When the top coaching job at the North Melbourne football club recently became available, Lisa Alexander decided to throw her hat in the ring. Alexander’s coaching experience is formidable. She is the two-time Australian Institute of Sport coach of the year. She coached an Australian national team to two World Cup finals, one world cup win and a Commonwealth Games gold medal. She coached one of the top teams in the world for almost a decade. It’s the type of experience clubs dream of in a coach.
But Alexander didn’t get the job. Not only that, she didn’t even get an interview. Because though she was one of Australia’s most successful and experienced coaches, her experience was in netball.
North Melbourne’s decision not to interview Alexander highlights the limited opportunities for women in senior coaching roles in Australia. There are two clear potential paths for women to the senior level of coaching men’s sport in Australia. One is to develop skills and experience in a sport in which there are multiple opportunities for women, then move across to a similar role in men’s sport. The other is to follow a development path within a sport with a men’s and a women’s program. Alexander’s experience suggests the former isn’t considered a serious development pathway.
Ted Lasso aside, transferring coaching skills across sports isn’t just the stuff of fiction. Take, for example, Mike Young. He’s a former minor league baseball player, and Australian baseball player and coach. He’s also the current Australian cricket team fielding coach.
Even within the AFL, the idea of transferrable skills isn’t new: you only need to consider the stories of international imports like Jim Stynes, Tadhg Kennelly, Mason Cox and Mike Pyke, all of whom had considerable success at the highest levels of the game.
The skills that are vital in a senior coach — managing players, developing good assistant coaches, creating a long term plan for success and executing well under pressure — are not exclusive to any one code and are largely transferrable. There is also a strong argument that an outside perspective on tactics could be a significant advantage.
'While senior roles in men’s teams are at least theoretically appointed on "merit", that merit is defined in such a way that it excludes women — it requires experience that is not available to female coaches.'
But if the up-and-across path isn’t available, it makes it all the more