Katie Sadleir: Changing rugby governance overnight
Katie: I was born in Scotland. My father was from Perth, Western Australia and my mother was from Glasgow, so yes, I lived in Aberdeen until I was two and then moved from Scotland to Vancouver where my dad was a university lecturer and my mother was a nurse and I was there in Canada until I was 15. And then at 15 I went down to New Zealand and I have lived in New Zealand all the way through until I took up this job at World Rugby in 2017. But it’s a little bit more complicated in that my grandfather who lived in Australia was born in South Africa – so South African heritage – and my great, great grandfather came from Tipperary in Ireland so when I went to the World Cup in Japan, for rugby, for the men’s World Cup last year, I kind of had 6 countries covered! One of them was going to win! And clearly the South Africans did!
SA: I love that! And what were your earliest memories of sport as a girl growing up in Vancouver?
Katie: Well I was very involved in aquatic sports and in Vancouver I sort of started out as a competitive swimmer and then at quite a young age I started, I got involved in synchronised swimming. It was kind of when you are involved in swimming and aquatic sports, really high time demanding so by the time I was 13, I was doing sort of 35 hours a week of training. So it became more than a sport, it became almost like an occupation. But I loved it and obviously Canada is a country, like all the countries that I’ve lived in, that is a very active nation, so there was lots of women role models around, in terms of both in the aquatic world but also in sport, full stop.
SA: And how did you discover synchronised swimming? You did it with your sister, I believe.
Katie: I did. I was kind of one of those, in that in between of a sporty girl and an arty girl so I also did dance as well. I did ballet until I was on point and I did a lot of drama and singing and the whole kind of musical theatre stuff. And maybe that was the link with synchronised swimming but I started off – my parents really believed that everyone should swim – a younger brother and an older sister, we were definitely in the pool for a lot of our younger lives and then my sister started first of all. She got involved in synchronised swimming and I used to think, this doesn’t seem to be very fair, I was being left behind with my dad and my brother and my sister was taking off around Canada, competing in different competitions, so I joined actually following her. She wasn’t my duet partner when I was in Canada, I was kind of part of a wider team that she was a member of but when I moved to New Zealand and she followed, we ended up competing for New Zealand at the Olympics in 1984.
SA: And people can be a little judgy I think about synchro in terms of the smiles and the costumes and so on but it’s a tough old sport isn’t it?
Katie: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of funny like in the ’84 Olympics, I think there was a research study that was done, looking at athletes and who were the most physically fit all round. And if you think of a sport like synchronised swimming, you had to have the flexibility of a gymnast in terms of being, not having the weight-bearing ability to do splits and upside down, you had to be as fit if not more than as a competitive swimmer cos you did all the competitive training and then you had to hold your breath at the same time! I was never really into the smiley sequence bit of the sport. It was just a bit too painful for me. But I really enjoyed the whole kind of physical fitness aspect of it and the entertainment aspect.
SA: And you mentioned moving to New Zealand. So was that tough to be uprooted as a teenager?
[0:03:44]
Katie Yeah, it was my last year of high school, but I was always a kind of, with having parents and family that were all around the world you were always a bit of an adventurist. I mean I always talk about this job that I’m in now as my big girl’s adventure. So from that perspective, I liked to go different places and I always sort of knew that if I didn’t like it, I could come back. My sister didn’t come to New Zealand initially. She stayed and she was, she moved to Calgary and swam for another year so didn’t come down for another couple of years.
So I went down with my parents and then I did decide, I thought, my gosh, my friends were so important back then, I did go back and I did my first year of university at UBC in Vancouver and played water polo. That’s where I picked up the love of water polo and played water polo across Canada and down the Canadian-American side and then I played it when I got back to New Zealand as well. But after being away for a year, I kind of realised, particularly I think it was at Christmas time that home is where your mum and dad are. So I did move back down to New Zealand and my sister followed. And so then we continued on with our sporting career down there.
SA: And how easy was it to find a new club and a synchronised coach there, ‘cos you went to a very high level then?
Katie: Yeah, it was not that easy because it wasn’t a very big sport in New Zealand at all. Swimming has had a huge track record in New Zealand but synchronised swimming, there was kind of small fledgling groups. So you ended up being the administrator, the competitor, self-coaching, sometimes judging. So I guess one of the things that I did early on was try and grow the sport in the country. And that kind of led to me making sport, I guess a bit of a career, in that I got involved in administration as soon as I finished competing, really, really young.
I was on the board in New Zealand, and the same in Ireland and probably in the UK as well, you have an aquatic federation that looks after all the aquatic disciplines – so water polo, synchronised swimming, diving, master swimming, open-water swimming and competitive swimming. So at a very, very young age I was on the board of New Zealand Swimming and it’s kind of ironic as of two months ago, I accepted a position as a director on Swim Ireland. It was kind of my first board at 23/24 and I’m 55, so I am back on the board of swimming!
SA: To take you a little back I guess to your time of competing. So when did you realise that you had that talent to compete at a world stage, do you think?
