Homegrown Leader: Mihai Raducanu Joins Hamilton Sports Group as Chief of Staff

It’s been a whirlwind process, but to Mihai Raducanu, “in my head it all started eight years ago” when he told his wife that his next big career step would ideally be as a sports executive in a professional sports front office.

“And in a million years I never would have thought I’d get that opportunity to do it here…in our city,” muses the 46-year-old Cathedral basketball legend, who grew up under severe political repression and economic deprivation in Romania before emigrating to Hamilton at the age of 15.

The years since have been crammed full of the pursuit of knowledge, experience, strong relationships and business innovation, all of it motivated and informed by the teamwork and personal connections he learned through sport, his hard-scrabble Iron Curtain youth, and his time in Hamilton.

And on June 1, Raducanu was named Hamilton Sports Group Chief of Staff, working across HSG’s permanent workforce of over 150 people and hundreds of part-timers to strengthen culture, systems and execution.

He was hired to build a high-performance culture at HSG using his unique attributes, which include high-end people skills, fostering and maintaining personal relationships, 18 years of global sports experience, an extensive teaching and coaching resumé, three university degrees, and a thorough creative history in understanding and implementing AI. He’s operated and consulted on businesses on four different continents.

As Raducanu concisely frames it, his over-arching proficiencies are “people, systems, love.”

His is a deeply Canadian story, a deeply Hamilton story, a deeply immigration story, a deeply sports story.

“This city gave me life,” he says. “Hamilton for me is home. I’m a true, true Canadian and I’m a Canadian because of Hamilton. I’m a Canadian because I went to Cathedral and I learned from their inner-city, inner-core, interconnected family there how to be a proper citizen in this city and this country.”

“Hamilton built me into the person I am. It instilled a hard-working blue-collar get-it-done-but-you-can’t-get-it-done-by-yourself mentality. You have to build it with others, and I learned that from Hamilton.”

While his roots are Romanian, the trunk, branches and leaves of Raducanu’s life are firmly Hamiltonian. His three children, Nia, 17, Lox, 15, and MJ, 4 months, were all born and live here. His wife, Brittany MacFarlane, was an OFSAA basketball medalist for St. Thomas More, played NCAA Division 1, coached at the University of Guelph, coached Kia Nurse, and has helped Raducanu coach in major basketball training programs around the world.

Some of those businesses weren’t sports-related but they were all based on the teamwork and self-responsibility principles he extracted from the game. While basketball was his vehicle, he believes he would have found the same blueprint “in any other sport.”

Sport provided a reprieve from the harsh realities of a childhood under a dictatorship.

“When you were 10 years old there, it was like being 20 here because you were so switched on,” he recalls. “You had to fight for your life.”

Raducanu was born in Cluj-Napoca, the unofficial capital of Transylvania. Always tall—he’s 6-foot-9 and 275 pounds now—he started basketball at age 13 on the junior team in the local club program where future NBA big man 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Mureșan was on the senior team.

By then, the Iron Curtain had been torn open and vicious dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had been executed, which was filmed for public viewing.

And Raducanu remembers it in vivid detail.

“It was all oppression so there was no education,” he says. “Romania had the biggest Secret Service ever.

“The only way we knew about what was happening in the rest of the world was that people would smuggle Western movies into the country, which were then dubbed. So the guys and girls in the community would hold secret movie-watching parties. We all went and that’s where you got to see the world.”

He was nine years old and his mother had sent him out to get bread and mustard on the night Ceaușescu was executed, and he joined the revolutionaries celebrating in the streets, worrying his mother with his long absence.

But despite the regime change, there were continued life-threatening shortages of essentials like groceries and fuel and “everything was rationed…if you could even find it. There were long lineups for food. There was such scarcity you had to do a lot of planning, and sometimes there was nothing …for days.”

When he was 15 and his sister Iuliana was 12, Raducanu’s parents, Hajni and Silviu, contracted a private company to get them out of the country.

They were scheduled to be situated in Windsor, but when they landed in Toronto, representatives of the company drove them to a since-demolished cheap motel in Scarborough “and they said, ‘Have fun!’ and just left us.”

