‘Calmness under pressure’: The AFL’s first female leadership duo on heading North

This story is part of the July 29 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

IT’S game day for North Melbourne Football Club and the players and staff are filing from their bus across a concourse towards Heritage Bank Stadium on the Gold Coast. A gate guard steps forward to block a woman from moving through the security barrier. “You need to wait for the club officials to go through,” he says firmly. After an awkward pause, one of the group pipes up: “Mate, she’s the CEO.”

Recalling this moment from April, Jennifer Watt says she took no more offence than she did at a dinner for AFL club CEOs and their partners earlier this year, when someone she’d not previously met inquired who she was there with. Watt puts this kind of thing down to the “unconscious bias” of a still male-dominated field, rather than blatant sexism. After more than 20 years in the footy industry, she knows its blind spots and can talk its language. “I can understand why that person thought that, because that’s all it’s ever been,” she says of the dinner conversation. “I love that this appointment will change that.”

We’re chatting in her bare-bones office in the Kangaroos’ sleek Arden Street headquarters. If an office tells a story about the executive who works there, then Watt’s desk, devoid of framed family photos or other personal touches, says: “Let’s get down to business.” There’s a slim PC and a cheat sheet identifying staff whom the 45-year-old is still getting to know (she only started in the job last November) but that’s about it.

As we talk, the burly frame of Todd Viney, the former Melbourne Demons star who is now the Kangaroos’ general manager of football, appears in the doorway. The Kangaroos are about to announce the selection of a first-gamer, Blake Drury. As has become North’s practice, it will be sprung on Drury in front of the whole club at a kind of agora in the middle of the club’s headquarters, and Viney knows Watt will want to be there. Other staff members also swing past, one to canvas a position on the Voice referendum to be considered by the board, and to update Watt on a possible Indigenous hiring. Another drops in to get approval for a match-day function. It’s clear that Watt is in her element.

“I think I’m underestimated. A lot.”

Sonja Hood

Watt is just the second woman to become CEO of an AFL club. Her president, Sonja Hood, is only the fourth woman to hold that post in Aussie rules, making them the first female president/CEO duo operating at this elite level. Reflecting on this, Hood, 53, says she’s aware her voice resonates differently in the male-dominated rooms she regularly passes through and that she sometimes hesitates to turn a corner in a change room she hasn’t been to before. But she did stare down a mooted board challenge last July from former club administrators Mark Dawson and Francis Trainor, who were displeased with the club’s direction. “That came as a genuine surprise to some people, that I wasn’t interested in rolling over,” she says. “I think I’m underestimated. A lot.”

If there was to be a double break through the glass ceiling anywhere in footy, it was always going to be at North Melbourne. In terms of finances, members, fans and crowds, the Kangaroos are the smallest of the AFL’s nine Melbourne teams and right now are in another long lull, but they’ve always been spunky. The club pioneered Friday night and Good Friday footy, paved a path for Indigenous players and nurtured the game’s first South Sudanese player, Majak Daw. They threw their arms around a former coach and premiership player when Dani Laidley was outed as transgender in 2020. Though scarcely rolling in cash, the Kangaroos were also the first club to give up their admittedly small holding of poker machines.

The Kangaroos nurtured the game’s first South Sudanese player, Majak Daw.Credit: Sebastian Costanzo

Latterly, North Melbourne have been a hub of excellence in women’s footy, with a strong team whose captain, Emma Kearney, is also an assistant coach of the men’s team. Laura Kane, the fastest rising star in the executive at AFL headquarters, came from North. And despite North’s low profile, the club can count two AFL Commission chairmen and a former AFL CEO among its alumni. Friends in high places have not shielded the Kangaroos from the game’s market forces, however. North Melbourne have staunchly resisted repeated AFL pressure to either fold into another club or move somewhere else. This is where Hood comes in.

