SA: Hello and welcome to The Gamechangers Podcast. Now you’ll hear from trailblazing, fearless women in sport. I’m Sue Anstiss and in this episode it’s Sally Munday MBE (OBE). The CEO of England and GB Hockey who’s overseen a transformation in the sport in the past decade. On Sally’s watch the GB Women’s team have won their first ever Olympic Gold in Rio. England hosted a hugely successful World Cup in London and participation at all levels of the sport have rocketed. It’s little wonder that Sally’s just been appointed to arguably the most powerful role in elite sport as the new CEO at UK Sport.
The first half of this interview took place before Sally’s new role was announced. I went to meet her at the home of England Hockey in Bisham Abbey and started by asking her whether sport had always been a part of her life.
SM: Yes. Sport was a massive part of my life growing up. I’m the youngest of four girls and there’s only five years between the eldest and the youngest and I grew up in quite a sporty environment because my dad was really big into sport - Chair of the Tennis Club, ran the London Marathon and none of my sisters were that interested in sport and I was. So I got an awful lot of encouragement from my dad and I was probably what you would describe as a sort of really enthusiastic allrounder.
I was willing to have a go at everything and I was reasonably competent at lots of things, but I was never going to be brilliant at anything. But I absolutely loved it. I did gymnastics quite a lot when I was little and to quite a competitive level. I did canoeing, I went running, I got into hockey quite young and just loved doing everything. Every opportunity I could to be playing sport and my dad encouraged me all the way so yeah, it’s always been a really important part of who I am.
SA: And team sport, you mentioned hockey there. Why do you think that that was something that you were drawn to as a child?
SM: I think probably because I wasn’t a sort of stand-out sporty person, the enjoyment I got from a sport was doing it with other people and so even when I was doing gymnastics which was an individual sport, I remember sort of heading off on a Saturday morning to gym club and being, I’m going to go and see my friends, and it was the sort of social part of it. So probably very naturally I got drawn into team sports because of the friendship thing and I very quickly learned that winning and losing with other people is a whole lot more fun than the doing it on your own.
When you lose there’s somebody there to kind of pick you up and you feel better about it and when you win there’s people there to celebrate, who understand what you’ve done to win and yeah, the team sport bit, when I was young I think I was naturally drawn to. And now as an adult, I still love team sports and I love all the things now I know as an adult that it gives you as a young person, in terms of confidence, communication and the ability to work with others, whether you like them or loathe them.
SA: So were you attracted to work in sport from a younger age? Do you think you felt that would be a path for you?
SM: So when I was younger, I think probably like a number of sporty kids, I thought I wanted to be a PE teacher initially. It’s when I was about 14/15 that I think things started to crystallise in my mind. So the 1988 Olympics had a massive impact on me. The men’s hockey team won the Gold Medal. And I remember sitting watching it with my dad and we got into this conversation about, I was just playing hockey at school at that point, and my dad was kind of like, you should think about going and joining a club.
And so in those days obviously we didn’t have the internet so I went down to the local library and did some research about finding a local club and went and joined a local hockey club and that was kind of probably my first foray into a team club. I’d been a member of a gym club and a canoeing club and those things, but not a member of a club in a team sport. So that was quite an important moment but at the similar time to that, a massive new sports facility was being built where I lived. Huge. In Reading, I grew up in Reading. And the manager of this new centre came and talked to us at school.
I decided I wanted to run a Sports Centre so I wanted to go into Sports Management and all I knew was that I wanted to work in and around sport but that seemed like a better idea than being a PE teacher. So as soon as the Sports Centre opened, I was sort of knocking on the door, give me a job and all through my A levels worked there doing a whole variety of different things. I did quite a lot of sports coaching, so I got into sports coaching quite young. Did some of the most amazing coaching. I coached trampolining to adults with learning disabilities which I absolutely loved.
I mean, some of my happiest memories, I can still picture the people that I coached then but also not only coaching, I did a bit of lifeguarding, I worked on reception, I worked in the health suite, I did a bit of everything, and I think that was really good in terms of giving me a sort of real experience of working in that type of environment.
SA: And we talk a lot about role models and girls being inspired by role models. Who were your role models, your sporting role models?
SM: There were never people in the sporting world I aspired to be because I think I was really realistic about the fact that I just really loved playing and participating in sport. And I think that’s probably why I got into coaching and team managing so young because I liked organising people. It’s interesting, I’ve been asked like where my leadership journey started and I really believe that my leadership journey started when I was about four. Because one of my earliest memories is growing up, me and my three elder sisters shared a bedroom. We had one room, two sets of bunkbeds, not a huge amount of money growing up.
And I remember that one of my earliest memories is being about four, stood in my bedroom with my three sisters with my hands on my hips, thinking I am so fed up with being told what to do. Because, obviously being the youngest, all three of them … you get it, you know what it’s like. They all think they’ve got the right to tell you what to do and it’s one of my earliest memories, just thinking, I would like to make the decisions. I want to be in charge. And I genuinely think, I mean it sounds funny, but I genuinely think that shaped me wanting me to lead things and wanting to organise things. So I think that all of that sort of contributed to me getting into sort of team managing and coaching quite young, which I absolutely loved doing.
SA: And that was the mainstay, in the beginnings of hockey, was coaching and team management where you started on that pathway?
SM: Yeah, by playing I joined a club, like I said, and played an awful lot. Did all the things that you do as a volunteer in a community club. I Club Captained, I was on the committee at certain points.
SA: All at Reading?
SM: It wasn’t Reading Hockey Club, it was a small club in Reading called Phoenix and then I started coaching at my club and doing stuff with the youngsters. Did my coaching qualifications then started coaching at county level, junior county level and then junior England level. Then senior England level and Great Britain. So that was the sort of coaching and team managing was going alongside my full-time career which was, for the first four years at Reading, and then I went and worked for the Lawn Tennis Association.
SA: And so you wouldn’t ever become the next Danny Kerry and coach. Was coaching to that top level in the professional sense ever a passion and a career path for you do you think?