Katie: I think that synchronised swimming in Canada at the time, when I was kind of 14 and 15, it was definitely one of the top Olympic sports for the country so they were always in the top 3, if not, there was rivalry between the Americans, the Canadians and the Japanese back then for the top 3 medal potential. And before I left and went to New Zealand, Canada didn’t have a centralised programme, they basically picked club teams that did well at the National Championships to represent themselves.
So I’d actually represented Canada the year before I moved to New Zealand. I was chosen in the team that came and swam in two or three competitions in Switzerland and in Belgium. That really gave me a bit of a taste to international sport. It was great, it’s a team sport so synchronised swimming, at that stage I was really much more into the 8 girls in the water kind of exercise as opposed to doing it only on your own or with a wet partner. And I kind of saw, I had a summer of spending time in swimming pools around Europe and competing in some really interesting competitions and doing quite well. And I said, do you know what, I think this is something that I should keep going at? So when I moved to New Zealand I just kept going and I guess I’m a little bit novel because the programme wasn’t really big there but quickly with competitions and spending quite a bit of time in Australia I realised that we could do quite well. So I ended up getting a medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1986 in Scotland, which was pretty cool, and didn’t do badly at the Worlds and at the Olympic Games as well.
SA: I love the way you say, yeah, just the medal at the Commonwealth Games. You mentioned there that you obviously were on the board of Aquatics New Zealand.
Katie: Yeah, Swim New Zealand, it was called Swim New Zealand.
SA: And what was the makeup of the board when you came onto it at the time?
Katie: There was me and I guess, I’m just thinking, involvement in aquatic disciplines and 7 men! And I was young. It’s kind of funny, people have asked me that question. What was it like being the only woman on a board at a really young age? I was so much younger than the rest of the people in the board, so yes I was a young female, but I was also young in terms of the life experiences of some of the people that were on that board. So that was kind of interesting. But I had a different background and I think that swimming is a very traditional sport and it still is in many ways in terms of officialdom and it can be quite strict, it has quite a lot of culture associated with what you can and cannot do in that aquatic world.
So I was kind of a bit of a rebel I have to say, sort of coming into a board at a young age where I was kind of far more casual in my approach to senior administration. And I remember I gave the guys a bit of a hard time and they put up with me because maybe I was a little bit unique in that we would turn up at meetings in Wellington in board rooms at Swimming New Zealand’s offices and there would literally be no windows or anything like that. It was a Sunday afternoon, you were really there by yourself and they world all kind of march up there in their blazers and their suits and their pins in their ties. And I would kind of rock up there in my tracksuit!
A. there wasn’t a suit and a tie for me at that stage, I’m 55, so we’re talking back a few haircuts, but also I just couldn’t see the point! So that whole kind of tradition, although you respect that, I know for some people that type of thing is really important in terms of officialdom. But to me it was really, I could imagine that if you weren’t very confident you could find that whole kind of thing rather intimidating in terms of walking into a room with a bunch of reasonably elderly men in suits.
SA: Is there anything you would do differently if you know what you know now, going back to that time?
Katie: I think that, probably, and it’s even not so much back that time, it’s when I reflected very much on my career. I am in this role now where my title is General Manager Women’s Rugby for World Rugby, and it’s the first time, although I am a woman and I have worked in sport for years and years and years, it’s the first time I’ve had a title called ‘women’s’ sport person. And I think in hindsight when I look at my career, particularly in that early age, you were just going for it. You just went ahead and you did everything you could, and perhaps I could have done more to bring more women with me at an earlier stage. I didn’t really think of myself as, I am a woman in an administration position and that I should do more to create more roles for more women.
[0:10:56]
I was just really flying by the seat of my pants, trying to be as professional and get things – I’ve always been someone who works at pace - so it was very much about moving as quickly as possible to cementing the next stage for the future for the sport. But I wasn’t really thinking so much about gender back then. And now in hindsight probably I would. And when I look at the work that I do now with women around the world and some of the barriers for them and the challenges for them, and the opportunities that perhaps in hindsight if I had, if I had the wisdom I have now as a 24 year old, I might have done some things differently.
SA: We all might be doing different things or is that me? You led the establishment of the New Zealand Academy of Sport in the late ‘90s and helped take a country with a population of just 4 million, from 4 Olympic medals at Sydney to 18 at Rio. So what do you feel changed about sport in New Zealand while you were in that role?
Katie: Well, that was one of the most amazing opportunities. If you think about your career and you think of some of the really good projects that you’ve been involved in and that was quite a big project. I guess that basically what happened was, Sydney had been awarded the Olympic Games – and back then, we didn’t really have a high-performance system. We had kind of grant programme where athletes who had talent were given sort of individual grants but there wasn’t like a systematic way of developing talent in the country. So, Sydney got the Olympics, the Prime Minister set up a task force to capitalise on the Sydney Olympics which was made up of business in sport and I was given the task of being the secretariat for that to drive, how did we actually turn that into our home Games for us, for a country that was never going to host an Olympic Games?
