Our Team
Decades inside the game—NHL front offices, player representation, and professional hockey—inform everything we do.
Mark Yates
Managing Partner/Founder mark@benchandboardsgroup.com
As Managing Partner of Bench and Boards Group, Mark Yates represents hockey coaches and executives with a clear, disciplined approach grounded in experience, credibility, and trust. His background spans coaching, scouting, and senior leadership roles, along with building and scaling major analytics and sports-services organizations across multiple sports. That work has produced a deep, established network of decision-makers and a strong understanding of how organizations evaluate leadership, manage change, and make long-term decisions.
Mark’s perspective is shaped by years spent working closely with coaches, executives, and organizational leadership, as well as operating businesses that serve teams, leagues, and governing bodies at the highest levels of the game. He understands the realities behind titles, contracts, and organizational dynamics—not from theory, but from proximity and repetition. As a result, his guidance is practical and unsentimental, prioritizing stability, positioning, and timing over noise, speculation, or short-term optics.
Rather than viewing representation as transactional, Mark approaches each client relationship with a long-term mindset. He evaluates opportunities through the lens of fit, leadership structure, and organizational direction, recognizing that the right role at the wrong time—or in the wrong environment—can stall a career just as easily as advance it. His representation style is direct, strategic, and focused equally on protecting careers and advancing them deliberately.
Raised around professional sport and the agency business through his father, long-time golf agent David Yates, Mark learned early that reputation, discretion, and relationships are earned slowly and lost quickly. Those principles remain central to how he operates. At Bench and Boards Group, he applies them consistently, serving as a trusted advocate and strategic partner for coaches and executives navigating today’s increasingly complex hockey landscape.
Michael MacPherson
Consultant / mike@benchandboardsgroup.com
As a consultant with Bench and Boards Group, Michael MacPherson brings nearly four decades of experience across every level of the game — as a player, a coach, and a leader — making him one of the most credentialed and well-rounded hockey minds we work with. His background spans grassroots development in Ontario, university programs, and professional hockey from the ECHL and AHL through to the OHL and five years with the Chicago Blackhawks organization. That range is not incidental — it reflects a career built with intention, at each level, over time.
Michael's perspective is shaped by something most in hockey don't have: thirty years running complex organizations as a high school principal in Ontario, including serving as Principal of all three Catholic high schools in the city of Guelph. That experience — managing people, navigating institutional dynamics, building culture, and leading through adversity — gives him a distinct lens when evaluating coaches, assessing organizational fit, and advising on leadership. He doesn't just understand systems on the ice. He understands the systems around it.
Beyond the rink, Michael has been a consistent voice for athlete welfare and safe sport, serving for three years on the Leadership Committee of Athletes CAN and contributing to strategic initiatives that produced Canada's first national athlete hub. He is a certified coach evaluator with the Coaching Association of Canada and currently supports the Ontario Hockey Federation in Risk Management. His academic work — including a collaboration with renowned psychologist Angela Duckworth on grit and performance — reflects someone who has never stopped developing, even after decades at the top of the profession.
What Michael brings to Bench and Boards Group is a depth of perspective that is genuinely difficult to replicate. His involvement in hockey spans every level of the game — from grassroots development to the NHL — built over a career stretching back to 1986. But what truly sets him apart is the institutional knowledge, the leadership fluency, and the ability to see around corners that only comes from having operated at the highest levels of both sport and education for the better part of four decades. His counsel makes us better at what we do.
Our
Values
Transparency
No smoke, no mirrors, no “we’ll see what happens.” We tell you what we know, what we don’t, and what it means—so you can make decisions with your eyes open, not crossed fingers. This is a relationship business, and trust starts with straight answers.
Innovation
Hockey is evolving fast—front offices and leadership roles are all shifting. We stay ahead of that curve with modern strategy, smarter positioning, and opportunities that extend beyond “just the next job,” the way top multi-service agencies do across sports.
Loyalty
We represent you—not the room, not the rumor mill, and not whatever’s trending this week. We’re built for the long game: steady counsel, consistent advocacy, and someone in your corner when it’s easy and when it’s not.
Relationships
This space still runs on credibility and connection—earned over time, kept through integrity. We build meaningful, professional relationships with decision-makers while staying intimately personal with our clients, because the best outcomes come from trust on both sides of the table.
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