SM: No, coaching, I was what you would describe as a really good community/sort of introduction to talent coach. I was good at it because of, I guess my enthusiasm and making it fun. So making youngsters want to keep coming back, wanting to try harder, wanting to get better but I was never particularly sort of technical. The team managing however that I got into, I did think that there would be an opportunity to progress through that, and interestingly in 2008/9 had quite an interesting decision to make about whether I was going to pursue that more or whether I was going to try and become the next Chief Exec of England Hockey.
SA: What swayed you in that direction?
SM: I knew that, it was post-Beijing, so it was just at the end of 2008 and the England hockey Board of Directors had decided that we needed a permanent full-time Chief Executive in the business.
SA: Sorry, what was your role at the time?
SM: At the time I was Development Director and then in my spare time I was doing a lot of team managing so I was managing the England and Great Britain under-21 group. I’d done some trips with the senior group but post-Beijing, at the time we had an executive chair who was part-time and the board decided we needed a full-time CEO. So it went out to advert and I was considering putting my hat in the ring for that, at the same time as knowing that the manager who was managing with the senior women’s team, so I was managing with Danny, was leaving after Beijing and I’d done some senior trips, so I knew I was going to be in the frame for managing. And obviously the opportunity of team managing at a home Olympic Games is a kind of pretty unique opportunity.
But I knew that the two roles weren’t compatible. You can’t be Chief Exec of an organisation and team manage. And I had quite a dilemma at the time and now looking back, it seems mad that I had that dilemma. And the trigger point for me about what I wanted to do was I was in a conversation with one of my friends and they just said to me, they could not get their head round why this was even a dilemma. Yes, they understood the appeal and the attraction of managing a team at London but the opportunity to be CEO of the organisation and the influence and the change that you could make happen and how you could move the sport forward. And I just thought, Yeah, that’s so right. Why is this even a consideration? So I applied for the CEO job. Ten years ago now.
SA: Sometimes it takes that someone else outside of your circle almost to bring you down to …
SM: To say the obvious and yeah.
SA: Ten years is a long time so I guess you’ve seen, I look at the changes in hockey from where it was to where we are today. Why do you think you stayed with this one sport for so long, I guess 10 years, and then the years before that too, what is it about hockey as a sport that’s kept you so committed for so long?
SM: There is a lot of talk about the hockey family in inverted commas, and I know other sports say the same thing, but there is something really special about the type of person that hockey attracts and I don’t know if it’s because of the sport and the team sport part of it, but I think it’s also because it’s a truly dual-gender team sport, it really does attract such a variety of people from different backgrounds and people get involved in a sport like hockey for no other reason than they love it.
And once they are in and they’re hooked their sort of love for the sport just grows. And I got hooked by hockey when I was younger and I’ve stayed with it so long there has been such an opportunity to grow and develop it so I joined the board of England Hockey in 2003 and that was just after the LTA ? had gone bankrupt.
SA: It’s not that long ago is it? In researching you I remember it was in such a place wasn’t it?
SM: It was in an unbelievable mess and that’s when the new organisation England Hockey was born and Philip Kimberley who came in as Executive Chair who was an amazing, still is an amazing man, he’s not Chair anymore but did a fantastic job, and I was very fortunate in 2003 that when he was advertising and wanted a Finance Director and he wanted a kind of Hockey Director he saw something in me that I think he felt that he could learn from the hockey point of view.
But I think what he also saw was somebody who was really keen to learn and develop and he was a really highly experienced business man and the combination of the two of us – I brought sort of grassroots and the sort of elite hockey knowledge having team managed, as well as worked in the grassroots, and he brought the business perspective. So I had 12 years, from 2003 through to 2015, when he stood down as chair being mentored and coached by him which I am extremely grateful for.
And I’ve stayed so long and I’ve been asked a lot over the last few years, what are you doing to do next? I’ve stayed so long because there has been, we’ve been on such a journey from where we were, but also if you think about it, I became CEO in 2009, we had a home Olympic Games and we were doing a massive engagement programme around the home Olympic Games about wanting to use the games to get more people playing and I’m really proud of what we’ve done with utilising big events and the profile the sport has had to grow participation.
We’ve doubled the number of girls playing in our club since 2011 and that type of stuff is the type of stuff I’m really, really proud of. And so we had a home Olympic Games, that was amazing, we started to really grow participation. We had re-engaged with a lot of our clubs, who we’d been disenfranchised from when the old LTHA ? went bankrupt. And then we took a decision to really focus on developing the profile of the sport through hosting major events. So we were bidding for the Europeans and the World Cup and so on. So hosting those. We’ve obviously had the sort of development of the teams and winning medals at the Olympics and in 2012 and 2016, hosting the World Cup last year. There’s just been one thing after another and I’ve been involved in the last three or four years in developing the new hockey Pro league with my international colleagues.
So there’s always been something that’s been the next big thing that has excited me and kept me motivated and wanting to keep the organisation and the sport moving forwards.
SA: And what’s the bit that drives you now, because that’s obviously massive accomplishments in the last decade? Is it participation, is it growing the kids coming into the programme, women’s sport - what are your goals as we sit here now?
SM: We are focused on three key areas. Growing participation and we’re aiming to double the number of club members by 2027 and that is huge, that’s a massive ambition. And it sounds, oh doubling it, how hard can that be? It’s a huge ambition to do that and that means we’ve got to diversify the way people play, we’ve got to offer people ways to play that isn’t just the traditional Saturday league hockey.
And so that’s really key. The second of our ambitions is around growing the visibility of the sport. We’re trying to triple the fan base. We’ve made a massive step forward in terms of broadcast of the sport over the last five to ten years. But there is a long way …
Our relationship at the moment is with BT Sport but we’ve had some really good broadcast with BBC and also historically some with Sky but there’s so much opportunity moving forwards with how broadcast is evolving. And there’s some really interesting stuff going on with us and some other sports at the moment about where we might go with the whole broadcast. So, the visibility piece is really important and then the third is around continuing to get international success. And what we’re really seeking to do there is to get sustainable consistent success. We want to be winning medals at every World Cup, at every Olympic Games.
And those three are the sort of big ambitions and to utilise the success, to grow visibility and to use the visibility to drive participation …
SA: I was going to say, they obviously all feed each other in terms of, and also participation creating a pool of elite athletes to come through for the next stage too.