After that piece of work, in which I was looking at the economic development aspects and how we could actually commercialise, become a host city venue, we realised that we needed to do something on field and I had been an elite athlete and I was just in the right place where the Government said, we need someone to have a look at what good practice is round the world. And I was given this task of visiting high-performance systems, right around the globe – ones that we felt we could compete with, others that we really just were interested in seeing how they had fast-tracked their system. Yo come back and create something that was – not copying – but was cognoscente of good practice and created something that was quite unique for New Zealand. So I came back, I wrote a report.
I brought the sport sector with me in terms of understanding that if we really really felt that we wanted to play with the big countries, and sport was so much part of our culture in New Zealand, that we had to change, dramatically change and work differently. Because I also sort of knew, the report sort of said, we can’t compete on dollars in terms of the investment and we certainly couldn’t compete on numbers, we’re a small nation. So we had to think differently and we had to sort of capitalise on things that we could do. Like being quick and nimble and be able to respond and adjust quickly to opportunities and situations and we needed to quickly adapt to where was good practice, and how could we utilise that? And the country that I guess that we learned most from and that I brought in to the system when I came back was Norway. I spent quite a bit of time in Oslo having a look at their Olympic Training Centre and seeing how a country of that size, similar, could do so well particularly at the Winter Olympics but also in some significant major sports.
[0:14:20]
So, came back with a bit of a vision, an unwritten vision to be the Norway of the southern hemisphere and see how we could really turn this around. We always had our big brother, big sister next to us – Australia, and in Australia, sport was just pumping out medals - so we kind of adopted – well we didn’t kind of adopt – we did two or three things. First of all we became very, very targeted. We worked out what were the sports that we could really excel in? And, unashamedly went through a targeting exercise saying that we could not be world champions in everything. We needed to pick a small group of sports and really, really focus on making them world class.
And when they became world class then the business case would expand actually increasing more money into other sports. So that was part of it and we picked eight to start with. And the next part of it was, what do you wrap around, what’s the kind of infrastructure that you need in terms of support for those programmes in terms of creating proper daily training environments and proper applied services to really take it that next level? So sort of did kind of two things. Brought in expertise from outside and created a structure that the sports could flourish in and then really homed in on the sports we would do. And then the other thing is, which I really learned from Norway is, and I think it’s still quite unique in New Zealand, although I worked in high performance sport for a long period of time and things have adjusted but we really, we picked up the concept of Norway that we needed to be one team.
That we could not afford to not capitalise on the knowledge that existed in all our sports and work together as one team. And so when you think about the New Zealand high performance system now, we develop our coaches as together in terms of joint professional development, our performance directives in terms of joint professional development, we share constantly in terms of knowledge transfer - in our pre-briefs and our debriefs and where we are travelling and not travelling. So it is definitely a one-team culture as opposed to a whole bunch of sports doing their own thing.
SA: There’s been a lot more in the media recently about how the ambition of medals has negatively impacted the wellbeing of athletes. I’m thinking especially in sports like gymnastics and swimming and athletics. Does that surprise you to see that recently?
Katie: Well, I think some of the stories that have come out recently in terms of, particularly in the gymnastics and looking at the athlete A, which I’m sure everyone has had a look at, are just horrific. Does it surprise me? You know, people are driven by certain things and certain nations are driven more by certain things. When I think of New Zealand, we definitely are a country that puts a balanced approach to performance and participation. And that has always been really, really important, although I was an elite athlete, I had a daughter that participated in lots of different sports and participation and active recreation is very much a part of the New Zealand culture.
And so whilst we do have a pointy end in terms of high performance, there is a huge investment in participation in getting people just active and I think that is as important as the high end and hopefully the two can mutually drive each other. So it’s not about performance for performance sake only, it’s about performance because it drives things that are about social change in countries.
[0:17:41]
Growing participation, growing national pride, creating that social cohesion which is why it’s so important right now. And if you think about the countries around the world and most of them have done this now where the government, New Zealand Government’s done that, and Ireland here has done it. I know in the UK where they’ve got pretty significant packages about getting sport back up and moving quickly is important because sport in a crisis can be the most important and the least important thing. Obviously ? the most important thing.
SA: You talk about the pointy edge of sport. Do you feel that having more female coaches at that pointy end might perhaps have prevented or changed a lot of those issues that we are seeing now in terms of the negative side of sport?
Katie: Well there’s a lot of women gymnastic coaches. I don’t know, I’ll be honest and sort say I don’t know, but I do know that we have to do more for women. We need to have more women role models and leaders in both coaching and non-coaching positions and it is certainly been something that we have been focusing on significantly in terms of World Rugby. Working very, very closely with a wonderful woman from the UK called Carol Isherwood who’s one of our World Rugby hall-of-famers and she has been working very closely with us to drive a huge transformation in terms of getting more women involved in high performance coaching.