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Sonja Hood is North Melbourne to her bootlaces. Her parents divorced when she was young and on weekends her father would take his three daughters down to the old Arden Street home ground. “I was here the day the pie stand caught fire, and I was here the day Malcolm Fraser got booed by the North crowd,” she says, smiling. We’re talking in the club boardroom, which overlooks North’s venerable training oval, said to be as old as the suburb itself, dating back to the 1880s.

A mural of past playing greats – Wayne Carey, Malcolm Blight, Keith Greig and the like – adorns one wall. “I’m old enough to remember the smokers’ huddle at quarter time, old enough to remember the senior players eating pies at the bottom of the grandstand while they watched the reserves game.” If she cranes her neck a little from the boardroom she can see the very spot, though the careworn suburban football ground it was then is unrecognisable as the chic training base and administrative HQ it is now.

Since graduating from Melbourne University in the early 1990s, Hood has spent all her adult life working in social policy and public health, including spending more than a decade in the US and the UK, where she met her husband, Jon Kenton, with whom she had two children and has since divorced. In that time, she added a master of science in public policy from Penn State University to her PhD in population health from the University of Melbourne.

She returned to Melbourne in the early 2000s, where she rejoined the diehard Kangaroos crowd but had no thought of becoming more intimately involved with the club. Then, in 2007, “the Gold Coast thing happened”, she explains. That was when the AFL tried again to ship the always financially vulnerable Kangaroos off to Surfers Paradise. Indignant that the AFL could treat a football club as a moveable piece on a chess board, its supporters as expendable, Hood joined a protest movement of fans and members, attending a demonstration with her kids brandishing KEEP NORTH SOUTH placards. That rally picture ran on the front page of the Herald Sun the next day. North stayed south.

“She’s a fan-first president,” says Heath O’Loughlin, a friend and for 12 years North’s media officer, now media manager of the National Basketball League. “She’s been through it all. She ticks more boxes than most would in the sport’s history. She’s thoughtful, considerate, always looks at the other person’s point of view before she forms an opinion. She’s not rash. But she’s deceivingly strong. She’s got real backbone.”

The 2007 protest movement that Sonja Hood joined when the AFL tried to ship the financially vulnerable Kangaroos off to the Gold Coast.Credit: John Donegan

By 2010, Hood was working at the club as CEO of its pioneering community arm, the Huddle, which she describes as the cornerstone of the club. Just as North Melbourne gave her a sense of belonging as a child of divorced parents, the Huddle seeks to provide the same to disadvantaged local communities, particularly migrants and youth. “Footy clubs are aspirational,” she says. “So are young people. So are migrants. We don’t often tap into that. We did.”

In 2015, businessman Peter Scanlon, benefactor to both North and the Huddle, whisked Hood away to become CEO of Community Hubs Australia, a kind of huddle for the whole country. From 39 centres then, it’s grown to more than 100, mostly along the eastern seaboard, and nearly all in needy or socially isolated communities. “It’s getting kids into pre-school,” says Hood, “and mums out of the house.”

In 2019, Hood was appointed to the North Melbourne board, replacing Brian Walsh, who’d left the Kangaroos board to rejoin the AFL as chief of corporate affairs, government and communications. Walsh could see in Hood a future president (“She’s incredibly smart, calm under pressure and strategic,” he says). Last year, she was duly approached about the role.

“There’s this tic that we have as women that the first thing you think is, ‘I can’t do that.’ That still bothers me now.”

Sonja Hood

Reflexively, she said no. Now she wonders why. She had the skills, she knew the club inside out, and she’d overcome her awe of footy’s high-flyers. Most of all, she’d regularly counselled young women to seize their moments. “It really bothered me because there’s this tic that we have as women that the first thing you think is, ‘I can’t do that’,” she says. “That still bothers me now.”

Walsh was thrilled for the supporters and members – and football – when Hood finally took the presidency. But he demurs at the idea that Hood and Watt provide some sort of peculiarly feminine balm. “It would be unfair on them to say that their calmness under pressure is a gender attribute,” he says. “They’re two really talented, strong, values-driven people, who do what they say they’ll do.”

