Holly Ransom: Port Adelaide’s catalyst for change in AFL and AFLW
She grew up in Perth, barracked for West Coast and lives in Melbourne, so why is young entrepreneur Holly Ransom so critical to Port Adelaide’s AFL and AFLW success?
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At just 31, Holly Ransom has already waxed lyrical with Barack Obama and Richard Branson, co-chaired a G20 youth summit, delivered a peace charter to the Dalai Lama and been touted as a future Australian prime minister.
The Port Adelaide Football Club director is chief executive of her own company, has completed two ironman triathlons and is an acclaimed strategist, keynote speaker, columnist and podcaster. She’s overcome depression, is a Harvard Fulbright scholar who has just released her first book, is a regular on television panel shows, broke new ground when appointed as the youngest female board member of an AFL club and is spearheading the Power’s push to enter a team in the AFLW.
She’s a quintessential overachiever. Smart, successful, energetic and multidimensional. But if you had asked her when she was eight what she wanted to do when she grew up, the answer would have been uncomplicated and unequivocal.
“I wanted to be a Brownlow Medallist,” she jokes about her sports-obsessed younger self. “If you look at my Year 3 journal, that was what was in there. I seemed to have had no conception that there wasn’t an AFLW yet.”
There’s more than a touch of synchronicity between that early life goal and her current role at Port Adelaide. She was also on the advisory group that helped steer the AFL towards the creation of the AFLW in 2017. She’s a massive advocate for female participation in the sport – a passion that has its roots in her childhood, when she was the only girl playing for Claremont Tigers in Perth. And then came the devastating moment she was told, aged 10, she was no longer allowed to play. Because she was a girl.
“Probably the most vividly I can remember crying my eyes out as a child was the day I was told I wasn’t allowed to keep playing,” she says.
“I moved into all other manner of team sports but never stopped loving AFL – that was always the game that we played every school lunchtime. It was the game we’d kicked around with neighbourhood kids in the afternoon. It was always there.”
And it’s still there. In fact, it’s omnipresent. Sure, it’s not her exclusive focus. Far from it. But when discussion turns to Port Adelaide, there’s a passion in her voice that would rival that of any of the diehards around the front bar of the Alberton Hotel.
YOUNG LEADER
Ransom’s grandparents met in Adelaide and moved to Western Australia soon after they married to set up home in Denmark, in the state’s southwest. Her parents lived in Perth, but Ransom has fond childhood memories of surfing holidays shared with her brothers and cousins in the coastal town, about five hours south of the capital.
Her grandparents played a key role in shaping the young Ransom. She dedicates her book to them and one of her earliest memories is of her grandmother standing up to a man yelling at a supermarket checkout operator who had mistakenly given him the wrong change.
“I watched my grandma, all five foot of her, insert herself between this giant and this poor girl and tell him: ‘How dare you talk to a young woman like that. You apologise,’” Ransom says. “I have reflected on that moment so many times. I remember saying: ‘Grandma, that’s so brave.’ And she said: ‘If you walk past it, you tell the world it (that behaviour) is OK.’
“It’s a lesson that I didn’t really fully understand for a long time, but I’ve never forgotten that moment. I think all of us have those moments every day that we can take responsibility for changing and directing in new ways and making different choices.”
Ransom didn’t need to wait long before she was making significant choices of her own about the direction of her life.
She was identified for a leadership program at school when she was 15 and then enrolled in University of WA in a law/arts degree with a major in economics and a minor in political science. If she was going to change the world, she reasoned, she first needed to understand how it worked.
She adopted the ethos of vice chancellor Alan Robson, who told students that if they left their courses with just a piece of paper certifying their degree, the university would have failed them.
So she threw herself into university life, both inside and outside the classroom, worked in numerous non-profit organisations (and founded some of her own) and started to enter the WA public consciousness as a speaker, consultant, leadership coach and women’s advocate.
While delivering a keynote address for International Women’s Day at Perth’s Government House in 2011 she met renowned businessman Sam Walsh, who was head of Rio Tinto at the time.
Ransom was just 21 and working as a paralegal at the time, but Walsh was impressed. He created a position for her to drive change at the mining company and became a mentor and close friend who would go on to describe her as “a human dynamo” whose “intellect, empathy, drive and energy are endless” and nominate her as a future prime minister. Not that it’s a position she especially covets. But more on that later.
In 2012 she was the youngest named in an Australian Financial Review list of Australia’s 100 most influential women, was WA’s young person of the year, young volunteer of the year and became the world’s youngest Rotary club president.
Her life was already on the up and up, a trajectory that continued when she received a call from then prime minister Tony Abbott asking her to chair a G20 youth summit in Sydney in 2014.