But we also need to be quite careful that some of the data and the stuff that talks about women coaches, talk about, particularly at a club and at junior level, talk about one of the reasons they are really good is because they have that kind of mothering instinct. That’s not what we’re about right now. They are also bright coaches. So capitalising and creating opportunities for women who are exceptional leaders in coaching perspective will drive a different group of more women coming through into coaching so we will see some changes.
SA: You were awarded a life-time achievement award from Sport New Zealand in 2016 I believe. Was there a part of you at the time that thought you might then take a different career path in terms of sport?
Katie: Yeah, well I actually had, I mean it was kind of one of those bizarre events. I worked in sport for a very very long time and I’m still working in sport, it’s kind of funny. But I went through a variety of organisations. So starting off with the Hillary Commission, named after Sir Edmund Hillary where I was kind of more into the volunteer, sport, national governing body capability improvement, grassroots stuff, then I went to work for the Sports Foundation which was kind of that organisation that just picked up grants. Then they created this new organisation called, Spark – Sport and Recreation New Zealand – and then I worked for Sport New Zealand and High-Performance Sport New Zealand.
So 5 sort of different crown entities along a kind of pathway. But got to the age of 40 and thought, oh my gosh, I need to apply for a job! And I sat and I talked to a bunch of people that were on boards that I had to report to, to get some feedback about who I was and what I was and what they saw the strengths were. And they all advised me, I need you to step out and do some really good jobs in other sectors for a period of time and then step back in if I wanted to. And so that’s what I did, so at the time when I won that award, I was not working in sport, I was doing some things that were completely different which were definitely stretching me from a challenge perspective.
[0:20:55]
And I was invited back for this dinner where I just thought I was going along to another sports dinner and then all of a sudden, there one of my mentors was practically reading my eulogy and I thought, oh my gosh! This is me they’re talking about! And I was only 50 at the time and I kind of thought, wow, who gets this at this age? This is kind of bizarre and it did make me think when I was listening to the things that I had had the privilege of being associated with during my sporting career that I would love to get back into that which is why that’s kind of spring-boarded me into this current role.
SA: And why did you take this role?
Katie: Well, I mean, literally I went home from this dinner and I was just reflecting on all these people giving me hugs and handshakes and all this kind of stuff and then one of those very special moments and it just made me realise that I wasn’t finished. I love sport, I love the power of sport to change people’s lives and one of the things that I hadn’t been able to do as much of was to use sport as a social change agent. So I kind of in my mind thought that at some stage I’d love to be working in an international organisation that did use sport for sport development and literally 2 weeks after the awards I thought, I’ve got to look out for things.
This job came up and it came across my desk and someone said, you should put your name in the hat for that. And I went and I spoke to one of my very close friends who was the Chief Executive of New Zealand Rugby at the time, Steve Chu, and I said, what do you reckon? He wasn’t really encouraging me to take the job! I don’t know, it’s kind of a big thing at 50 moving to the other side of the world but nothing ventured nothing gained. I was looking at what was going on. It was a very long robust recruitment process but I just saw my potential and I saw some of the things that were happening around the globe in terms of women’s rugby and yet it is such a powerful and empowering sport for women and I just thought, look, if I can get this job, I want this job and I really, really believe that I could do some really good things.
SA: And is it a new role?
Katie: Total new role. There was a wonderful woman who’s actually on World Rugby’s council right now, called Su Carty, she was a Development Manager, working at World Rugby and she had left, she had been gone for about 12 months before they advertised this role. And I think that World Rugby turned around and realised it had been such a success at the Olympics in Rio and the numbers were growing. So I know most, I spent a lot of time with other international federations and people from international organisations and we all say we are the fastest growing women in sport.
But we were very fast and are, 28% increase in numbers, year on year. And in countries that you just wouldn’t expect would be involved in such a physically demanding sport because of some of the challenges that exist there for women. So yes, I thought, they created this position. It was quite unique, I’ve kind of gone about it a little bit differently than some of my colleagues in terms of the approach to change and transformation, but we are really making a difference and I am really excited about what’s happened so far.
[0:24:03]
SA: And I want to come on to talk to you about activity on the ground but just talking governance initially. When you joined, is it true that people told you there was no way at the time that World Rugby would have women on its council?
Katie: As it was. I remember there was an article that was written by a very famous American coach, coaching women’s rugby, and I think she had just done a report to rugby’s ? It’s got 6 regional associations and I was reading this and basically she was making a comment about how we would never see the change. And I’ve never played rugby. I come from New Zealand, I was married to a half-back who played in Wellington a long time ago, so I knew a lot about rugby and I had a lot of friends that were associated with the New Zealand Rugby Union and I came from New Zealand. So it’s part of what you do down there.
But coming to an organisation that had 27% of its population more women playing around the world, and we were governed by a board of 30 men – you do sit there and think – hmm, okay, there’s some big changes that have to be made around here! But full credit, I know that’s a kind of rugby saying, full credit to what I call my ‘manbassadors’ that are all around the globe now, they kind of realised that you can’t say that you want to be world leading in sport and not be committed to international best practice. And so one of the things that needed to be changed and needs to continue to be changed – and we are still on transformation – I think over the next 6 months you will see some even better changes that are going to come out of World Rugby but we needed to do something significant and impactful really early on if we were going to drive the transformation that needed to happen around the globe.