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If Hood was born to North Melbourne, but not necessarily to run the club, Watt was the opposite. Growing up in working-class Frankston, she was a bright student and a natural leader who tried rather than excelled at sport. “I loved playing sport but was absolutely the last person selected,” she recalls. “All heart, no skill. I was often the captain of teams, but no certainty to be selected.” Her CV suggests she’s always had a vocation to lead. “I’ve always found my way to that place, but it wasn’t an aspirational thing. It was that I enjoyed it. I would describe myself as a bossy, organised person who likes to pull groups of people together for purposes or outcomes. I like people. And I like to do well. I like achievement.”

Brother Dan, four years her junior, affectionately calls his sister a “benevolent dictator”. Dan was involved in a ghastly car accident in Denver, Colorado when he was 21 that put him in a coma for days and left him with an
acquired brain injury. His sister flew to his bedside and has been backing him ever since. “If someone had told me back then that Jen would be an AFL club CEO, I would have believed them,” he says. “You’ve got to remember my mum was a very senior manager in the Royal District Nursing Service. My family didn’t see gender.”

Watt’s first job after leaving university was selling memberships for the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre, where she met her future husband, Antony de Jong (they have two kids and have since divorced). She was on $23,000 a year and before long was head-hunted by Ricky Nixon, the entrepreneurial and raffish owner of Flying Start, a sports agency, which managed and marketed the biggest names in the AFL. Nixon wanted Watt to sell memberships to a gym he was opening at Docklands Stadium and was offering $50,000 a year. “To a 23-year-old, it sounded like a million dollars,” Watt explains.

The gym soon collapsed and Nixon later receded from the spotlight, but Watt had received her entrée into football. She became acquainted with famous players and, more importantly, the game’s movers and shakers. Today, Watt’s contact book is more like an AFL directory. She’s an arch networker but don’t call her that; it sounds too transactional. When young women ask her about networking in a man’s world, her advice is simple: “Don’t network. Make friends in the industry, because the person sitting next to you will be a leader in the future in this industry and might be your boss one day.”

Jennifer Watt (right) says being CEO is her career path. “I don’t get out of bed and think, ‘How will I be a good female leader today?’ ”Credit: Eddie Jim

Watt’s next stop was Melbourne Football Club, where she would stay for nearly 15 years, beginning in membership and working in every corner of the business. For the last eight, she was on the executive as general manager of marketing and communications.

Those years, from 2003 to 2017, were a turbulent time: Watt prefers to think of them as “issues-rich”. She served under six presidents, six CEOs and alongside six senior coaches. The Demons soared, then plummeted. Brownlow medallist turned president Jim Stynes died of cancer; Watt was there for his inauguration and planned his funeral. Player Troy Broadbridge died in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand. The club was accused of tanking.

A footy club, then, is no place for shrinking violets. Watt is renowned for calling a spade a spade. “There might be the odd C-bomb in there,” says long-time friend and former Melbourne, now Essendon, media executive Ryan Larkin. “She’s always had a good mix of work and humour. She’s lots of fun.”

Watt says her years at Melbourne were her making, teaching her how to be more innovative and far more resilient than she’d previously been. Every day at the Kangaroos she’s “called on the muscle” she built with the Demons. In 2015, pioneer female footballer Debbie Lee came into Watt’s office at Melbourne when the club were “diddling around” with marketing strategies
for China and India. “I know a group of people who are really passionate about footy,” Lee said. “Maybe we should target them?”

“I loved the idea of being a female going into this really old institution and shaking the foundations.”

Jennifer Watt

From that acorn grew the sturdy sapling that is now AFL Women’s (AFLW). Watt does not claim personal credit for the rise of women’s football, but she’s proud to have helped facilitate its emergence. It did lead to an overture from AFL chief Gillon McLachlan to become the inaugural CEO of AFLW in 2017, just when she was mulling over an offer to move to the Melbourne Cricket Club. “It was chocolate mousse in one hand, pavlova in the other,” she says of the choice. She knew her time at the Demons was up. “You can turn into the old lady who married the club,” she says. “That would have been a nice life but I wanted to do more.” What, though? Kate Roffey, then a Melbourne Demons board member, now president, had an answer: “Don’t think about this job. Think about the job you want to do after that and which job will help you get that.”