That appointment prompted a move to Melbourne, where she founded consulting agency Emergent Solutions and continued to impress movers and shakers in both the business and government sectors.
JOINING THE POWER
Hence she came to the attention of Port Adelaide chairman David Koch when he was on the hunt for an alternative voice to fill a vacant spot on the Port Adelaide board. Koch gave her a call, the pair had lunch in Melbourne and he asked the former West Coast Eagles supporter if she’d be interested.
“I thought she was a remarkable young Australian,” Koch says. “My job is to attract the very best world-class talent to the board. Directors are almost exclusively drawn from Port Adelaide’s supporter base but I wanted to change the age profile of the board to better reflect the generation of our players, staff and young members. I also wanted someone who thought like a disrupter, who would challenge our thinking, traditions and processes.
“That’s what Holly is. She’s a catalyst for change to ensure we continue to evolve as an elite sports organisation. It’s what Richard Branson uses Holly for when she runs the Virgin disruption conference each year … and it’s why she is so critical to our club.
“At the time she was the youngest Australian to have ever been appointed to an AFL board and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made.”
Ransom, just 26 at the time, was impressed from the start and interested in the offer but wanted to ensure she would be more than just the token young woman on the board.
“I always wanted to make a contribution to football, but I never wanted it to be token, either by virtue of my age or my gender,” she says. “And so it really mattered to me that they were asking with a genuine want that I would be invited to contribute and offer different ideas. I wouldn’t just be making up the numbers.”
She went through a robust process of meeting then chief executive Keith Thomas and other senior board members and signed up at the start of 2016 as part of a Koch plan to increase the board’s diversity. Five years down the track, that 10-person board now boasts three women (Ransom, Kathy Nagle and Christine Zeitz), a Sydney-based chairman in Koch, three members based in Melbourne (Ransom, Cos Cardone and Andrew Day) and tennis coach Darren Cahill, who spends much of his time travelling overseas with world No.10 Simona Halep.
She’s now a Port Adelaide tragic and can’t believe she ever supported another team – especially West Coast, a club that has caused the Power significant heartache during her time on the board, not least of which was an extra-time elimination final loss at Adelaide Oval in 2017.
“I cannot say enough wonderful things about the leadership of the club from Richo (chief executive Matthew Richardson) through to the board through to so many of the people I’ve had the opportunity to work with that touch our club, from volunteers to our staff and all our footballers,” she says. “One of the things that is really important when you get involved in anything, particularly something that demands as much of your time as being involved in a football club board done properly does, is you’ve got to be able to bleed for them.
“And I think one of the things that became so apparent to me through that process (of her recruitment to the board) was that this is a club I would walk through fire for. There was so much I loved about it.”
Her intuition turned out to be spot on. She admits she could rave about the Power for hours and whenever she watches the team play, her heart rate rises so much that her Apple watch tells her to relax and breathe. She’s excited by the future of a club that has high hopes of progressing deep into this year’s AFL finals series, plans for a $30m upgrade at Alberton, will enter a team in the 2022-23 AFLW season and record membership levels. “There’s a lot to be proud of and excited by,” she says.
Ransom chairs Port Adelaide’s people and welfare committee and, Covid lockdowns allowing, flies from her home in Melbourne to as many games as possible, including regular long weekends in Adelaide structured around the AFL fixture, full-day board meetings, SANFL games and sponsors’ functions.
She’s pumped by the growth in female participation in the sport across the country since the inception of the AFLW and proud to be a member of the growing number of female AFL club directors – there are now more than 30 across the competition compared with just two when Richmond president Peggy O’Neal first joined the Tigers’ board in 2005.
But Ransom also knows there’s still a long way to go before the AFL reaches anything approaching gender equity.
“I don’t think we’re doing well enough in terms of executive leadership of clubs – we can’t point to any female CEOs at the moment,” she says. “You can’t point to any female heads of footy, you don’t even see so much of that in the women’s game.
“And that’s something we (Port Adelaide) acknowledge – we want to make a really big contribution to the female coaching space in the AFLW and be a real talent pipeline for female coaches.”
LEADING CHANGE
While Ransom dreams of a future with more women at high levels in the AFL, she’s equally passionate about the need for more of all of us, of both genders, to embrace leadership and drive societal change. It’s time, she says, to end the lack of generational, gender and cultural diversity among those who have traditionally controlled and led both communities and countries.
Hence her new book, the not-so-pithy title of which sums up her philosophy and challenge to others: The Leading Edge: Dream big, spark change and become the leader the world needs you to be.