My first year was about developing a global plan, listening to people around the world to work out what were the key drivers that we needed to put in place to accelerate the global development of women in rugby, to create women’s rugby and girls’ rugby be normal, and one of the big big pillars of that was leadership change. And on the day that they signed off on the 8-year strategy we changed the governance structure of world rugby and brought on 17 women directors. So from zero to 36% just like that. And so when people say things like that can’t happen, they certainly can happen. And we are doing the same in coaching. I think that we did quite a big piece of work just to kind of understand what was going on in coaching ‘cos in that leadership workstream it’s not just about administrators and senior managers, it also must be coaching and we realised that we were so far behind the 8 ball in terms of, I think we did a review of the top 16 women’s Sevens and 15 teams.
There was only one country in the world back in 2017 that had a woman as a head coach and there was only four countries that had women involved in coaching teams. So we knew we needed to do some dramatic change and we kind of signed off on a really holistic suite of recommendations which we are implementing with vim and vigour which are about changing the look and feel of coaching, not just having women coaching women. It’s about having diversity in coaching teams. So there’s been some, we’re about to announce something that is really quite big in terms of deployment opportunities for women coaches globally, but we are absolutely driving a change on the field as well.
SA: Excellent. That’s fantastic to hear. And I guess on a slightly more negative point, I think it was Ali Dunley that pointed out there were more reps/refs than women on the 12-strong board of World Rugby this year for the second successive term. So does that clearly that does frustrate you there when you see so much good work happening elsewhere in terms of governance.
[027:31]
Katie: Yes, but and I put that with a big but, that was a catalyst for change. And this isn’t, not an overnight thing, although the first was overnight. One of the big things that came out of the selection was a strong commitment by the current chairman to relook at the governance structure of World Rugby. And so, yes, our first change was, bring on 17 women onto council, and that is the highest decision-making body. Exco is a subset of that and so that is the biggest decision-making. And then the next thing was once every four years, which is now the election, we need to look at re-populating all our sub-committees to make sure that they reflect gender balance and diversity inclusion.
So that is happening now, and then on top of that, the commitment that Bill made at that time - I mean, he was one of the first people to say, that’s not good enough - was that we are currently doing a governance review which has commenced and it will take place over the next 3-4 months and diversity and inclusion on all committees, and Exco is a key component of that. So you will see some changes.
SA: Watch this space.
Katie: Watch this space and that will be this year, so I think there’s some really big announcements that are coming up in rugby this year. We know that next year is incredibly big for us. I talk quite often but I think we are probably the only sport that’s got an Olympic Games and a World Cup for women in the same year. Very, very unique and we are going to capitalise on that to the max, but we are rapidly trying to knock off those issues that are still irritating for a lot of people – men and women – in terms of creating good practice on boards.
SA: Good news. Going back then to the piece you talked about being so passionate about in terms of sport for social change. Why do you feel that rugby is so powerful in terms of changing lives for women and girls?
Katie: Clearly, I know that you are a passionate rugby follower, I have come across you at several of the events. It’s such, there’s so many things about the sport. Firstly, the values of rugby. We talk about it as being a sport that builds character as kind of a sub-line. And that’s really, really true. I mean, when you think about the team aspect of rugby and the whole kind of all shapes and sizes, the way that it embraces all different cultures and how strong we are when it comes to stamping out things that don’t fit and that are not aligned to those kind of values. So that’s kind of really important. The physical nature of it, the presence of some of these women and you don’t have to be large to have that strong presence.
You know when I watched some of the teams in Malaysia or in India, we are talking about some pretty small girls but in New Zealand we would talk about it being their ‘mana’, the way that they have that kind of self-belief and control is just incredibly impressive. When we launched the plan in 2017, I went, and we launched it in Dubai at the under-17 Asia girls’ Sevens tournament and I think there was 16 countries from around Asia, incredibly colourful gear that they were wearing. In the full hijab outfits in multi-colours and I was watching these girls from places like Pakistan and Vietnam and Lou and you look at them and you realise that what you are developing here is incredibly powerfully strong women with great support networks within their country and globally. I mean, you are part of a global family when you play rugby.
[0:31:05]
We launched a campaign last year which we’re starting phase two of right now, called, Try and Stop Us. Start Rugby Become Unstoppable and it was, particularly picked out some of the places where we know that women have challenges and used women who had excelled through rugby to become inspiration role models that are driving significant social change in those countries. I mean Nahid who is one of the women in our Unstoppable campaign, she is the coach development manager from Iran. And Iran went from three-and-a-half thousand women participating in rugby, pre our Try and Stop Us campaign, to well over 10,000 in just that period of time.
And you know, it’s just fantastic when I look at the photos that get sent from countries like Iran or from Pakistan or from Syria or from Uganda and you look at these women playing and you know how physically challenging it is. It just makes you able to stand up for anything on the field and off the field.