The AFLW position was high-profile but narrow. The MCC, which had a partially deserved but wholly unshakeable reputation for fustiness, would widen her horizons. “I loved the idea of being a female going into this really old institution and shaking the foundations,” says Watt. “I used to joke to people that it was the only place in the world where a moderately overweight mother of two in her 40s could feel like an innovator!” She took the MCC job.

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Suddenly, last year, several AFL CEO jobs fell vacant. Previously, the only woman appointed as CEO at an AFL club was Olympic cyclist and cycling administrator Tracey Gaudry, who was appointed to run Hawthorn in 2017. She lasted five months. In an interview with radio station SEN last year, Gaudry said she’d been hit by the perfect storm. She still held a senior board role in cycling, had three teenage children and, two days after she started as CEO, her then husband had a major health scare. “I would hope the league and system took the opportunity to learn from a good intention that wasn’t entirely successful,” Gaudry tells Good Weekend.

Watt had observed the job and its attendant risks in unvarnished close-up. “CEO can be your last job,” she says. “Those six CEOs I had at Melbourne, five of them didn’t leave of their own volition, and they’ve never worked in sport again.”

Yet in contrast to Gaudry, Watt had been inside the AFL system for two decades, and was fully versed in the game and its moving parts. She personally knew at least two who sat on the North assessment panel – of course she did – but says that meant she couldn’t fudge anything.

Watt prepared for the job interview as only she would. She spoke to everyone she knew. She read three books about North Melbourne. She enlisted Melbourne CEO Gary Pert to put her through a mock two-hour interview.

The board’s decision was unanimous, and when it was announced in November last year, Watt was flooded with congratulations. “What I didn’t expect was that it meant so much to other women to get this job,” she says. “My favourite message was from a good friend in the industry, who wrote, ‘I’m standing at Chadstone and crying like a dick.’ It was such a uniquely female response.” Watt says she feels a profound responsibility to succeed because it matters to so many, but that this sits at a subliminal level. “It’s just my career path. It’s my job. I don’t get out of bed and think, ‘How will I be a good female leader today?’”

One of Watt’s mates is former Melbourne coach Neale Daniher, best known these days for his tireless campaign to raise funds for research into motor neurone disease, even as it consumes him. Daniher has outlived his life expectancy by eight years, but now can’t talk. When he learned that Watt had the North job, he wrote with some advice about how to deal with a gruff, old-school coach. “Bless him, he can only communicate now using his eyes to type on a special computer,” Watt says. “He sent me about seven pages of advice.”

Watt swore off alcohol back in her university years when she found knock-off drinks left her fuzzy-headed for her ocean swim the following morning. In footy, not drinking makes her a maverick. At functions, people presume from her naturally bubbly demeanour that she drinks anyway. “I’m also a person of excess and I reckon if I did drink, it would be an expensive habit,” she reflects.

Sonja Hood says she’s not self-conscious about her position as a woman of authority in a man’s world, but she is conscious of it. “I’m aware that in many environments when I speak, my voice is different. And the tone. I don’t shout – there’s still a lot of shouting in footy,” she says. “I don’t tend to speak first. Sometimes in a leadership role, you’ve got to remind yourself that people are waiting to hear from you. I’ve got to remember sometimes to put my voice in.”

Hood has demonstrated steel enough of her own in two ways. Earlier this year, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Surgery and drugs swiftly removed all trace, and she’s now on medication to prevent a return. She likens it to the crisis cycles experienced regularly in clubland. “Everything’s fine, then it’s not fine, then you’re in a crisis, and you’re working out what just happened, then you’re rolling into the next one,” she says. “Except this one was mine.”

