Broker Focus: Sports Insurance

We caught up with Neil Felder from PROLINK who gave us his valuable insight into insuring sporting and fitness activities:

"What Is Sports Insurance?"

Neil Felder (PROLINK): "Sports and Fitness insurance is a whole composite of policies that are geared towards the sports and leisure industry. It could be reading from Commercial General Liability insurance to Abuse coverage to Cyber Liability and policies or Sports Accident insurance policies. It encompasses a lot of different individual policies when you look at Sports and Leisure."

"Who Is Sports Insurance For?"

NF: "In terms of who can really benefit from that is you can really name a whole bunch of different types of businesses out there. You've got sports leagues, national provincial sports associations and organizations. You've got different sports and fitness facilities themselves, whether it be your regular gym or even a more specific location such as a climbing wall facility, and certainy others beyond that, including manufacturers, suppliers and distributors to the sports and leisure industry as well."

"What Does Sports Insurance Include?"

NF: "A Commercial General Liability policy is certainly standard when it comes to sports and leisure types of businesses. You have coverage in there for liability claims, so if they do get seriously hurt you can claim through that. If there's ancillary medical expenses, such as calling an ambulance, most of those policies will also have a feature involved with that to pay for some of those costs. But also, what a lot of companies and organizations are doing is for their members buying a Sport Accident policy, so that there's an automatic pay-out based on when their injury took place based on a set amount of money as well at the time."  

"What Risks Are Associated With Sports Insurance?"

NF: "The worst case scenario is that something takes place where their policy isn't properly set up and it falls outside the parameters of what they currently carry, the worst case scenario being the participant gets injured, perhaps concussions are a bigger issue right now. If concussions are somewhat excluded from the policy, or if something else of that nature and that occurs during the policy, well the worst case scenario is that your policy is actually not going to respond and it won't get to be activated during the course of the term. So the right way to do it is to make sure you're properly set up and that way you can make sure all your risks are taken into account, and from there get a policy that's going to work for your organization."

"What Are The Most Common Claims With Sports Insurance?"

NF: "I'd say the most common claim would be related to Participant Liability. So a participant goes out to play the sport, or use a piece of equipment if you're a manufacturer, and they get injured during the course of playing the sport. That's certainly by far the most common occurence of the claim, but there's other claims that can occur beyond that as well."

You can browse our current range of Sports products here.