Hajni called some friends she had known 10 years earlier in Romania, and they fetched the Raducanus and drove them to their home in Hamilton between Upper James and West 5th.

They shared that kind family’s home for a month, and the next-door neighbour was local basketball coach Jim Robinson.

“What are the chances?” Raducanu says, still marvelling at the karma. “So he gave me Coach Walton’s name and said, ‘Call this guy.’”

Coach Walton is Mark Walton, who had turned Cathedral Catholic Secondary School into a provincial powerhouse, coached university ball and eventually built basketball training programs. That phone call to a man who would become his continuous mentor altered Raducanu’s life.

“Coach Walton thought someone was playing a prank on him,” he laughs. “I didn’t speak English and was translating my questions, word for word, from a Romanian-English dictionary, and I was flipping the pages back and forth as I tried to speak.”

Walton told him to show up at Cathedral, and when the lanky 15-year-old arrived, he said, “Holy crap, you are real.”

“I was more excited than nervous because it was a brand-new life. You left the crap behind you and now you’re here to make it. To us this was the land of opportunity and for the last 31 years that’s what it’s been.”

Raducanu’s very first class was English as a Second Language and the second class was gym. He was disoriented by the new surroundings, but fellow student Mike Lawton recognized that he couldn’t understand English, handed him a basketball, pointed to the hoop and mimed the dunking motion.

“I’m in street shoes and the school uniform, jumped up and just hammered it,” Raducanu recalls. “Instant friendship! His mom, Mrs. Lawton, welcomed all of us to her house. She picked us up after school, drove us to school, she took me to Wendy’s and Tim Hortons for the first time. I learned English from that family; I learned habits, how to act, how to wear your shorts halfway down your ass because that was what was cool then.

“I’m forever thankful to the Lawton family and to the Cathedral family. Father Kennedy handed me a $100 bill and he said, ‘Take care of your parents and your sister.’ I had never seen a $100 bill and remember lifting the corner of the carpet in my room and tucking it under and saying to myself that if my parents ever need this I know where to get it. And we did eventually tap into it.”

Raducanu’s mother got a job at the Denninger’s factory and the family eventually moved into an apartment, the two kids sharing the only bedroom and their parents sleeping on a pull-out couch “we found on the street.” Walton gave them plates, silverware, Tupperware and other household items his mother uses to this day.

And Cathedral dominated Ontario collegiate gyms, with a stellar cast that included Walton, future Ticat Dave “Sticky” Stala, and an unmovable low post in Raducanu. Undefeated in 1998, they won the provincial title and were runners-up in 1999 after Raducanu won the opening tipoff, scored, then promptly passed out and couldn’t continue to play. He’d contracted food poisoning from dinner the night before with college recruiter Ganon Baker of Coastal Carolina.

Raducanu was fielding so many NCAA recruiting calls that he had to install a separate phone line in the family home just to deal with them. But he rejected the likes of Duke and Notre Dame to join Baker in Myrtle Beach.

He graduated from Coastal Carolina with degrees in business marketing and business management, then stayed in Carolina selling copying machines, “but it wasn’t my thing.”

So he moved back to Canada, settling in Fort Erie and “of course I called Coach Walton.”

Walton gave him a job for the summer, teaching him how to build decks and fences, while Raducanu in turn built a business website, created business cards and installed email programs for his former coach. He then accepted a full-time job with a heavy construction equipment rental company.

He was a good organizer, had strong eye-to-eye communication skills—he never takes his eyes off you during a conversation—and staff and customers liked him, but the job wasn’t what he wanted to do and he yearned for something else.

Meanwhile, basketball came into play—again—when he joined a group of men’s league hoopsters who turned out to be with Niagara Regional Police Service. They convinced him to go to police college and he became a plain-clothes detective within two years, later being awarded the prestigious Officer of the Year.

“What attracted me to police work was ‘team’; everybody’s there for you and that’s my theme in life,” Raducanu says. “My forte as a cop was always confessions and informants. I was able to build relationships and have rapport with people.