SM: But we really want participation full stop. Yes, great if we get more talented players from it, but actually the health of the sport, the future of the sport. I mean, we’re a traditional game, we’ve been around for a really long time and if you want a traditional game to have a positive future, then actually its participants are probably a pretty good indicator of the health of the sport. So we’re in pretty good health.
SA: And there is, I guess that, in terms of hockey being perceived as quite, in the past, white, middle-class, needing money to play – and I know you’ve been doing a lot to try and diversify that.
SM: We’re acutely aware of the fact that in some quarters there’s still a kind of a perception, of sort of ‘jolly hockey-sticks’ and it being as you say, kind of white middle-class. Interestingly we’re doing a really big piece of work at the moment on a really broad diversity strategy across the whole sport. We’ve done various pockets of really good work in diversity but they’ve all been kind of pieces of work in isolation to date. And what we’ve just embarked on is a development of a really broad strategy that looks right the way across the whole sport. And not just at the sort of protected characteristics. I think sports bodies have been encouraged to really look at making sure they’re diverse in terms of gender, in terms of colour, in terms of disability and so on, which is really important.
But if I were to use the example of around our board table. We’re obviously being really strongly led to make sure that we have people from a variety of backgrounds. My interest is particularly in making sure that it isn’t just the protected characteristics and it isn’t just the things that you can see. So, as a board, we could look really good in terms of gender balance, in terms of fame balance, in terms of disability and so on. But if all of those people round the table went to private school, they’ve come from a background that only 7% of our population have experienced. And I come from a very ordinary background. I had a really happy upbringing, I loved school, I’m very proud of the fact that I am from a very ordinary background. There is nothing particularly interesting about my background at all.
There’s nothing special. We weren’t particularly poor but neither did we have money to allow us to do some of the things that other kids get to do. And money, when I was growing up, kind of like, for me it was never made to feel like a massive factor. I’m sure it probably was. My mum ran a market stall. I’m sure they probably hid that from us but I think that getting to go to an independent school, the opportunities that that gives young people, is so different. The experience is so, so different to what you get if you go to a state school. So, for me, the whole bit about diversity is about making sure that it’s beyond the diversity of things that you can see.
So I personally are sponsoring the work on the sort of diversity strategy here because I think that it would be very easy for us as a sport to not pay attention to those things but my life has been massively enriched by playing, coaching, administrating hockey. And it was really easy for me to get involved in a hockey club and to get involved. I want to make sure that it remains really easy for anybody that wants to get involved.
SA: Being a CEO, do you ever feel a bit isolated in terms of leading an organisation, the buck stops with you ultimately. How do you cope with the pressures?
SM: I think there can be moments of loneliness but to be honest with you, my experience isn’t that. You can be lonely if you allow yourself to be lonely and one of the things that I’ve been really aware of is making sure that I have people around me that I can go to, I can get advice from. That I can ring up and I can go, ‘Agh!’ to when I’m having a moment. And I have a number of people on my board - I have a spectacular board at England Hockey - the quality of the people around my board table, I’m incredibly lucky with their backgrounds and experience and the support and challenge that they give me.
So there are people there that I will turn to. I have people outside of hockey and outside of sport that I will turn to. And yeah, you have moments where you’re stood in front of the whole organisation or you’re stood in front of 1000 volunteers and you’re being criticised for a decision that you’ve made, but I fundamentally believe that when you make decisions, if you make them with the right intent, and you have gathered as much information as you can and you believe that you’re making the right decision with the right intent, I don’t actually think that people can ask more of you than that. And if that decision turns out to be wrong, at some point in the future, then you put your hand up and say, Yeah, I got it wrong. But I made that decision having got as much information as I could and I had the right intent. This was my intent.
And yeah, right, that isn’t always easy then when you’ve got a load of people saying, Yeah but you shouldn’t be doing this … people having a go at you, but I think if you’ve got people that you can turn to who can then say, believe in what you’re doing, you’ve done it for the right reasons, don’t beat yourself up about the fact that people disagree with you. It’s a leadership job. If you want to be popular you don’t do a leadership job because if you go into a leadership role and you try and be popular with everybody, in my opinion, you won’t be a very good leader. You have got to be prepared to sit in the uncomfortable, unpopular space at times because that is the nature of the beast and it comes with the territory and I have become okay at being in that space. I’ve become okay at being unpopular when I am unpopular.
SA: And has that changed over 10 years? Do you think you’re a different person when you came in? Were you always aware that that would be required within that CEO role?
SM: I think I learned to be unpopular in my previous job when I was Development Director. So when I first joined the board in 2003, there was a really small group of us who were basically trying to rebuild he governing body and rebuild the sport, and rebuild the sport’s reputation with its clubs, with its members, with our funding partners. And for the first two or three years in that role, we were just constantly criticised because for the hockey public, whilst we were new we were still a governing body, so we were treated like we were responsible for the previous organisation having gone bankrupt.
And we took a very conscious decision, and I remember discussing this with Philip, the Chair at the time, we said, for the first couple of years we were just going to take it. We were going to take the criticism and almost accept that we’d inherited that. You inherit things from an organisation that’s gone into administration. And then after about two-and-a-half years I remember sitting in the office with Philip and my other Director and we said, Right, we need to draw a line now. We need to stop taking criticism for the things that we haven’t done. If we’ve done things wrong now, we’ll put our hands up, but actually the mistakes of our predecessors, we’ve now been here two-and-a-half years, we’re going to stop taking this criticism.
And so we did. And the first four or five years of doing that job, it was really, really tough. And after that first two-and-a-half years we also started to make some pretty big decisions about changes in the sport, so we made big decisions about changing how the talent pathway worked. I got hate mail, I mean proper serious hate mail.
SA: How did you deal with that?
SM: Well, at the time, the first time I ever got hate mail I was kind of like, this is this lovely hockey family I’ve just been talking about and someone is sending me hate mail.
SA: Dodgy old relative!
