Australian Olympic sports risk funding cuts amid ‘glacial’ growth in women coaches

The “glacial” growth in the number of women coaches at the elite level has forced Australian Olympic sports to up their game in order to meet community expectations and avoid the federal government adopting the “stick” of funding cuts.

Fewer than one in five coaches at the Paris Games were women, or 18.6%, up barely three percentage points from Tokyo, and from 9% in Rio in 2016. Some sports recorded lower figures, including elite athletics at 12% and golf at 6%.

Australian Sports Commission chair Kate Jenkins said women had achieved broad success in sports administration and as athletes, but that she was impatient to see more progress among high-performance coaches.

“The bad news is, while we’ve now got these sports governance boards that are going to have 50% women, we’ve got women in lots of senior roles, we’ve got women now able to play most sports, coaching has really been pretty glacial in the change,” Jenkins said.

More than a hundred Australian coaches and administrators were part of a biennial workshop in Melbourne on Tuesday, including 33 chief executives and board members. It was the first meeting since September’s announcement that the government would require gender balance on the boards of sporting entities.

“We need to do things differently and we can, and we need leaders to back that in, and we need you not to just think it’s someone else’s job,” Jenkins said.

Targets were discussed but not agreed upon by officials in the largely taxpayer-supported sector, whose boards will need to have 50% women by July 2027 in order to continue to receive government funding.

Jenkins said there had been strong buy-in from sporting decision-makers for increasing the share of women coaches, and there was optimism progress could be made without mandating targets.

“The carrot is, you’ll get better results, you’ll have a better organisation, there’s a lot of rewards for doing this well and improving your coaching, you’ll access better talent,” she said.

“The stick, ultimately, for the board [gender balance policy], is you will lose funding, and the Sports Commission does fund a lot of sports for a lot of their operations and we might consider that in the future.”

Nicole Hannan, who represented Australia in beach volleyball at Athens in 2004, has only recently returned to the high-performance environment as a coach after 12 years away from the sport.

“I wasn’t in a great space when I finished playing and I went off and did completely different things, and it wasn’t until my daughter had seen her friends play volleyball when she was about 11 and said, ‘oh, can you teach me how to play volleyball?’”

Hannan is now assistant coach of Australia’s women’s indoor volleyball team and believes sports needed to be better at checking whether past players want to stay involved. “Maybe the sports need to ask, are you interested, who would like to be interested, how can we pull you back into the sport, and once you’re back in here, how can we support you.”

Former Diamonds netballer Caitlin Thwaites has recently started a family and said she was fortunate in finding work with the Victorian Institute of Sport that has given her a degree of flexibility, including job sharing with another young mother.

“It’s being open to have that flexibility of what might the coaching role look like at the moment, or how do we keep these people engaged,” Thwaites said.