SA: Is that the bit that excites you most? It sounds like it is in terms of the changing lives through the sport?
Katie: Absolutely. I am very fortunate in that my background is high performance and I can say I’ve been to 9 Olympic and Commonwealth Games and so many World Championships and you get a buzz out of sort of sitting there – particularly when your country’s doing really well. I always remember being in Athens at the Olympics with the Minister and being at the end of the triathlon and we got gold and silver at the men’s event, and that was just like blow your mind away. Those are really exciting moments and they are fun and they create inspiration for others but I think what I have really got an amazing gratification from in this job, has been how appreciative women around the world have been how appreciative women round the world have been.
We’ve invested heavily in leadership and I know that you invest in a leader then that woman changes the lives of others and then that woman changes the lives of others and then that woman changes the lives of others. And so if I can do more to support women who have potential and want to lead, then that is just such a gift and you don’t get jobs like this very often, to be in that kind of privileged … and sometimes as with all sports jobs you can come home and you can think about the politics and think, how am I going to get that over the line? And then whenever that happens I seem to get a text from someone – one of these wonderful women that I have maybe just done something very simple for, and they just say such wonderful things to you - it does wonderful things for your ego. But you just know that it’s so sincere, that their lives are different and that they are doing different things because you’ve been able to convince others to create opportunities for them and wow, that’s incredibly powerful.
SA: You mentioned the Try and Stop Us campaign which I loved. What is the next phase or can you give us a sort of hint of what’s coming?
Katie: Yeah it’s a three year campaign. So what we’ve rolled out now, so we start off globally, where we identified to try and make sure we had a group of 15 Unstoppables that represented the world in terms of diversity and inclusion and shapes and sizes and roles and amazing stories.
[0:34:16]
We have now moved into working with unions and regions to identify their own Unstoppables. So what we’ve done is we’ve created a series of on-line assets where unions can identify their own team and do their own social media and have their own local heroes. And that will roll out all the way through ongoing, because it actually helps, particularly in – although it’s been great – some of the major unions are really on board with it as well but what we were trying to do was to create marketing opportunities for unions that didn’t have access to that, to use that kind of campaign to drive participation, profile and investment.
And the next phase which is something that we are working on now which we will launch in 2021 is looking at that special year called The Golden Year of Women’s Rugby with the Olympics and the World Cup, how we then go and link the Unstoppables, probably at a younger age through to connecting the world to the World Cup in New Zealand and then taking the World Cup back to the world. So it’ll become a mixture of huge impressive events that will take place, linked to really cool young girls around the world that are doing some pretty amazing things. So yeah, watch this space, it’s going to be exciting.
SA: You made some very disruptive decisions about branding major championships last year. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Katie: Yeah. Ultimately we have a women’s advisory committee that reports into the rugby committee at World Rugby and it’s a really great committee. It’s one of the things that we get assessed by the IOC on an annual basis, every IF does, in terms of its commitment to the gender equity objectives of the IOC. And our women’s advisory committee is 50% men, 50% women, and it has been chaired for the last period of time by two really impressive men. Firstly it was the Chief Executive of Australian Rugby, Bill Pulver, and he had some really big things he wanted to drive in terms of gender change and diversity on boards with Sir Bill Beaumont.
And now I am working with a very passionate, the Vice-President of France, Serge Simon who is really into driving profile competition kind of changes. So, but ultimately one of the key themes that we’re trying to do in terms of what the change state is, is to normalise women’s involvement in rugby and so that when you think of it as a sport, it’s just automatically it’s not a sport that’s played by men - and oh yeah, sometimes women play that as well - it gets to the stage where it is like an aquatics or cycling and you think about it and it’s just a sport.
So there was things that we needed to do along the way. One was to change the look and feel of the game and how we actually portray it. So we’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at our social media channels, the kind of things that we pump out. Are they resources that are full of boys or are they reflective of the fact that it’s gender neutral? So we’ve done a lot of work on content in terms of getting more women profiles and women’s stories across the thing. But the same thing needed to happen about the competitions is that we came to the conclusion, we sort of saw what cricket had done initially. Cricket turned around at their last cycle of world championships where they decided they would add men’s into their World Cup title, so they’ve got a women’s Cricket World Cup and they have a Men’s Cricket World Cup. And we looked at that and we sort of said that, rightly or wrongly there was probably a perception that the Men’s World Cup is the most important, in terms of our pinnacle events and the Women’s World Cup was second.
[0:37:45]
And one of the reasons people would think that, I mean, you recognise in terms of generating economic return for the game right now and for the foreseeable future, although we are trying to do something different in the commercial space, the women’s game is absolutely reliant on the men’s game. But the men’s game is reliant on the women’s game for other things as well. So we know that that is a huge driver of economic value but when you think about the event itself and the players that participate and aim for World Cup glory, that there should be no difference. So what we did was we dropped the gender from our t? so we now have got 3 World Cups. We’ve got one that’s played by men, one that’s played by women and one that’s played by men and women, that’s the Sevens, and then we have the Olympic Games which is played by men and women. We don’t have a World Cup and a Women’s World Cup.