SM: Yeah, and I remember sitting and discussing it with Philip and it comes back to, one of our values as an organisation is about integrity. People have different definitions of what integrity means. And for me, integrity is about having the courage to do what’s right. The person that taught me that was Sue Campbell. To do what’s right, not what’s easy, not what’s popular, to do what is the right thing. And sometimes that means sticking your head above the parapet. Sometimes that means making unpopular decisions but if it’s the right decision, even if it’s unpopular, have the integrity to do it and see it through.
And I remember when I got this hate mail and it was about this particular thing, about the talent pathway, we had done so much research and consultation, we knew that we were going to upset some fiefdoms and some sort of power bases in the sport. But we also, one of the big drivers for the work that we were doing was to try and open up the pathway to try and make it more accessible so that when you turned up to a trial you weren’t picked because of the colour of your socks said that you went to a particular school or club.
SA: And had that been in the past?
SM: Definitely. And I was experiencing that being a coach at county level, that you are under pressure, Oh you’ve got to pick those four girls because they go to such and such a school. They’ll be good hockey players. And I’d be like, Well hang on a minute, just because they went to that school, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good hockey player.
And so I think I learned during that period that’s when that whole thing about integrity and having the courage to do what was right started to, I think, become really instilled in me. And I just accepted that people were going to be unhappy. There would be plenty of people that would be happy but for all the happy people, you would have people that would be upset.
And I think I just came to terms with that through support and coaching from Philip and others, because I really believed, I really, really believed that what we were doing was the right thing.
SA: And the proof is sort of in the pudding, isn’t it really? Years on, in terms of your pathway and the development and being more inclusive and the success that’s followed.
SM: Yeah, the thing is that we need to go again. We need to go and re-examine it again because yes, there’s been loads of positives from it, but equally as the sport has evolved we’ve got a really good example now where independent schools are doing so much in the space of sports provision. It’s actually quite hard for a youngster that goes to a state school to get access to as much coaching as a kid in an independent school does.
So we’re doing a whole piece of work on that at the moment about how can we make sure that it does retain an openness to it and a fairness to it?
SA: Malcolm Gladwell or someone wrote about it before, that science around actually you need to get a certain amount of coaching to then get on the squad to get the next, and if you don’t get that initial volume of sport to play, you’ll never make it on to that first squad that enables you to get selection, and so on.
SM: I think there’s always a risk with that that the thing about our system is because we have such a wide talent base at the kind of bottom of the pyramid I think it’s quite easy for kids to get involved in the initial part. I think it’s actually harder as they get a little bit older. We get quite a lot of the state school kids offered scholarships. That’s great. The independent schools are doing such a great job but what we need to make sure is that kids that don’t get offered a scholarship or don’t want a scholarship or that come late to the sport, or develop later, have still got the same access to coaching and opportunity that kids in independent schools have. And that’s something we’re doing quite a lot of work on at the moment.
SA: I’m going to take you back now to Rio, in terms of the successes and the challenges and so on, we can’t not talk to you about that amazing night in August. So I guess just looking back at that and the culmination of all those changes and things that had happened, you must get asked about it a lot and still think about. How did that feel for you as a fan of hockey and a CEO on that night? Were you able to separate those two emotions?
SM: Well there was a kind of third dynamic to it as well in the fact that there were a number of players in that team who had been in the England under-16 team when I was team manager. A number of the players I had managed at under-16s, 18s or 21s. So I had seen them as youngsters and someone like Alex Danson, I actually took her on her first international tour when she was playing for the South of England and I was the South of England team manager. I remember a 12/13-year old Alex Danson being taken to Holland and got some funny stories about that.
She’ll kill me. So there was kind of the three dynamics playing out for me. There was this immense pride of the players that I had seen as children growing up into hugely accomplished athletes and achieving the ultimate dream of Olympic Gold. And you can’t help but have flashbacks to seeing those kids when they were sort of 14/15 or even someone like Hannah Macleod who was our under-21 captain, and how driven and determined she was then.
Seeing her with a gold medal round her neck. So there was that emotion. There was the fan of hockey that was just kind of like, our sport is so incredible to watch. It’s so fast and dynamic and exciting. The players are so incredibly athletic and skilful that whenever we take people to watch international hockey who haven’t seen it before we get the same reaction, people are blown away by it, and I think people who have had that image of sort of school-girl St Triniansesque, that they are blown away by the men’s and women’s game as it is now.
So there was that kind of like feeling that this is brilliant that people are seeing why I love the game as a fan. And then as the Chief Exec, just this feeling of, have my decisions played a part in this? Have the things that we’ve done helped to reach this moment? And of course you want to believe, yes, that they have, but it was seeing them on the top of the podium was very, very special. I’ll never forget that as long as I live and for all of those reasons.
But interestingly if you were to ask me, and I am asked what am I most proud about?
SA: I won’t ask that one.
SM: It’s not actually about the gold medal, it’s about how our sport has used that gold medal and used the bronze medal of 2012 and the other events we’ve done to engage with our clubs and our hockey family to drive more participants. That’s what I am most proud about.
SA: I heard Jo Adams, Netball CEO saying actually when they won that Commonwealth Gold, she felt a sense of relief in terms of future funding, sponsorship, almost like knowing the role would then be easier. Was there an element of that for you or had you through 2012 and the legacy and activity you’d always seen that uplift in terms of participation?
SM: I don’t remember feeling relieved. I think I remember thinking, what an opportunity, and we had a thing called Operation Gold which was a plan that we wanted to put in place if we won gold. And I was just desperate to get back over here, to come home, and I literally flew home as soon as I could, because I wanted to, right, Operation Gold, let’s get it up and running. Let’s make the most of this. And yeah that was, the six months that followed, in terms of the profile, the opportunities we had to promote the sport, absolutely magical.
SA: In terms of sponsorship you were a bit at the forefront of women’s sponsorship for sport because Investec came on board ahead of those games and I think at the time it was the biggest women’s sponsorship opportunity. I’d be interested to know your thoughts on that and how that came about?
SM: Investec have bee a phenomenal supporter and I think a trailblazer in terms of sponsoring women’s team sport. They were the biggest women’s team sport sponsor that had ever been see in in this country when they joined us in 2010. And that came about off the back of us employing a new commercial director. He wasn’t from hockey, he knew very little about our sport when he joined us. And one of the things that we wanted from him was to create a more commercial outlook for the whole organisation. But what we also invited him to do was to be really constructively critical. For those of us that loved the sport, we’re sitting here thinking, why wouldn’t people want to sponsor us, it’s fantastic?
