‘A lot of girls delay having a family’: Geitz reveals pregnancy struggles
After watching Laura Geitz pave the way for netballers to be mums, Firebirds star Gretel Bueta is following in her footsteps.
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Cradling her baby bump, which is finally showing at 30 weeks, Gretel Bueta is beaming.
“Think light,” she whispers to Laura Geitz, who is also 30 weeks pregnant with her third child, as they walk across Geitz’s picturesque Brookfield property, and the former netball teammates, both towering above 1.8m (six feet), laugh in unison.
Every parent she knows, including Geitz, tells her to enjoy the last weeks of her pregnancy (the pair are now 34 weeks at the time of publication).
She knows these final weeks will be the last time she will share alone with husband Nico Bueta, whom she married 10 months ago. But she can’t help counting the days.
“I’m still so excited to meet our baby boy,” Bueta smiles warmly. “I just want to wake up and have him here.”
The 27-year-old goal attack was the reigning Liz Ellis Diamond winner, netball’s highest individual honour, when she announced in July that she would sit out the 2020 season for the Queensland Firebirds to start a family.
She has been assisting from the sidelines, just returning from a training camp with the Australian Diamonds, the national team of which she is still a fundamental part.
If everything goes to plan, Bueta will welcome her son in January and be back on court for the 2021 Suncorp Super Netball season, having already been named a key member of the Firebirds’ shooting circle.
“We knew when the time was right we’d look at having a family, and as an athlete you don’t really know if that’s going to happen straight away, but we were very fortunate,” she says. “I wanted a family so badly that I was OK with stepping back.”
Becoming a mother, at a young age if fate would permit it, was one of two things she’d been sure of growing up on the Gold Coast. The other, unsurprisingly at 191cm and with two older brothers, Kurt and Joel Tippett drafted into the AFL, was to be an athlete.
“I remember in Year 6 we had to write down what we wanted to be and I said, ‘an athlete’. I felt most at home playing sport.”
But when she signed her first contract with the Firebirds in 2015, following a switch from basketball to netball, she faced the reality – one many female athletes do – that she wasn’t sure how she could be both an athlete and a mother.
Netball was semi-professional then and the talented shooter, like most netballers, was supplementing her income, using her nutrition studies to release nutrition and fitness programs, and running netball clinics to “pay the rent and do the grocery shopping”.
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“You never thought of netball as your job,” she says. “You just did it because you loved it, and then you make ends meet other ways.”
So taking a step away to have a child and then finding a way back onto the court seemed an impossible task for many of Australia’s star netballers.
Geitz, who played 32 games for Australia between 2011 and 2018 and was among the first to return with a child, smiles broadly as she listens to how supported Bueta has been throughout her pregnancy.
“She’s been determined that she’s wanted to be a mum, she has wanted it for so long,” Geitz, 33, says.
“To hear that Gretel is pregnant and attended an Australian camp last week, it shows the sport’s intentions and how progressed it has become, and I think it had to.
“When I was just coming through the Aussie team it was your career and then you have family life after your career, and we would often speak about how the Kiwi girls would combine motherhood with coming back and how crazy that actually was.”
Netball Australia had a parental policy in place, but it was a hurdle not many knew how to leap over until they retired.
“A lot of girls that I played with did delay having a family,” Geitz says. “But then they got to their thirties and had trouble falling pregnant and that’s a big issue.”
In the change rooms of the 2016 ANZ Championship, after Geitz led the Firebirds to a third premiership win, she shocked the netball world by announcing she was nine weeks pregnant and that, in a huge loss for Australian netball, she had played her last game at 28.
“When I fell pregnant I felt quite comfortable. (My husband) Mark (Gilbride) and I were ready to start a family,” she recalls.
“When you’re playing sport it goes so quickly; one season bleeds into the next, into the next. I remember thinking at 21, ‘I’d love to start a family at 24’, but I was 28.”
“Similar to Grets, I actually thought it wouldn’t happen as soon as it did, so for that I’m grateful. We had won the premiership so it was kind of like, ‘Oh well, that’s a nice place to finish. If that’s it, then that’s it’.”
Months later, in early 2017, the professional Suncorp Super Netball league was formed, ushering in a groundbreaking parental care policy, which went beyond what was legally required by including full income protection for contracted players for two years when they fell pregnant.
The returning player would also be able to travel with their baby, up to 12 months old or while they breastfed, along with their chosen babysitter, at the club’s expense.
Geitz had given birth to her son, Barney, in February that year while Australian teammates Rebecca Bulley and Renae Ingles had also stepped away to have children.
“I knew there were plans in place about supporting mothers coming back,” Geitz says. “It was a couple of us who had fallen pregnant and we thought if one comes back then they have to support us.”
She contemplated returning to the game for some time, endlessly consulting friends, family, coaches and trainers. But it was simple advice from rugby union legend John Eales that proved the turning point for Geitz, motivating a spectacular return and silver medal win for Australia in the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
“He said, ‘You have to retire when you’ve exhausted all your love for the game’ and I just hadn’t,” she says. “And that was the short and sharp message where I was like ‘Well no, I’m not completely done’.”
One of the first Australian players to utilise the new policy, Geitz had a carer with her – a roster of her husband, her mum and a babysitter – throughout the 2018 season.
“It was a huge step for netball to bring that agreement into place, but that’s not to say it wasn’t without challenges,” she says.
“I was the first person at the Firebirds to come back under (coach) Rose (Jencke) to have a baby … and no one had any motherhood experience.”
“As an athlete, you are a selfish person. You’re told so early on that sleep and eating are your two biggest recovery methods that need to be prioritised and then you’re a new mother … feeling guilty that you’re not ticking all the boxes of what you should be doing to perform.”