The racism allegations against North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson were among a rolling series of crises. Credit: Getty Images

Then there’s the fortitude the position demands. Hood fired former coach David Noble and other football staff last year as part of a reset that brought legendary coach Alastair Clarkson to the club – and, eventually, Watt. (Clarkson, who was presented with several juicy offers from bigger clubs at the time, stepped down as North Melbourne coach in May as a result of the AFL investigation into the treatment of Indigenous players when he was coach at Hawthorn, but has since returned to lighter coaching duties with the Kangaroos.)

Early in her presidency, Hood assimilated three pieces of advice offered by people she respected. One was to make sure the club didn’t go broke. That’s in hand. Another was about her role post-match; she was uncertain of the unwritten rules in the dressing rooms, not necessarily because she was a woman, but because she’d spent so little time there. “They were really clear to me: by all means come down after a win, but you have to be there after a loss.”

The third tip was to make sure the CEO didn’t have a breakdown. That’s also in hand. “One of the things I really respect about Jen is that she’s got a handle on her work-life balance,” Hood says. “To some degree there’s a real advantage in being a working mother because you’ve got to be explicit about it from the beginning.

“I might have to sack Jen at some point, or she might want to resign. You’ve got to keep that in mind.”

Sonja Hood

“I say that with no disrespect to working fathers. When I was on the executive here and my then husband was on the executive where he worked, he’d say, ‘You and I are the only executives who don’t have full-time wives.’ It’s so hard. You’ve really got to plan every minute of your life. Jen’s been doing that for years. She understands.”

Watt has two daughters, 13-year-old Sunny and 10-year-old Lily-Rose, who both play footy. Sunny has taken up umpiring as well, which means Watt’s life is hectic in a way that will be familiar to many. “Half the week I’m a dedicated single parent and most of the week I’m a dedicated North Melbourne CEO,” she says. Hood has been there, done that, with her children Luke, now 25 and Katharine, 23.

Hood and Watt talk almost daily, but rarely socialise; time does not permit. Watt says they enjoy a “comfortably familiarity”; Hood says it’s not so much that they’re both women as that they share values and ideals. “Liking someone helps – but it’s not the main thing,” she says. And there’s this caveat: “I might have to sack her at some point, or she might want to resign. You’ve got to keep that in mind.”

Watt says that for all her qualifications, she did wonder how big the step-up to CEO would be. She hasn’t felt lost at all. A football club is an unusual institution: it’s a business but it’s not. For one thing, it’s subject to a highly public de-facto audit every week. No matter what the tectonic plates are doing, it’s only as good as its last match – and its latest crisis. Both come along like clockwork.

For North, it’s been an “avalanche”, to use Hood’s formulation. There was the upheaval of last season culminating in a third change of coach in four years and a less than propitious start to this one; at the time of writing, the Kangaroos had won only two games. There was the issue of Tarryn Thomas, perhaps the club’s most talented player, who for the first half of the season was under a club-imposed suspension because of claims of harassment of women. Last week, a magistrate fined him, but spared him a conviction. Just when the club thought it was stabilising, coach Clarkson was overwhelmed by the allegations of racist conduct while at Hawthorn, and it would take months for the investigation to run its course and clear him. Most recently, there was the case of former North Melbourne and Perth player Barry Cable, 79, who was stripped of his AFL Hall of Fame and legend status after a civil trial earlier this year found he sexually abused a girl over a five-year period from 1968, when she was 12 or 13 years old.

Watt says she chafes at any preconception that as a woman she should have special insight to the Thomas case and that she was being held to a “higher account” because of it. “It underestimates men significantly to suggest that you need a female to respond adequately to matters of disrespect towards women,” she says. Otherwise, for Watt, this is all very familiar: a smaller club wading methodically through stormy waters. These are grave matters, but Watt says she thrives on crises because each one poses to the club an important, almost existential question: can we be who we say we are?

In most jobs, says Watt, Monday is Monday. At North, as at most clubs, every Monday is the start of a new adventure. “Clubs have spirit and life and people love them,” she says. “All humans love to feel, and clubs let you feel incredible things all the time.”

Hood has always known this.

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