And he came in and gave us some real home truths and we built our sponsorship strategy on data and insight and facts and information and he was able to work with an agency to bring Investec to the party. They renewed ahead of Rio and we had a good discussion about should we renew before or after? You don’t know whether you’re going to win a gold medal. They got a pretty good deal by renewing beforehand, but fair play to them, I don’t begrudge them that at all.
SA: Because they had supported you in the first place and across all levels of sport.
SM: Absolutely, and they’ve been really great partners to work with. They’re with us through to 2020. Ten years is a pretty long time for a sponsor to stay engaged with one sport.
SA: And what makes them a good sponsor, a good partner? What is it that you look for as CEO in terms of that partnership?
SM: So we want to work with organisations that have shared aspirations, the shared ambitions that we have and the shared values that we have. And Investec are really good in the way that they activate the sponsorship. So, yes, they give us a pot of money and that’s very welcome but also we went on a journey with them around London 2012 to really try and raise the profile of the women’s squad. And they put the women’s pictures all over taxis, all over London, on billboards all over London. They really helped with us in terms of trying to change the perception of the game and change the image of how the women were seen and have done a really good job with that. They’re also really experienced in sport sponsorship and know what they want and how they want you to respond and that makes it easy for us to work with them that they know the things that they want to do. Our players love working with Investec because Investec look after them.
SA: I was going to ask you that. Do you think that sponsorship helped the players in terms of giving them more confidence as they went into Rio, in terms of the on-pitch success? Do you think that is impacted by being well sponsored?
SM: I think the women really appreciate having a brand like Investec on their shirts. And obviously you can’t wear Investec when you go to the Olympic Games so it’s everything but the Olympic Games that they have that on their shirts. And I think that having a high profile, credible partner that says, we believe in this sport, we believe in this squad, we believe in these players, I think probably subconsciously does something. Does it directly affect the way they play on the pitch? Obviously that’s down to them and the coaching and the back room staff. But we don’t have problems getting the women to do the Investec gigs that they want, because Investec look after them, they take care of them.
They’re really thoughtful about how they work with the women, so, for example when we hosted the Europeans in 2015 they made cushions for all of the girls for the changing rooms, where the cushions were made out of the back of their shirts, so they had their shirt number and their name on it. And to sort of just celebrate that event, as a memento of that event. And it’s something that costs very little to Investec but the fact that they thought about it and they do that sort of thing a lot. They’ll give them a little gift or something that says … and as a result, the girls go the extra mile when they’re doing stuff for Investec.
So yeah, they’ve been brilliant to work with, they really have and hopefully they might want to carry on beyond Tokyo but we’re pretty pleased that we’ve had them for 10 years.
SA: And I guess almost as a reverse to traditional sport, at the moment, the challenges that we have, in hockey it’s been the women’s game that’s had the most attention, the sponsorship, the media coverage. Are you surprised by that or is it a result of the success they’ve had?
SM: I think it’s directly as a result of the success they’ve had. When we won bronze in 2012, we hadn’t won an Olympic medal for 20 years. And I think some of the other decisions that we took around London also helped to sort of position the sport differently. So, for example, the blue pitch, that wasn’t an accident, that was a lot of very difficult negotiation with the International Federation to agree playing on blue, with the pink.
And we very deliberately wanted to do that because we wanted people to see it for the modern dynamic game that it is and then I think the women winning bronze, but also one of the stories that obviously ran through London 2012 with the Captain Kate, breaking her jaw in the first game and then coming back and playing three games later is quite an incredible story. And I think that those sorts of stories are the reason why people love Olympic sport and are the reasons why people get attached and care about it. So, yeah, I think the women’s success has definitely been a massive factor in why sponsors want to come and work with us.
SA: And how have the men’s teams and coaches responded to that, obviously you are CEO of the entire association, how have you dealt with that, has that been a challenge?
SM: It’s not always been easy actually. And in fairness to the men’s players, in the most part, they’ve got on with and they’ve accepted it. They’ve been kind of, do you know what? The women have won a medal in a major competition every year for 10 years and the men haven’t. And so I think that they can sit there and look over the fence and say, Oh it feels unfair, but I think that they’re realistic to know that that’s come because of the success the women have had.
The challenging thing for me is the men work no less hard than the women. They put no less effort in. They’re no less talented as a group of athletes.
SA: But it’s almost tables turned, you could say the same for women’s, it’s what we say all the time for every sport isn’t it? A bit of a role reversal there.
SM: The men are really starting to come into their own actually. We’re really excited about this group for the next couple of years. There’s some really good experienced heads in that group and there’s some phenomenal talent coming through. And it’ll be interesting because obviously Danny who coached the women is now with the men and he’s loving that. The men seem to be responding really well to his leadership so, a real watch-this-space.
SA: We talk a lot at the moment about collaborative leadership and working collaboratively. And I think you’ve done that hugely as an individual and also as an NGB, so I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit - working with netball, cricket, in terms of Team Up.
SM: So, I’ll start from a different place if that’s okay because you started the question on collaboration and I am a massive believer that you can get so much more done with collaboration and so my natural state is one of people describe, what’s her leadership style? My leadership style is definitely one that’s collegiate, collaborative and that has fed into a whole number of things that I’ve ended up being involved in. And Team Up, which is the project with hockey, cricket and netball came about ‘cos all three of us were hosting women’s World Cups in consecutive years. So cricket in 2017 hockey in ’18 and netball this year in ’19. And we had some conversation about, surely there’s something in this, something that we can do to leverage off the fact that this is a pretty unusual set of circumstances, that three team sports, three women’s sports would be hosting their World Cups.
And so the Team Up project came about on what we were seeking to do was to drive more ticket sales, more profile but also more participants playing our three team sports, and it’s been fun, it’s been really good working with netball and cricket and both at my level, with the women that lead those organisations but also I think our athletes that have been involved have enjoyed it. And the schools and the clubs that have got involved I think have liked the collaboration as well. But there are a number of other collaborations that we’ve done at the moment.
