Carolyn Campbell, CEO Netball NSW

Alex Mednis & Nicholas Watkins, Australian Sports Professional Association
Carolyn Campbell, Netball NSW

Bonus content

Each CEO has bonus content available to ASPA members that is not found in the book. The philosophies below are sourced directly from the interview, however each interview contained so much great content we had to put together an excerpt. Note that the content of the interview differs than the philosophies.

Interview

Carolyn has had an incredible journey in sport, from the public service to world cups to netball. 

Tell us about your journey! How did you start out your career?

I always wanted to be a PE teacher, and so that’s what I did. I thought it was the absolute ‘bees knees’. I had set up Como Senior High School as a specialist hockey school, which was a role I was actually headhunted for. It was a dream job, absolutely.

And then one day, back in the thermal fax days, a fax arrived. Do you remember faxes?

A what? (Laughs) Just kidding. We're not that young!

Well I got a phone call, because there were no mobile phones. They rang the office, who put me through to my office, and I picked it up, and they said, "We're about to send you a fax. Can you go and get it?"

Go and get it?

Ordinarily the office would receive it and give it to you, so I assumed this must’ve been private. Real confidential kind of stuff.

In any case I had to go down to the main office to get thermal fax. And this document came through, and it was the WA Sport and Rec Department, offering me a job. They were asking whether I would come in for a secondment for six months.

Government to government, they could do that. I read this thing walking back down the corridor with all these pages to it. I thought to myself, "Oh yeah, I could do that. Yeah, I could do that." So, I took that job on. The principal reluctantly gave me 12 months' leave to go and do that.

And I got in there, and I think it was week two of sitting at the top of Premier in Cabinet, which was in the Capitol Building in Perth at St. George's Terrace. And I could almost see Como High School from the window, and I just went, "Oh, I'm not going back there.”

(Laughs)

It was just that moment of reality, that I could do all this other stuff. That was the start of my more professional sports administration career. 

That took you into a role around applying for the World Cup bid. How did you end up there?

That was really interesting. The opportunity was given by FIH, the governing body of hockey, to apply for World Cups. And it was way before we knew the big processes like they are today with the dollars attached to them. And being European-based, they ran it from sometime in November to sometime mid-January, because they don't really stop much for the Christmas break like we do. 

I was trying to put this bid together from Perth to host this World Cup, and this was in 1998, for 2002. And I couldn't get anyone to answer the phones at FIH. I couldn't get any information. This whole thing was done on this speculation about what we could get and how it would look. And I put this bid in through Women's Hockey Australia.

Was the sport not unified at that time?

No, Hockey Australia didn't exist then. Hockey Australia came into play in 2000. At the time it was still Women's Hockey Australia that I was working with.

More specifically, Hockey Australia was called AHA, Australian Hockey Association. But the two genders came together in 2000. That was the formal merger of the sport.

In fact, it might have even been 2002, but it was because all the international bodies were pushing for these mergers of men's and women's sport, because they would run quite separately and resource quite separately, which is not very efficient.

So you put in this bid… what happened?

I remember trying to stay awake all night to see if I could ring Brussels, which is where FIH was based. There was a window in which I could call, to see if we'd been successful. Being in Perth, it was something like 2:00 to 3:00 AM.

Well, I fell asleep. Didn't ring. And my clock radio, do you remember those?

Yes. They were a lot easier to snooze than our smartphones. You could bang it with your hand to stop the noise without worrying about a screen replacement.

(laughs) Well, my clock radio came on at 6:00 am, as it does every morning, with the news to say, "Perth has been successful."

Oh, it still makes me get goosebumps to this day!

"Perth has been successful in winning the bid to host the 2002 Women's Hockey World Cup."

My life sort of changed from there, because I went, "Oh, shit. (laughs) What do I do now?"

So what did you do?

In that time, I met my now husband, and his business interests were based in Sydney, and I was in Perth. For 18 months, we did long distance relationship stuff. And at that time, Ansett stopped flying, so to fly to Sydney was $1700, $1800 each way. And you couldn't get a ticket.

Long story short, we never added up what it cost us. (laughing)

As soon as the final ceremony was over for the world cup, which was in December 2002, I moved to Sydney.

Did you have a role in mind?

The month before that, I started looking for a job in Sydney. There was one advertised by Netball in New South Wales. It was called technical services manager. And I thought, "Oh, it must be something to do with computers." I looked at it a bit more, and it was a fancy term for all things game development, what we'd call game development these days. So, I sent my fax reply over.

I reckon it had hit the desk in Sydney, and they rang straight away and said, "Can you come for an interview?" I said, "No, I can't come for an interview. I'm about to run a World Cup and I'm in Perth!"

That lasted about two seconds, and I reneged and came on the midnight flight on the Thursday, interviewed straight ...

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