Plenty of athletic departments have a strategic plan. Considerably fewer have a strategic habit. The difference tends to reveal itself about eight months after the plan is written, when the document is in a drawer and the department is back to running on the calendar.
A plan produced once is a plan that ages badly
Every athletic program should be planning for the future, but planning treated as an event produces a document that describes a department that no longer exists. Staff turn over, enrollment shifts, facilities change, the competitive landscape moves. A plan written for last year's reality quietly stops being true, and nobody notices because nobody is looking at it.
Strategy works when it is a consistent part of how a department operates: evaluating regularly, gathering feedback, and staying genuinely engaged with your staff, your teams, and your culture.
What a strategic habit gives you
Focus, first. A department with a live strategy can say no to the good ideas that are not this year's ideas, which is most of the job. Then collective movement, because a plan everyone can see is a plan everyone can pull toward. Then improvement you can actually observe, because you set out to make it and wrote down what it would look like.
Lead it or have it led
Some departments have the internal capacity to run their own planning process and simply need a partner to pressure-test the thinking. Others need someone to lead the process outright, because the people who would run it are the same people the process needs to examine.
Either is fine. What does not work is the third option: intending to plan, every year, and never quite getting to it. Growing, leading, and innovating are not things that happen to a program. They are things a program schedules.