I’m quite heavily involved, or have been, with NGB CEO forum. And I think some of the work that we’ve done collectively in trying to get a more positive narrative about National Governing Bodies out there, that’s been quite important. But also some of the things that I’ve done internationally with my hockey CEOs around the world. I think one of the things that I personally feel that our sporting landscape is crying out for at the moment is collaborative leadership and I think that I really want to see, particularly in the performance space, more collaboration in terms of collaborative leadership with UK Sport, the BOA, the BPA and the Home Nations Sports Councils, because they have a role in talent and I really think that the industry is crying out for that type of sort of collaboration.
And I think it’s at a time where that type of collaboration could be a real shifting point for us. We’ve been hugely successful as a nation in Paralympic and Olympic sport and it’s kind of like, well how do we become more successful? How do we become even better? And for me, the big part of becoming even better, is getting that collaboration in the sort of performance space across those organisations.
SA: And do you see, it’s interesting isn’t it, the last week or so, hearing more around aiming for more golds and more success Olympic Medals. Do you definitely see that clear link between medals and inspiration and participation? It feels like you’re very driven to get more people playing sport or do you ever feel better money being spent on more coaches, facilities, access to the mass market?
SM: So there are some people that simply don’t believe that the evidence is there, that international success equals more participants and I think there are a number of sports that you could point to and say, they had success and it didn’t change the dial on participation. I think if you leave it to its own devices, you’re not going to change it but if you get international success and you use that to drive the visibility of the sport and then you make sure you’ve got the right interventions that make it really easy for somebody to go and pick up a hockey stick. So, for people that came to the London 2012 Games, we were the third biggest sport in terms of ticket numbers at the London Games. We had 630,000 people come and watch hockey and we …
SA: I came twice!
SM: Thank you. You will recall, probably, that when you came through into hockey there were some mini-hockey pitches for people to have a go. I cannot tell you the amount of work and pain it took to get permission to do that but we did it because we knew that of those 630,000, probably about half a million of them weren’t going to be hockey players. And if we gave them an opportunity to pick a stick up and have a go, but then what we also did was we had our team there, with iPads, capturing people’s information, saying, Oh do you want to play?
And we had all of our clubs around the country offering activities straight away so that when you rocked up with your 7-year-old son and he had a go and said, Mum I want to give this a go, he didn’t have to wait three months or go and join a club, he could literally find an activity the next day. So I really believe the numbers in our sport speak for themselves. Doubling the numbers of girls playing in our clubs since 2011, that has to be, and we’ve done some research now that tells us that a lot of those young girls were inspired by watching hockey, maybe for the first time at London.
And I think that for all the examples there are of where it hasn’t worked, I really believe that those inspirational moments can have a really massive impact on getting people interested in playing sport. It’s how I ended up joining a hockey club.
SA: Everyone I talk to in this podcast, seeing other people, it’s having that frictionless transition then, as easy as it can be to then let you go and get started and play.
SM: Yeah and making it as easy as possible for people. I think that is the key and giving people a welcoming environment when they get there and just not for finding the next stars, but just so that people can enjoy the love of the game, and enjoy the love of sport and all the things that it gives you. So I really believe in it and it’s really interesting listening to Katherine Grainger and the stuff that’s been in the media recently about, we could become first on the medal table.
That’s quite an exciting ambition to do that but in my mind I don’t want us to become first on the medal table just for the sake of it. I don’t want medals for medals’ sake. At hockey we’ve always been about we want medals because of what it enables us to do to grow the sport, to grow the visibility of the game, to get more people loving our sport. And I think that’s possible across a whole range of sports and if becoming first on the medal table is a catalyst to enable that, then that’s a fantastic thing.
SA: Obviously there’s some fantastic female leaders in sport – yourself included – but CEOs, we’ve had 3 female Sports Ministers, CEO Sport England, UK Sport, Sport Recreationalized and yet many sports boards are still being perceived as overtly male, perhaps a lack of female senior coaches, female agents in the sport. Why do you think that is?
SM: I don’t think that you can get away from the fact that historically sport was dominated by men up at CEO level as well. And it’s only really been the last probably 5-10 years that we’ve seen a lot more female leaders in the sport space. Sue Campbell was clearly, when I was emerging in my career, was a female leader but she was probably out there on her own in many ways for along time. And I think that we’re seeing now more and more boards becoming more equal gender and I think that it’s because we’re seeing more people realise that a balanced board makes for better decisions. You don’t want equal gender or a balanced board just to tick a box.
You want it just because different people’s perspectives, people from different backgrounds and different experiences create a different conversation that can lead to better decisions and better outcomes. I think the women’s coaching one is a challenging one because I think from a hockey perspective we see a lot of male coaches moving into the sort of talented space, into the sort of moving up the ladder, quite often when they’re in their sort of late 20s, early 30s.
And again this might not be a particularly popular thing to say but a lot of women are choosing to have children in that window so in the window where we’re seeing a lot of men come in and move up, sometimes women are having children. And the demands of elite coaching you’ve got to really, I think for any woman who wants to have a demanding career, whether it’s in coaching or anything else, alongside having a young family, you’ve got to really want to do it.
You’ve got to really want it because I don’t have children, but I see my friends that have got children and I see friends who are full-time mums and friends that have got full-time careers and are mums. I swear to God, I don’t know how the full-time mums do it. I spend three hours with my niece and nephew and I’m absolutely exhausted.
I am in awe of people that are full-time parenting and then I think about those that aren’t full-time parenting and are trying to have a successful career and be really amazing parents. I find it hard enough having a full-time career.
I’m in awe of it and I think that it’s hard for women because they want to be both. So many of my friends have said I want my career but then I feel like I’m letting my kids down. And I think it’s a bit of a reality of biology. And that, I think we as employers and leaders have to make it as easy as possible for women to be able to do both, and not difficult. We’ve got to try and remove the barriers that are there. Even if you remove all the barriers, and even if you make it easy, even if you do all the things around childcare and flexible time, all of that, that still doesn’t make it easy. It’s still tough to do.
