As the demand for women’s sports continues to power upward across all codes, the Ministry of Sport has held its 2022 Women In Sport Summit.
The Summit was held on September 8th at the Gold Coast’s Crowne Plaza, kicking off with a welcome from Ministry of Sport CEO Ben Parsons.
The first guest introduced by the Summit’s artificial intelligence MC was Councillor Brooke Patterson, who spoke about how the Gold Coast has recently been named the 26th best Sports City in the World in the 2022 Burson Cohn & Wolfe Sports Practice report. Not only that, but the Gold Coast was the top rated regional city on the list.
Brooke Patterson
The Women In Sport Summit AI MC
Next up was Olympic gold medallist and manager sport engagement at Griffith Sports College, Naomi McCarthy. Speaking about the inequalities that women’s sports face and how to address them, McCarthy touched on the athlete pay gap, the fact that only 6% of published research around training, injury, and recovery used exclusively women in their study, and that women are still chronically underrepresented in sports leadership.
Naomi McCarthy
Turning up the heat was Peter Kloczko, vice president of Australia & New Zealand for the UFC. After detailing how UFC reaches 693 million fans worldwide, and has access to 900 million TV households across the globe – 5.7 million of those in Australia – he opened Zoom to invite two champions of the sport to speak. Having both woken up at 2:30am their time to speak to the Women In Sport Summit was current UFC flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko, and recently retired fighter Joanna Jędrzejczyk.
Valentina Shevchenko (top) and Joanna Jędrzejczyk (bottom)
Bringing in more international guests was Angel City FC’s Stephanie Rudnick, who told the story of how the Los Angeles women’s club got its start thanks to high profile owners including Natalie Portman, Eva Longoria, and Serena Williams. Joining on Zoom was Angel City captain Ali Riley, who helped explain some of the ways that the club gives back to its community, and spoke about why it matters for the next generation of women to see what’s possible.
Ali Riley
To round out the morning, head of female engagement at Golf Australia, Tiffany Cherry, explained how everyone who has ever hit a neon putt-putt golf ball can call themselves a golfer. For Cherry, the future of women in golf came down to the fact that 86% of golfers in Australia are either Alt Players or Ball Hitters (the two levels under Round Players). As it stands, women make up 41% of Ball Hitters and a whopping 66% of Alt Players. Cherry was then joined on stage by the Sunshine Coast’s Cassie Porter, Australia’s top junior/amateur golfer who turned professional earlier this year. The pair spoke about encouraging women in golf, and how to hit the perfect ball (Hint: It’s all in your head).
Tiffany Cherry and Cassie Porter
The Summit broke for lunch, and then split up into three streams, each with its own set of sessions for the day.
At the end of the day, the Women In Sport Summit reconvened for the Kayo super panel to see the day out. Fox Sports’ Lara Pitt was the moderator, speaking to Kayo director of marketing, Kim McConnie; CEO of Netball Australia, Kelly Ryan; and AFLW player, Chloe Molloy. As it turned out, neither scheduling changes nor a particularly persistent fire alarm could stop the panel.
Ryan opened the panel by speaking about The Diamonds winning Australia’s 1,000th Commonwealth Games gold medal earlier in the year, joking that “I was instrumental in that gold, I waved my scarf like you wouldn’t believe! There were eight and a half thousand people there, and they were not barracking for Australia, so I was very patriotic.”
She followed up by speaking about the broadcast rights agreement that Netball Australia had come to with Foxtel and Kayo last year.
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“We’ve absolutely loved our partnership with Fox and Kayo… Kayo have been absolutely phenomenal in the work that they’ve done for us as a sport.”
Molloy then spoke about how when she was a child she wished to be a boy so she could keep playing the game she loved.
“The boys around me always had more opportunities than I did. I decided that I wanted to become a boy because I wanted to go and play football. It’s quite sad that when I was 12 I had to give up football even though I loved it so much, and that’s where my friendship circles were, just because I was a female.”
Eventually, she was drafted after “throwing her hat in the ring” for AFLW in college.
Lara Pitt, Chloe Molloy, Kim McConnie, Kelly Ryan;
Ending the panel was McConnie, who spoke about the growth of women’s sport on Kayo.
“It’s really great to see the numbers support what we’ve talked about here today,” she said.
“The 2020 Women’s Cricket World Cup, 450,000 people watched that – that’s a phenomenal number. The AFLW Grand Final, 130,000 people watched that. I got the guys to pull the numbers from NRLW and AFLW season games today, NRLW is up 75% season on season, and AFLW is up 40%. These are fantastic numbers – not only are they big numbers, but they’re continuing to grow at an accelerated rate.”