Now I know that some people might think that that’s semantics but it was something that we consulted with our sponsors about and we felt very strongly that that was about levelling the field in terms of not having one event more important than the other in terms of how we portray them. So they are both pinnacle events and they are equal in terms of what we’re trying to achieve from a player development perspective.
SA: So talking again about the World Cup in New Zealand next year, can you tell us a little bit about what will be different there perhaps than ones that have gone before?
Katie: Every time, as with most international federations and national federations, every time you run a pinnacle event you do quite a significant debrief and that happened after, I’d arrived just before Ireland hosted the World Cup in 2017 and it was amazing. It was my first World Cup that I had been to, played by women. So we did a significant review and listened to the coaches and the players about things that needed to be changed, particularly looking at player welfare. So the tournament is quite a bit longer, it’s an extra 10 days and that was because we needed to create more rest days in between the periods. We also increased the size of the squads so that there was more ability for reserves. We introduced a quarter-final so that created more excitement at the back end of the tournament. But also one of the changes that we have done is that in creating a longer tournament, it does have that knockout ability whereas up until 2017, the women stayed right through till the end. But now when you’re not in the end, you’re not in the end!
I guess it’s not paid for anymore by the host organising committee so there might be some people that stay because they’re passionate about rugby but it’s not part of the Test. So we did a variety of things. Going forward, clearly one of the things with the name change, we are looking at really doing much, much more in terms of an engagement and how we make the tournament ‘as live’ aspect because we are in the southern hemisphere. It’s the first time the World Cup’s been down in the southern hemisphere. It will create some challenges in terms of UK and northern hemisphere passionate fans that might not be able to get down there so we are investing in quite a lot more technology in terms of the ‘at live’ competition being really, really impressive.
So the whole kind of marketing aspect of it that we are working on now. And then, New Zealand does great events. Right now very very privileged and they’ve got the World Cup in cricket. They’ve got the World Cup in rugby. They are co-hosting the football World Cup. So it does do events very, very well and I know that the New Zealand rugby union is absolutely pulling out all stops to make sure that this is the best World Cup for women so far.
0:41:26]
SA: And you allude a little bit in terms of sponsorship and the commercial side of women’s sport and I think Women’s/World Rugby’s approached that a little bit differently. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that – differently in terms of other federations?
Katie: In terms of other international federations and kind of following some of the regional and local federations, particularly in football. The work that UEFA has done and that the FA has done in England has been a bit of an inspiration in terms of what we’re doing. When we signed up on the strategy, for global development of women’s rugby, it’s got 5 colours. Grow participation, create amazing international competitions, leadership, leadership, leadership. Profile with impact and the last bit was about diversified investments underpinning the game. And that to me was really really important in looking at two aspects.
One was growing the percentages of internal world rugby pie that was invested into women’s rugby but it was also about growing the pie. So it needed to be both. If all we were doing was kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul, then we weren’t actually getting significant gains in terms of standing on our feet saying women’s sport is important. So in that work stream we are doing four things. We developed a separate commercial strategy. We’re looking at philanthropy, we’re looking at 4-purpose funding and we’re looking at capability build. But the commercial stream was the first off the rank and we made the call. We did an analysis of what was going on in the unions around the world to see where they were at with their own commercial strategies and we decided to unbundle the commercial rights for women and men.
By that, what I mean is that most international federations as we did, when they sell the rights for their men’s World Cup, they also throw in the rights for the women’s World Cup and some of the other events as well. That’s where we were at. And it’s not saying in any way that the sponsors that were, that had been given the women’s rights weren’t necessarily passionate about women’s rugby, but what wasn’t happening was the internal cashflow didn’t materialise and also we weren’t seeing the activation to the same extent.
And so we decided that women’s rugby, we should be aiming to get a separate commercial programme for women’s rugby and we are currently in the market looking for 6 global partners for Women’s Rugby over the next 6 years, sort of picking up this World Cup and the next World Cup and all the other things that we’re doing, associated with the IP. We went to market after the World Cup. Clearly we have covid at the moment so it’s been a bit more challenging than we had anticipated but we believe that we’re doing the right thing and we’re having some interesting conversations with partners. Everyone is kind of just seeing how things kind of fallout, but I am very hopeful that within the next three months we might be in a situation to announce something that could be quite spectacular.
SA: Excellent. I get a bit passionate about it, as you say. But I think it’s such an exciting time and for Women’s Rugby because it has so many traits and elements that perhaps, other men’s sports certainly, but other women’s sport doesn’t have too. Good luck to you. We look forward to hearing more! We saw some headlines last week that World Rugby could ban transgender women over safety issues. I just wondered what the process was in terms of, and timeline, for making any decisions like that on a global scale?