After retiring at the end of the 2018 season, Geitz, who’d always dreamt of having a large family, fell pregnant again and welcomed her second son, Frank, in July 2019.
“Come that next 12 months I had well and truly exhausted my love for the game,” she laughs. “Now if I looked back and I didn’t (return to the sport) I would have always wished and thought, ‘What if I did?’ So I’m definitely glad I did.”
It was during a pilates class in Paddington less than a year later that Bueta showed Geitz her seven-week ultrasound scan and Geitz passed her a scan in return.
“That’s not mine, that’s yours,” Bueta recalls saying, stunned. “That was the best surprise ever. I remember when she came back after Barney, I said ‘When you have your third, I’ll be ready for my first’. I just said it. So it’s crazy how it’s worked out.”
Bueta had been in the dressing rooms celebrating the 2016 victory when Geitz announced her pregnancy and met Barney when he was four days old.
She was with her teammate throughout her return to the sport, watching her get help organising a car with a baby seat during away games.
“Until a very good friend of mine went through it I wasn’t really quite sure how you do it. I’m a realist, too,” Bueta says when discussing her decision to start a family.
After getting engaged on a camping trip north of Noosa in November and marrying Nico on the Gold Coast in March, with Geitz as her bridesmaid and Jencke among the guests, Bueta discovered she was pregnant a few days before Mother’s Day in May. She placed a tiny onesie on the bed in their Murarrie home so Nico would see it when he walked in.
They each have two siblings and Bueta admits she “sussed out” early on, after they met on a night out five years ago, that he wanted a family, and at a young age, too.
Despite being inspired by Geitz and Bulley that she could have a child and come back to netball, Bueta felt anxious about telling the Firebirds she would have to sit out the season.
“A part of you, playing a team sport, you never want to let the team down,” she says.
“It was pre-season so I was struggling to keep up. I told Rose and then two weeks later we told the girls. They were amazing. I shouldn’t have been as nervous as I was.”
Firebirds chief executive Catherine Clark remembers her text message exchange with Bueta. She herself had fallen pregnant shortly after taking on the top job at the Firebirds in 2015 and had confronted her own challenges as an executive, organising a support person for board meetings.
“My connection is very personal,” Clark says. “I just said to her ‘I am so happy for you, don’t apologise to anyone’. There can be a perception you will interfere with plans but I remember someone said to me, ‘There is no perfect time, Catherine,’ and that’s what I try to impart to any player. It’s a blessing (to fall pregnant) and we will support them 1000 per cent, so they know there’s no risk.”
Clark believes making players feel emotionally and legally supported to have children and return, an issue unique to female athletes, is fundamental to netball’s growth as a professional sport, allowing players to have longer careers without making difficult sacrifices in their personal lives.
“Netball has pioneered the way for women’s professional sport for a long time and this is an extension of that,” she says.
“There was a perception of once you hit thirty you move on and the role we play is, how do we provide players with options so they can have children if it’s right for them in their twenties, challenge that old assumption, and keep playing for many years.”
“Laura’s comeback was a statement that resonated well beyond one player; it was saying to female athletes out there that you can do this, and that’s something we as a club want to amplify.”
With fellow mum Kim Ravaillion set to return to the Firebirds alongside Bueta in 2021, Clark says they are continuing to discuss ways the club can better support mothers, whether that means a dedicated club nanny or crèche on game days.
From next year the minimum salary of contracted netballers will also rise 10 per cent to $33,000, with a potential average salary of $75,000, making them Australia’s highest-paid female domestic club athletes.
They are also able to gain work relating to netball development outside their club’s salary cap.
But, still sitting a long way below the lofty salaries in male sporting codes such as NRL and AFL, Clark says pay parity is “the next frontier”.
“Many of our players now are able to leverage their athletic career to produce more revenue to support a professional involvement in the game and that’s growing rapidly,” she says.
“It’s fair to say there is a large gap between where our NRL counterparts are to where we are sitting in netball. I don’t buy into traditional arguments that more broadcast numbers means therefore they are paid more; that’s an easy statement to make when you have been given priority broadcast positions. We need to go deeper and be resourceful to reduce that gap.”
Bueta is among those who now feels fully supported by her netball career and, still under the hoop putting up shots three times a week, she’s ready for the challenge ahead of her after giving birth.
But, as it was instilled in her from the beginning running netball clinics to make ends meet, she will always consider netball as her passion rather than her job.
“That’s the mentality I still have; I want to be the best possible netballer I can be because I love it,” she says.
“When you compare it to the male sports it’s not quite there yet, but in saying that it has come a long way. We’ve just got so much more opportunity now with Suncorp Super Netball, it’s like a dream.
“We have young girls coming through pushing for that position and that’s what’s going to make the Diamonds successful and I know I have a challenge ahead of me to get back, which is exciting.”
It’s a sentiment Geitz, who is keeping the sex of her third child a surprise, resolutely agrees with, having played much of her early career knowing there was no chance of a full-time pay in netball.
“You do look at male sporting codes and there’s always the want and wish, but being an athlete you have to accept that things don’t always happen how you want them to,” she says.
“It (netball) is a very short period of your life … so I hope, as more money comes into the game, that girls still realise it’s important to have something else.”
Now two years into her retirement she recalls a moment earlier in the week when she decided to go all out for her two boys, buying kinetic sand for Barney, now three, and a toy blower for Frank, one.
“Frank came in and blew the sand all over Barney’s floor and those are the days I think, ‘I used to be such a capable woman’,” she laughs.
“And then they’ll say things to you like Barney says, ‘Oh Mummy, I love you so much,’ and those moments, nothing compares to that.”
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