Melanie Woosnam, CEO Water Polo QLD

Nicholas Watkins & Ryan Agar, Australian Sports Professional Association
Melanie Woosnam, Water Polo QLD

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

Melanie has a diverse background in sports administration, having been the CEO of Hockey New South Wales, Futsal New South Wales and Queensland Touch Football before running a sports consultancy business for over a decade. She is currently the CEO of Water Polo Queensland. Melanie has also sat on a number of Boards including Stadiums Qld, Redlands Hockey and is currently President of Hockey Australia and a Director on the Board of QSport. 

What a career in sport! Let's wind back a little to the start. Did you always want to work in sport?

Like most kids going to school, I really enjoyed PE and had a really good PE teacher, she was a great role model for me. My love of sport, fuelled from playing sport in school and throughout my junior career, was always going to lead me to a career in the industry eventually.

It really shows the strong, positive influence sport can have on a young person.

Absolutely! It was my first real involvement with sport at school that was the start of a desire to be involved sport as a career. I went to university and studied PE graduating with honours and sports administration was part of the course. The rest really flowed from there!

You somehow managed to skim over the fact that you're a former Hockeyroo.

(Laughs)

It’s no small feat! And it creates a fascinating scenario where you needed to transition from an elite athlete into the administration side of the same sport. How hard was this for you?

I think being an elite athlete, you have a love of sport. I was quite fortunate during my time as a Hockeyroo that I spent three or four years in the national squad under Rick Charlesworth. At the time the Hockeyroos  were a very successful Australian sporting team and probably one of the most successful Olympic teams in that era, it really makes for a great environment to be around. 

So, I was extremely lucky to work in the sport I loved. I started as Promotions Manager for Hockey NSW which evolved into Executive Officer of Hockey NSW. 

But it is difficult to divorce your sporting life from your work when you are in an administration role and you've also been involved with the sport. So, the transition wasn't too difficult.

You found administering a sport you were familiar with was relatively easy, but after so many years in Hockey you moved to Futsal and later Touch Football Queensland. When you leave a sporting community that you have such deep roots in, these established relationships, you have to go and start again. That’s tough!

I think when you've been involved and entrenched in a sport for so long, you obviously have your own opinions about how it used to be administered when you were player. When you come into a sport new, you can actually look at it impartially. 

Whereas if you come in knowing about the sport, you might have a preconceived idea about what you think is priority and it might not necessarily be the case.

That’s a very positive way to look at it. 

The drawback is that you take a longer time to engage with stakeholders and get to know ‘who's who in the zoo’ and, of course, people will always tell you different things. When I came into this role (as anyone coming into a new role will find), you get information about who to be careful of, what your focus should be, and so forth. 

I think you've just got to draw a line in the sand and say, “Well I'm new in this role and I will actually take time to assess the business and understand where the priorities should be” – that’s a necessity. 

It’s almost a cathartic opportunity to ‘start fresh’ or plead ignorance to ‘the way it’s always been done’. 

Yes. Sometimes you still might have to deliver what's left on a strategic plan, sometimes it’s a blank canvas. But I think you get to know very quickly what the strengths and weaknesses of the organization are and where the most focus and the priority areas need to be.

Speaking of priority areas, the sports you’ve been involved with have such a geographical spread of members. That must present some challenges. How do you prioritise where to allocate resources?

When I first started with Hockey [NSW], my role involved travelling around to every centre, and every region of the state. I'd spend a week driving from the border of New South Wales and Queensland down the coast to say, Coffs Harbor. The next week you might go out West to Wagga Wagga and Dubbo.

It's just a matter of having those conversations and understanding how as the state body, you can support and assist your Clubs/Associations. . What is the service that they're expecting for the fees they pay us in terms of how we promote, develop and deliver the sport across such a wide geographical distance?

That is obviously an ideal way to tackle such a spread of stakeholders and Hockey or Touch Football are a relatively large organisations with more resources to implement a strategy like that. But how have you found the experience working in a smaller organisation?

I'll use the example of Touch, because we were quite a high participation sport. I think at one stage we had 70,000 members, in contrast to water polo where we've got about 4,000.

You've got different levels of capacity in terms of funding. You can't always guarantee and rely on government funding. We're quite lucky in Queensland regarding how supportive the state government is, but we always need to think about diversifying those income streams.

Does ‘One Management’ come in to play in there at all?

I think conceptually it is where we can achieve efficiencies in delivering sport more collaboratively at the state and national level. 

Opportunities for shared services like finance, HR, IT, etc makes sense and is certainly something we're exploring in both hockey and water polo. Sport Australia are very supportive of sports who are going down this path because if you can't continue to find efficiencies in the way you deliver your sport, why should the funding continue?

We're not opposed to that, although I think there are alot of sports who perhaps are  not as optimistic about some of the opportunities that can be achieved through a one management approach. 

The barrier for a lot of sports is often the relationship between the state and national bodies. Some sports are amicable and it's working well. For other sports, it varies quite considerably and the level of trust and transparency can be questionable.

It sounds as though there is a vested interest that you see in a lot of organisations where people might say, “Well, I don't want to give up my role or my status” which makes things like ‘One Sport’ or collaboration challenging. 

Absolutely. It all comes back to control.

That’s within the same sport, what is your perspective on learning from different sports when it comes to sharing and collaborating on different ideas?

I think we have a narrow focus sometimes when we think about what a shared services model could look like. For example, here in Sport’s House [QLD] we've probably got maybe 15 or 20 different sports. When you're in a physical space together you have a great opportunity for collaboration. We need to do more of that within sport.

There's certain commonalities and areas where we can definitely do things together. 

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