and its inaugural acting joint CEO, Shane helped bring 18 national and state cycling bodies, across road, track, mountain bike and BMX, into a single national organisation, in the middle of a pandemic. That meant bringing together governance, constitutions, people, members and systems. It’s the experience he now brings to sports facing federation reform, mergers or major structural change.

From 2021 to 2024 he was Group CEO of the Presbyterian and Methodist Schools Association (PMSA), an education group of four historic independent schools, two of them more than 120 years old. The group had more than 4,800 students, up to 2,000 staff and a balance sheet of over $750 million. There he led the development of its 20-Year Strategic Vision (2024–2044). He has also held an honorary adjunct role with Bond University’s Business School.

Those years taught Shane that leadership is mostly the work nobody sees. It’s the small judgements you replay on the drive home, the calls nobody else can make for you, and the moments when everyone looks at you because you’re supposed to know. He has had to make hard calls, including cancelling a national championship. He has learned that leaders rarely struggle because of pressure alone. They struggle because of isolation under pressure. That understanding is at the heart of how he works with leaders today: as someone who has sat in the chair and is comfortable not having all the answers.

Shane is a problem-solver and a builder by nature. He believes meaningful change usually comes from small, deliberate steps that ripple outward rather than grand announcements. He is endlessly curious, and he finds useful lessons in unexpected places. He would rather help a leader find the right question than hand them a neat answer.

Through Engage, Shane works with boards, CEOs and leadership teams on:

• long-term strategy and vision, setting a clear ambition that drives shorter-term planning and decisions

• governance, organisational structure and operating model design

• unification, mergers and major structural change

• ongoing advisory and mentoring, as a trusted thought partner to leaders

With Fiona, Shane also operates Engage’s two e-commerce brands, Angry Penguins and Fig & Fi. He writes on leadership from time to time. He is based at Moonee Beach on the NSW Coffs Coast.