SA: It might make it easier …
SM: Absolutely might make it easier but it’s still tough and yeah, I genuinely am not sure that I would be capable of it. And I am hugely in awe of those that are.
SA: You almost touched on this earlier, in terms of the 10 years that you’ve done and won Olympic Gold with the girls and hosted the World Cup and the new Pro league. So I guess what motivates you now moving forward?
SM: So we as a sport are still really reliant on Government money. We turn over roughly £10/11m a year, 60%-odd of that still comes from the Government. We get a certain amount that’s ringfenced for our elite teams. We get a certain amount that’s ringfenced for us to drive participation in the sport and our massive ambition at board level and throughout the organisation is to remove our reliance on Government money. We don’t want to stop having it, you know, we don’t want to just say we don’t want it anymore but we want to stop being reliant on it.
So a lot of the decisions that we’re making, a lot of the things that we’re doing are around us trying to generate new ways of bringing in revenue that will enable us to not be as reliant. A really good example is what we’re trying to do with the Pro league. So we’re hosting this new international league that Great Britain men and women are playing in. It gives us the opportunity to have 16 home games. First weekend was last Saturday, so we had a 5000 crowd back at Lee Valley for the women playing USA. But what we’re doing from a trial point of view for the last game of the season, which is on the 23rd of June, is we’re trying some new technology, some innovative new technology to lay a pitch at the stoop at Harlequins Rugby Club with the hope of being able to sell out 15,000 seats there.
And the reality for us is that until a sport like ours is able to regularly sell out a decent number of seats, 7/8000 plus, regularly getting the sport on TV and move towards getting broadcast income that then potentially leads to more commercial income, sponsorship income off the back of that. The reality is we have got to explore these type of opportunities because there is not a whole load of cash cows waiting to be milked in a sport like ours. So a lot of our energy is going on trying to make that successful because then that’s clean money that we can bring into the sport that isn’t ringfenced that we can reinvest in growing the sport and growing participation.
SA: Super exciting. The podcast is called The Gamechangers, so trailblazing women in sport. When you look back in another 30 years or so, what do you feel you’d like your legacy to be?
SM: I think as a sport hockey’s a bit of a sleeping giant. It’s a really diverse sport that attracts people from every background that you can play from aged 4 to 84 and it’s incredibly exciting to watch live and on TV. And I feel that we are really on the cusp of the sport moving from being considered as sort of traditional St Triniansesque into being a sport that is really relevant to, and meaningful to the British people. And I think we’ve taken some really big steps in that direction. We’re not there yet. I think the opportunities we’ve got in front of us will enable us to step more quickly in that direction but I would love to be in 30 years’ time, long after I’ve gone, looking at a sport that has a real relevance and meaning for the British public. And I genuinely think that is possible.
SA: Just a few days after I recorded this interview, it was announced had Sally had been appointed to be the CEO at UK Sport. Generous as always, Sally kindly invited me back to Bisham Abbey for a follow-up conversation to hear more about her thoughts on this appointment and her aspirations for the future of British sport. Having congratulated her, my first question was a little cheeky. How was such a significant job offer confirmed to you? Is it by email, by text or a phone call?
SM: Thank you for the congratulations first of all, I’m very excited. So it was quite a long process, the whole recruitment process from sort of start to finish. Various interviews, panel interviews and 1-1 sessions with Katherine. And I found out via phone call from Katherine who rang and told me I was the preferred candidate but she couldn’t actually offer me the job because it has to go through Government.
And so she told me I was the preferred candidate but it then took some time for the formal offer to be confirmed.
SA: Fantastic. What does it mean to you? What was your reaction to this extraordinary role?
SM: I mean, what an opportunity to be the Chief Executive of the sort high performance organisation in this country and be part of the leadership of high performance sport in the UK is an incredible privilege to be offered that opportunity, and really exciting. Being really honest, I’ve been on a kind of a real emotional rollercoaster the last sort of 10 days since it was announced. I’ve been at hockey a long time and you heard what I said when we last met, I’m very passionate about what we’ve done here and I’ll be really sad to leave. It’s been such an integral part to my life but it feels like the right time, I feel like hockey’s in a great place for somebody new to come in and take it on and take it to the next level and an amazing opportunity for me and my career and go and leave UK Sport.
I’m really excited about their new strategy, I’m excited about the quality of the people that I’ll get to work with there and it will be a real privilege to do that job.
SA: I bumped into some of the England hockey girls in Maidenhead High Street the other day and they were joyful for you but really sad to see you go and we talked about that hockey family and feeling part of a community too. So I do understand it must be hard to let go.
SM: Yes I mean hockey is my sport, it’s a sport that I’ve played, I’ve coached, I’ve team-managed and then have been given this amazing opportunity for the last 10 years to be the Chief Executive. I’ve had some unbelievable messages, not least from players, past and present, some of which have brought me to tears and I’m incredibly proud to have done the job that I’ve done and I will miss it. I clearly won’t be allowed to be involved in any decisions about hockey funding going forward, and that’s how it should be, because it’s a clear conflict. Can I look at it completely objectively? However much I’d like to think I can, the reality is it’s been 20 years of my life. So yeah, they won’t allow me anywhere near any of those decisions which is probably the right thing.
SA: Clearly Liz Nicholl’s done an extraordinary role in that job and it’s a tough act to follow. I guess when you took over as CEO of England Hockey they were in a very different place and you were able to have massive impact there. I just wonder how you feel going into it differently, you’re going into leadership of what’s already a hugely successful organisation?
SM: Yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot. To follow in the footsteps of Liz is huge big shoes to fill. I’ve been a huge admirer of Liz and the way she’s led that organisation and what she’s done for a long time and to get the opportunity to follow her, it feels slightly daunting but equally that organisation whilst led by Liz is packed full of other really brilliant people. And so to get the opportunity to go and work with them, and I think the interesting thing for me is that whilst a lot of the new UK sport strategy is still very much focused on us being successful at Olympic and Paralympics, it’s also talking about broadening and deepening its reach and it’s also talking about trying to really make a stronger impact from social impact point of view and that’s right up my street. That’s a lot of what we’ve tried to do here at hockey. We’ve seen massive increase in participation as I talked about before. And the social impact isn’t just about participating in the sport, it’s about the role that sport and international success can have in the British psyche and how it can make people feel very proud to be British and all the things that comes with that in terms of people being and wanting to achieve things in their lives.
