The NHL season only runs from October to June, but for Ken Zaba it’s always hockey season—and it happens to always be lacrosse and football season, too.
As the vice president of finance and administration for the Calgary Sports & Entertainment Corporation (CSEC), Zaba leads the finance department year-round for not only the Calgary Flames but four other teams and their affiliated charitable foundations. He’s a finance-minded individual through and through who grew up sleeping with a piggybank literally in his arms, but after stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Petro-Canada, and Suncor Energy, his other childhood passion—sports—remained untapped. He parlayed his zeal into his current position at the CSEC, and now he’s building the organization’s finance team back to full strength.
“I’ve always had this mind-set that you could marry personal interest with your education,” Zaba says. “I refused to give in to the notion that work has to be work.” He first got serious about pairing his two passions in 2010, when the wife of one of his former colleagues took seriously ill. She was about the same age as Zaba. “It was time to get after it,” he says. “Life can be short, and that could just as easily be me.”