GLENDA KORPORAAL, THE AUSTRALIAN
After appearing on a panel together several years ago, Sydney businesswoman Christine McLoughlin began mentoring cricketer Alyssa Healy, who went on to captain the Australian women’s cricket team that retained the Ashes in England this week. After the Rio Olympics in 2016, McLoughlin, now the chair of Suncorp, chancellor of Wollongong University and a director of Cochlear, was also asked to give some advice to gold medal-winning rugby player Alicia Quirk, who came from Wagga where McLoughlin grew up.
As her mentoring grew, McLoughlin found professional women sports people were facing similar problems in handling the “business” side of their lives – public speaking, managing the demands of sponsors and well wishers, the pressure of study, managing their finances and planning for life after sport.
Her experience led to the founding the Minerva Network, where some 300 leading Australian businesswomen now mentor more than 500 professional Australian sportswomen, including several in the Matildas football team. And it has drawn interest from international sports ministers coming to Sydney for the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
McLoughlin will co-host a cocktail party with visiting Irish Sports Minister Thomas Byrne, on Wednesday ahead of the opening game between the Matildas and the Irish women’s team.
It will be attended by diplomatic representatives from Britain, Argentina, Austria, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, Poland, New Zealand and Ukraine.
“There has been a real interest from sports leaders visiting for the Cup to learn what we have been doing with the Minerva network,” she says. “Men have been doing this for years – why shouldn’t women?” says McLoughlin of the traditional networking and supportive relationships between business leaders and sportsmen around the world.
“Sport is business these days,” she adds.
Women mentors in the Minerva Network include Kylie Rampa, the QIC chief executive and former Lend Lease executive; Louise Adams, the chief operating officer of Aurecon; Kerrie Mather, the Venues NSW chief executive and the former chief executive of Sydney Airport; Louise May, the head of strategy and consulting at Accenture Australia; Romilly Madew, the chief executive of Engineers Australia; and Natasha Roy, operations manager at John Holland.
Company directors Anne Sherry, Holly Kramer, Marina Go, Diane Smith-Gander, Sally Loane and Sam Mostyn are also mentors.
Matildas players who have benefited from Minerva’s mentoring include Ellie Carpenter – one of the network’s first mentees, who started at the age of 17 – Caitlin Foord and Kyah Simon.
Like all elite athletes, their performance on the world stage has come after years of dedication to their sport, which can be significantly assisted by support from trusted advisers and mentors who can help them with the business side of their career.
McLoughlin remembers meeting a young Ellie Carpenter and her mother in one of the early Minerva events.
“I know I’m great at football but I’m about to turn 17 and I need to get around,” Carpenter said. “Can you help me get a car?”
“We told her we couldn’t give her a car, but we could give her the tools to market herself and her potential on the football field in a way which could resonate with the corporate world, including a few of the car companies,” McLoughlin recalls. “Four weeks later, I got an email from her that a global brand company had given her a car.”
When the network started out McLoughlin said common themes emerged. “They (the women athletes) were winning, but they weren’t getting paid,” she says.
“They didn’t know how to navigate sponsorship or manage their brand or ask for appearance money.
“They wanted to know how to choose an agent, to get confidence in public speaking and how to manage their financial affairs.
“Pretty quickly the theme emerged of the value of having a personal mentor with a life which was unrelated to their sport. We started linking individual athletes with individual business leaders and developing programs for them.”
The network started out with one-on-one, face-to-face mentoring, the program spreading by word of mouth.
But things changed when Covid-19 hit and the program had to go online. But what initially seemed a blow to the program allowed it reach another level.
“Athletes travel all the time and they started to come to our webinars and connect with their mentors online,” McLoughlin says.
“Our numbers started to grow like topsy and we now have 526 elite women athletes playing in 70 different sports in the program and around 300 business leaders who are mentors.”
McLoughlin says hosting the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand will be a “game changer” for women’s sport. “The impact will reach well beyond the professional sport levels,” she says. “It will see more girls playing sport, and aspiring to play professionally.
“It leads to a healthier society, greater ambitions for women and higher economic value of women’s sports.”