The book is the culmination of a decade studying leadership, interviewing luminaries including Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Sir Richard Branson and Malcolm Gladwell. She calls on more than 60 case studies from 42 different sectors and 20-plus countries with an equal gender split representing every generational and sexual orientation.
“I want to intentionally disrupt the narrative that we’ve got on leadership and to tell a very different set of stories,” she says.
“You are a leader in every facet of your life. You’re a leader in the way that you show up in your household. You’re a leader in the context of your community. You’re a leader in your team, or with the people you’re collaborating with in your company.”
Ransom believes the next generation of progress will be driven more by the business sector than a political system which has left many Australians disillusioned after a dearth of genuine leadership in the past decade. She blames a lack of diversity among politicians, many of whom have no life experience outside of politics, and the toxic nature of a party structure that breeds power struggles and character assassinations for much of Canberra’s flaws.
So, despite the prime ministerial predictions of former Rio Tinto boss Walsh and others, she’s not interested in a move into politics. But that doesn’t mean she’s not interested in driving change.
“I’m a huge believer that in the next generation of progress there will be a lot more leadership, and I think we’re already seeing this in other parts of the world, provided by business (first), and then government. Government will always play a role in system-level change, but when you see the progressive leadership, where you’re seeing where pressure is coming from for reform, I think you’re going to see a lot more from business leaders who are, in part, responding to the community much more directly; this engagement they’ve got, on a much more regular basis, with staff turnover and customers voting with their wallets.
“So civil society and corporations and hopefully more collaboration between the two will play a very big role in shaping the future of this country. And I think you’re more able to achieve change from outside the system right now than you are in.”
IRON WOMAN
Ransom has been open about her year-long struggle with depression in 2013, a year she says she struggles to remember because of the thick fog that numbed her consciousness. It was the first time she had encountered crippling energy shortages and days of not wanting to get out of bed, and the experience prompted her to re-evaluate some of her choices.
She says overcoming depression was one of the hardest things she has had to do but claims it as one of her most powerful and significant achievements. Her recovery was the catalyst for embarking on two major challenges – completing an ironman triathlon and embarking on what she calls her “year of fear”, during which she and a friend vowed that every day they would complete a task they were afraid of.
She signed up for an ironman in Busselton, WA, less than 100 days out from an event that combines a 3.8km swim, 180km bike ride and 42km run. She was hopelessly underprepared but finished in 13 hours and 53 minutes. Nine months later, she did it all again, this time in California, shaving about 90 minutes off her time.
“I made a promise to myself that when I developed these new kind of coping skills and strategies (for depression), I would test them with what I thought was the most challenging thing I could, which was an ironman,” she says.
She also wanted to help lift the stigma around mental health and prove that people did not need to be defined by their mental health demons.
Her “year of fear” also included starting singing and acting lessons, stand-up comedy, quitting her job to create her business and jumping into the ice-cold waters of the Antarctic – pretty much anything that forced her outside her comfort zone. She’s no longer in training for any specific event, but says daily trail runs have kept her sane during the past 18 months of lockdowns in Melbourne. She’s joined on these runs by her partner Kate Gill – former striker and captain of Australia’s national women’s soccer team The Matildas.
The pair hooked up a couple of years ago and bought a house in Melbourne earlier this year, and Ransom has recruited the soccer fanatic, who scored 41 goals during 86 games for her country, to the Port Adelaide bandwagon. Any spare time they have at home together is usually spent watching sport, and Ransom also relaxes by cooking most nights – a hobby she says harks back to childhood memories of time in the kitchen with her grandma.
As the Power works towards entry into the AFLW, Ransom laughs off any suggestion that, at 31, she’s still young enough to dust off the boots and live out a childhood dream to play the game at the highest level.
“I remember when we went to China (where the Power played three AFL games for premiership points in 2017, ’18 and ’19) we were having a kick on the oval in Shanghai and (club legend) George Fiacchi thought I was a half-decent kick, which he couldn’t get his head around,” she laughs.
“I remember him making a song and dance about how whenever we entered the AFLW we had to make that (her pulling on the boots) happen. But I am far too long out of the game to make that work. I would certainly love to play a role, even informally, in the leadership development side and supporting our girls. But in terms of putting on the boots, I think my glory days finished at about age 10.”
But she’s optimistic Port Adelaide’s glory days are far from over. I finish our interview by asking if she thinks Port, which has defied a long injury list to entrench itself inside the AFL’s top four, can win the premiership this year.
“Absolutely,” she replies without hesitation. “Yeah. I’m a believer. At our best, with our best, we can beat anyone on any given day.”
The Leading Edge: Dream big, spark change and become the leader the world needs you to be, by Holly Ransom, Penguin Random House Australia, $34.99
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