So I’m really excited about the opportunity and yeah, it’s daunting, it is daunting following Liz. It’s funny, I saw her at an event last week where she was being celebrated, another standing ovation and I did say to her quietly afterwards could she try and do something rubbish before she goes. You know, anything, doesn’t matter what it is, can you just dial it down a bit, make it a little bit easier for me so we had a bit of a giggle about that. But I don’t think that’s likely.
SA: When do you start in the post?
SM: We haven’t finalised it totally yet but it’s likely to be probably the back end of September. I’m on 6 months’ notice here and I’ve been very upfront with them about that from the outset that I don’t want to rush out the door. There’s stuff that I want to close off here and make sure I hand over in a good place and hopefully I’ll finish off here September time and move over to them, back end of September. That’s the current thinking.
SA: And obviously huge opportunities ahead but in terms of challenges, I guess you’ve sat and thought about that, the key challenges in the next couple of years from a UK Sport perspective or too early to tell?
SM: I have a personal view on what I see as the challenges and clearly that’s the sort of stuff you’re asked when you’re put in front of an interview panel. I think there is a whole range of different factors, not least that we’re seeing a different type of athlete coming into the high- performance system now. Young people of today’s generation is different to the generation of 10 years ago. They have different expectations and different thoughts about what it means to be a high performance athlete and how they want to exist as a high performance athlete and I think we have to make sure that the high performance system is nimble enough to be able to adapt and flex to the different young people that come into our system. There’s clearly challenges with making sure that we secure the right amount of money to invest in high performance sport. I think there’s a real opportunity with that also, at a time in this country where people are struggling to feel proud and patriotic with all the things that’s going on politically, what sport does is it unites people like nothing else and so I think there’s some real opportunity around the funding and particularly around the ambition of the strategy and Katherine and Liz have already talked publicly about what it would take to be even better moving forwards.
But that’s no doubt a challenge. I think the fact that we’ve been back to back hugely successful at the Olympics and the Paralympic Games, can that trajectory continue? It was interesting because as part of the new strategy that UK Sport launched they did a huge consultation exercise, had almost 5000 people respond to it, which is a massive amount for a non-departmental body and the British public said what was fed back is the British public said, Yeah medals and success are important but it’s not just about coming second on the medal table, actually we’re quite happy with it being sort of top-5-ish. We want to see more breadth, we want to see more depth, we want to see social impact and the British public, they love the Paralympics, they love the Olympic Games and I think that what they love about it, yes, they love winning medals but they love the stories.
They love the trials and tribulations that the athletes have been through to get there. One of the reasons why the hockey story had such massive impact, it wasn’t just that they won a Gold Medal, it was the story about how they got there, how they worked as a team and the characters that came through from that team. And that’s what sport does, it creates stories and emotional attachment and I have memories now, I remember where I was when I watched certain sporting occasions and who I was with and we still, me and my friends, reminisce about, Oh do you remember when?
And, like I said, sport unites countries and unites people, unites communities at grassroots level like nothing else and so whilst I think there are challenges, one of the great opportunities, given where society is at the moment in this country and its feelings, it’s got a real opportunity to unite and bring people together behind something which makes us all feel very proud.
SA: Which leads into my final question really, which is as I guess you look back at 20 years of hockey and we talked about the legacy and all you’ve achieved, forwarding another 20 years, do you have a feeling in terms of what you’d be most proud of as a legacy in this new role?
SM: Twenty years is a long time away …
SA: Maybe ten?
SM: I think where I’d really like us to be at that point is that we’ve really got a sense of still being hugely successful but being hugely successful in a way that’s more than medals. That is about the impact that those medals have.
So we love those moments, we really cherish those special moments when we win things but actually the impact that our athletes and the national governing bodies can have in sort of social impact and community impact is massive and I would love us in 10 years’ time for that to be really embedded as something that sport really does and international sport does. That it has this well understood and well recognised impact on social and communities in this country.
SA: I guess then that also has the opportunity to provide something for those athletes – we talk about the transition out of sport – actually something that is there to take sport, the longevity sport and their medals gives them more opportunities too potentially.
SM: And lots of athletes are already in that space. And I think in many cases it’s under the radar and it’s unreported. Just look at hockey and the immense impact that our players have when they go out and visit schools and they go to community groups. And they have an impact that is almost immeasurable, but a lot of the sports are doing that quite quietly at the moment. And I think that there is a great opportunity for us to really celebrate the athletes and the sports that do that really well.
SA: I think Liz Nicholl at a conference last week at Elev8 said that 36,000 athlete days, I’ve never heard it lumped together in that way, which is just so powerful that those athletes, as you say, are out there using their …
SM: So, one of our players, after the Olympic Gold Medal in 2016, between September when they touched down, coming back from Rio, and something like December 2nd, I caught up with her at something on December 2nd - so they’d been back for that window of time - in that window of time she had done 87 community visits of some sort or another. Mostly in her local area where she lived back up in the north-west of England, she’d ended up being given Freedom of her local burgh but a lot of that was off her own back. The vast majority of it was voluntary in her own time, going round, showing her medal, telling her story that she was an ordinary girl who’d had a dream of something that she wanted to do and be part of and that she’d achieved her dream. And inspiring kids to say, you can be whatever you want to be.
SA: It’s not just sport.
SM: It’s not just sport. You think, 87 visits in that short window of time and that’s the stuff that we quite often don’t see. And she’s not the only one. There’s hundreds of the athletes across a whole range of sports, doing an amazing job utilising their stories, their medals, the journeys they’ve been on to inspire others to say, do you know what? Yeah, I can be what I want to be. And if it’s sport great, but if it’s not sport, and it’s other things and it’s just helping people to be better human beings in society, then how can that not be a good thing?
SA: It’s simply wonderful to hear Sally talk about the massive potential sport has to positively impact people’s lives. There’s no question in my mind that she’s set to have a remarkable impact in her new role when she takes up the post at the end of the Summer, and we wish her well.