Our Team
Decades inside the game—NHL front offices, player representation, and professional hockey—inform everything we do.
Mark Yates
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.
Managing Partner/Founder mark@benchandboardsgroup.com
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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