[0:44:35]
Katie: Yeah, I guess the first thing to say is that we’re in a consultation mode at the moment. I mean World Rugby doesn’t just make calls without consulting its members and this is an incredibly tricky and difficult, a challenge for any sport to address. I was part of the review group. The review group was chaired by an amazing woman who is one of our executive leadership scholarships for our pipeline programme called Dr Roo Chintoh who is on the board of Rugby Canada and a practising sports psychologist, sorry, psychiatrist, not sport. So she chaired that group.
The group was made up of a really good mixture of players, representatives, myself, scientists, legal experts who have played, and our task was to review what our current policy was and to decide whether or not it was fit for purpose. Because there were certain questions that were being raised, that were coming to us where some of those challenges were put before us. So I mean as with any kind of policy, it is something that you do and you take very seriously. The process that we went through was a. to make sure we had a diverse kind of review panel that was looking at the issue from all different perspectives. And we then had a really inciteful 2-day forum, where a whole series of groups that were representative of legal , social, ethical, players, medical, came together and we invited people to submit papers and discussions on things that we should consider when we were looking at what should we do in terms of creating a fit for purpose.
And it kind of pointed out a few things. I guess one of the things was there was question marks about the policy that the IOC had had in terms of, particularly in terms of how it applied for rugby, and it would have been professionally inept of us to just pretend that that didn’t exist. So, from that perspective, the real challenge when you looked at all the research that was put in front of that group was that we are a sport that prides itself on inclusivity and diversity and inclusion is really really important.
But we also put player welfare as our number one priority and there were challenges that were coming from the wider community about whether or not this was fair. And so I think the thing is that World Rugby is committed to making sure that it remains itself an inclusive sport. It may very well be that we need to just think about that happens in a different way but there has been no decisions made at this stage and it’s kind of interesting – I know that there has been some absolutely passionate women players that have come back and said that they think this is atrocious that we are looking at this - I think it would be very, like I say, professionally irresponsible for us to not look at it.
Because there has been many players who said that we need to and so you’re kind of balancing both sides when you are an international federation but what I can say is that if we go down that path it’s not a decision that we make lightly. It’s a decision that we make in the full understanding is that you are never going to be popular and that we need to do it with the best information we can and support the widest population that we can. So it’s something that we are looking at very, very seriously and it’s out right now with our members for consultation.
SA: Fantastic. And finally for you, as an individual Katie, what would you say your personal goals are for the future?
[0:48:11]
Katie: Wow! That’s a big one. You know, it’s interesting. Covid has given me a lot of opportunity. It’s kind of funny, I do a family quiz, I am in Ireland by myself so I left my family behind. Saying that, I wasn’t married but my 25 year old daughter. Everyone laughs because here is the mother, the 55-year old off on the big girl’s adventure and the 25-year old is back working hard on her career - Abby down in New Zealand. But we do do a family quiz every fortnight. It was my time to do it this time and that was one of the kind of questions.
Because you sit there and you think about what am I doing? And one of the questions was, what was I doing last year versus this year? Last year I visited 19 countries around the world. It was an incredibly amazing year, there was a lot on and it was all about driving the leadership agenda and doing what I could for women. This year! It’s quite different. Safety, safety, safety. I am planning on going down to New Zealand in September for an extended stay, though I will need to go into quarantine for a period of time and that is a mixture of work and a little bit of holiday with my daughter and my family.
But my personal goal, I guess I really believe, I did an on-liner the other night for a farewell for a staff member that I employed who looked after coaching New Zealand who was a really special guy. And I was thinking about my career and I sort of said in my leaving speech at 2 o’clock in the morning, so I could be there for him New Zealand time, was that I think your legacy is the people that you leave behind. And I have been really fortunate to employ some amazing people and see them have some incredible careers doing some amazing things.
What I really get a kick out of is developing leaders and I’ll give you a little story. We have this pipeline programme for when we put 17 women on council, people said, oh where are the women going to come from? So I said, oh well I’m sure there’s lots of women around the world but let’s have some money and we’ll develop a pipeline programme. We have this executive leadership scholarship programme and there was a woman who was identified, who was the President of Burkina Faso, Rolande Borot and she was one of the first women that I got involved in the scholarship programme. Such potential. Really amazing lady. She spoke French and not a single piece of English and so we had some really interesting conversations initially.
She wanted to learn how to participate in the international world of rugby and she knew that to do that she needed to master English and so her scholarship went towards supporting her for English. Here we are three years on, she is on the board of Rugby Africa now, she is a council member on World Rugby. And I remember when she turned up at her first World Rugby council meeting she came over to me and she just gave me a huge and she said, Thanks, I can speak… and she spoke to me in English! And I just thought, the difference that that has made for that woman who has such potential to actually help drive the change we want to see in Africa, it’s … so for me, my goal personally is to get more Rolande Boros and to get more Nahids and to get more A Ms? [0:51:17] and to do everything I can to make sure that women’s voices are heard and that we work with governing bodies around the world to make sure that diversity is respected, recognised and practised.
END OF TRANSCRIPT