The Coach Development Facilitators Workshop was designed to build awareness of the strategies all sports can use to empower women in coaching.

For Technical Lead for Victoria and Tasmania with Swimming Australia, Tracey Menzies-Stegbauer, the three-day course embodied a commitment to women coaches across the sector, in line with the High Performance 2032+ Sport Strategy.

“One of the highlights was the shared commitment of making this space a better space for all within sport,” Menzies-Stegbauer said.

“Often in sport we think that we're the lone soldiers that are doing it all on our own, but this week has been a really nice way to see that we are all transitioning in the same direction.

“We're one team and the ‘winning well’ is actually all coming together in a lovely way that IS going to encapsulate many aspects, not just the coaching development, it's going to help the athlete development, it’s going to help even the sustainability of our workforce.

For Matt Wilkie, National HP Coach Development Manager at Rugby Australia, the program will help further accelerate the development of women rugby coaches.

“It's about finding the optimal strategies that maximise those female coaches progressing without setting them up to fail by moving them on too quickly.”

The coach development facilitators learnt tailored strategies around leadership, learning environments and facilitation models suited to women. For Wilkie, this led to a new awareness of the need to invest more time in understanding the best ways to apply these strategies for all.

Menzies-Stegbauer offered one last line of advice to help the sector develop women coaches: “Be supportive. Be good listeners. Allow them to make their own decisions. Allow them to be their own voices.”

Australia’s HP 2032+ Sport Strategy: Win Well was launched in December 2022. It identified the need to diversify Australia’s coaching ranks and so the Women in HP Coaching (WiHPC) Project began. In November 2023 the WiHPC team released the “Fixing the Leaky Pipeline” Action Plan to address why there are so few women in HP coaching- a leaky talent pipeline which drains the sector of women coaches and results in a profound gender gap in head coaching roles. This Workshop is one part of the WiHPC Project which will be reported on annually as part of the WiHPC Scorecard. The 2024 Scorecard will be presented at the WiHPC Showcase in November.