Comment: More than half the Aotearoa New Zealand team at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games were female athletes, who won six of the 10 gold medals, 10 of the 14 silver and eight of the 12 bronze. A great success for women’s sport.
But only five of the 31 Kiwi coaches in Glasgow were women.
The good news story, though, is all five coaches won medals with their athletes – Dame Noeline Taurua and Briony Akle with the Silver Ferns, Tina Ball with weightlifter David Liti, Kirsten Hellier with field athletes Lauren Bruce (hammer) and Tori Moorby (javelin), and Kat Jones with the women’s 3×3 basketball team.
Not much has changed since the 2016 Rio Olympics where I raised the issue about the lack of women coaches in the team. We continue to increase the number of women athletes, but we’re still struggling to boost the number of women coaches, despite numerous high-profile initiatives in the intervening years.
In 2018, the government launched the first New Zealand Women & Girls Strategy, focusing on three pillars – leadership, participation and value and visibility. The development of women coaches within the high performance system was specifically identified under the leadership pillar.
The following year, I was part of a team with HPSNZ who surveyed female coaches across Aotearoa to identify their key challenges and enablers. More than 300 coaches responded and the key insights were:
- Only 53 percent of the women said they were clear on the steps needed to progress their career as a high performance coach.
- A lack of paid positions was the biggest challenge.
- Practical hands-on coaching was the biggest enabler for coach development.
- The most significant learning and development came through access to skilled and experienced women coaches.
- 64 percent of coaches were also working in another paid profession; two thirds of those were working fulltime in that other role.
In early 2020, the Te Hāpaitanga initiative was launched for women coaches in high performance sport, working with national sports organisations to respond to the complex challenges preventing women coaches from pursuing and maintaining a career in high performance sport.
Te Hāpaitanga seeks fundamental change by enabling women coaches to grow their capabilities and confidence and creating a collaborative community. The programme also aims to increase the visibility of women high performance coaches, by celebrating their achievements and seeing them employed in high performance roles within Aotearoa.
There have now been five cohorts of women in the 18-month programme, leading to increased capability, confidence and connection among the 60 women coaches.
However, there’s still much work to do in raising their visibility and value, and there are several reasons for this.
We know it is relatively easy to create women’s coaching programmes, and the participants benefit from them. The problem is when the sport environment and culture do not change, then neither does the visibility and value of women coaches, and in particular at the high performance level.
There’s also the reality that high performance coaching roles are limited, and applicants are often competing with international coaches. In team sports, the coach is often required to have already worked at the international level, continuing the gendered bias in sport.
In Glasgow the number of sports was halved, and most coaches in Te Hāpaitanga are from other sports, including football, rowing and rugby.
Kat Jones, in Glasgow coaching the women’s 3×3 basketball side to a bronze medal, was the only Te Hāpaitanga participant among the coaches. Most people wouldn’t know this, and I had to ring Basketball New Zealand to confirm this was the case. Where is the value and visibility celebrated for her as a medal-winning coach?
How do we raise the visibility and value of women coaches so athletes and younger coaches can see women at the highest level, and aspire to follow in their footsteps?
The benefits for having women in coaching positions include role modelling, challenging the stereotypes about women and leadership, and demonstrating coaching as an option for women. Events like the Commonwealth Games are often the pinnacle for coaches, so we need to celebrate them and showcase their contributions – and not make it incredibly difficult to find out who the coaches are.
One easy way would be for the names of coaches at pinnacle events to be made publicly available on national sports organisation websites, and if associated with the Commonwealth or Olympic Games, have them feature on the NZOC website too.
For the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, I would love to see all coaches, and in particular women coaches, visible alongside the athletes.
National coach hiring decisions are made by national sport organisations, so ensuring their policies provide equity of opportunity for women coaches to get to interview, rather than being screened out.
If we really want to make a difference, then consider, for example, making sure at least one woman is interviewed for each national coaching or assistant coach role. Setting minimum guidelines for the number of women coaches with national sport teams – like what was done at the governance level in the 2018 Women & Girls strategy, tied to funding and publicly reported – would also help.
Let’s celebrate coaching as an integral part of enabling our athletes to succeed on the world stage.
My lasting memory of this Commonwealth Games will be when Liti won gold and made sure his coach, Tina Ball, came onto the lifting platform to celebrate with him. It was such a powerful image of delivering on what High Performance Sport NZ set out to achieve in its strategy – inspiring athletes and coaches through their performances.