“I was 33 years old and I had finally realized that’s my skill: people, humans, relationships, getting people to understand the task at hand, to understand the reality of life, and building it up for them. It took a long time to discover, but my life had been so fragmented that you don’t really get time to find yourself.”

Through all the changes, Raducanu was connecting sports on a daily basis to whatever he was doing. He was the Police Services rep to a Brock University program, which used sport to help support kids at risk, and through that started individual basketball training with one young athlete. That business quickly bloomed and began attracting an ever-expanding portfolio of clients. Deputy Chief Bob Wright steered him toward a program, which allowed police officers to take a year off without pay to “explore a unique dream.”

So he accepted that year off, rented his own facility, built a holistic gym—ahead of its time in 2012—and with two partners combined basketball skills training, strength and conditioning, athletic development training and advanced mental preparation.

It blossomed to the point that clients were flying in from Europe, and basketball agents were sending promising players to the program.

“Basketball was the engine but I was learning more and more about building a business,” he says. “I had the tools, I had the knowledge, I had the clients. I knew what it took to get somebody better.”

He often hired high-calibre athletes as employees because of their work ethic, ability to park emotions to get the job done and their mutual respect for each other.

That became the basic business model which attracted the attention of the Sports Administration staff across the river at Buffalo’s Canisius University and the program dean suggested he take a Master’s program there, which he did, and by 2013 Raducanu knew he wouldn’t be returning to police work.

He accepted a job as an online adjunct professor at Canisius and was running his own business, which had been erupting in several directions. He and a partner ran an NBA pre-draft program at McMaster, sending players to the Raptors for morning workouts; he was helping create a sports product development program at Canisius, which involved new ventures and global sports; and he joined his longtime mentor Ganon Baker, who had the largest individual basketball skills training business in the world, with clients like LeBron James, Vince Carter and the late Kobe Bryant. It became even bigger with Raducanu’s help as the new CEO, so he and Brittany moved to Baker’s headquarters in Delray Beach, Fla. He also expanded the operations to other continents and developed an online curriculum, which exploded in popularity.

He also had his own consulting projects and still runs skills camps in Europe.

Raducanu is close friends with Mohawk College Athletic Director Matt Ferreira and became the progressive college’s Senior Development Specialist-Athletics, centering on advancing athletic programs through innovative educational practices, strategic fundraising, and community engagement.

He also began coaching the women’s basketball team and took them to their first provincial title in 34 years. He left the development job to accept the newly created HSG Chief of Staff position last month.

“We’ve been looking for a senior executive for some time to play a leading role in transforming our business,” says Scott Mitchell, HSG’s managing partner and CEO. “Using great data, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge innovations to get laser-focused and ensure we make great decisions in delivering to our fans and partners a world-class and meaningful experience. We know our teams have a substantial impact on our community and we also want to ensure we are being incredibly thoughtful about it.

“While we are always committed to our players having great professional experience with our teams, we were also committed to hiring a chief of staff to ensure our employees are having a similar positive working experience in a sector (sports) that can be very demanding of their time and commitment.

“After taking the time to define what the role and responsibilities were, we were incredibly fortunate to have Mihai surface as the slam-dunk best candidate, coming from our own backyard in Hamilton. Perhaps best of all, with his background as an elite athlete, he knows the importance of winning on the field/pitch.”

For his part, Raducanu said, “I was very, very intrigued by this business. Scott and I talked for three-and-a-half hours face-to-face and his eyes never looked away from mine, he was right there and that was huge to me. Just the way he articulated what he needed…it captivated me.

“And he cares so much for Hamilton and for this community.”

As does Raducanu.

“You are always going to react to situations based on your experiences,” he explains. “So my experiences from ages zero to 15 in Romania still influence some of my daily thoughts. But the last 30 years really influence them too.

“The connection I have to this city is out of control and to be able to do this, here in this stadium, is incredible. We are going to be a trailblazer in the CFL. It’s going to be the best sports organization in this country.

“To be able to help the Ticats and the Forge establish themselves as a powerhouse place for true entertainment-fans to gather?

“Are you kidding me?”