Raelene Castle on toxic social media, CEO tips, Canterbury Bulldogs, Rugby Australia and Israel Folau

Raelene Castle’s journey to the top sports administration gig in New Zealand has been a rollercoaster ride. She smashed glass ceilings in the NRL and with Rugby Australia, before finding herself at the centre of one of sport’s biggest controversies — and returning home to New Zealand as Sport NZ chief executive.

In a wide-ranging, long-form chat with the Between Two Beers podcast, Castle talks about the behind-the-scenes challenges of the Israel Folau saga at Rugby Australia, how she got the job at the Bulldogs, her relationship with Des Hassler and the most insightful memories from six years inside the NRL, lessons in leadership, how she got her start at Netball NZ, her return to New Zealand and the challenges facing sport here.

High-performance sport globally has had its #MeToo moment, and coaching methods that might once have been considered highly successful are no longer okay.

That’s the view of New Zealand’s most powerful female sports administrator, Raelene Castle, speaking on the latest Between Two Beers podcast out this week.

Castle, chief executive of Sport New Zealand, and something of a poster girl for smashing gender barriers given her previous roles as having been the first female CEO of a National Rugby League club (Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs) and then CEO of Rugby Australia, said her central government agency had strategies to assist coaches feel educated and supported to change their style without risking being sacked because a season hadn’t gone well.

“Where we had Harvey Weinstein acting unprofessionally on the casting couch, equally around the world, we’ve had coaches and administrators acting incredibly badly,” Castle said on the award-winning podcast.

“And at the time, we didn’t know it was bad, because that was the way it was — coaches yelling and screaming and swearing and not explaining to athletes why they’ve been selected or why they’ve been dropped, creating forced situations, to create outcomes.

“You know, those might have been okay in 1984, but they’re not okay in 2023-24. The hard thing is those very behaviours have got great results. And we have some people that we can look at internationally and domestically that have been hugely successful, whose methods would not stand up in 2023.

“So that’s a cultural change that needs to happen across the whole world. And it’s happening, you’ve seen it with Simone Biles coming out and talking about the experience that she’s had.

“There is also an expectation that our New Zealand athletes have to have a voice at the table and we are incredibly supportive of that.”

Castle said coaches often might not know what to do or how to change, and needed help on their journey.

“Equally, athletes can step into that conversation and express their views, knowing there’s [now] no consequence for them. Because for many athletes over the years, there were consequences of standing up and speaking about what you believed in or challenging the coach ...

“So there’s this change happening around the world. And from that, you will see some coaches that were successful, not employed any more because that type of behaviour is now not the way it needs to be.”

Castle, who is also chief executive of High Performance Sport New Zealand, said her organisation also saw the challenges of being a female athlete as different to male athletes.

“We used to treat women just like little men. We used to do all the same things to the women that we did to the men, and now there’s different strengthening, conditioning regimes, health regime and support regimes for female athletes than there are for a male athlete. Those things are very different.”

Don’t make the same mistake twice

The most challenging issue Castle has dealt with as a sports administrator was in 2019 in terminating the contract of star Israel Folau, when she was Rugby Australia CEO, after he repeatedly posted on social media railing against same-sex marriage and saying homosexuals would go to hell.

This led to legal proceedings, then multimillion-dollar settlement.

“So the first post — I’m a great believer everyone’s got a right to make a mistake. Just don’t make the same mistake twice,” Castle said.

“So first time, lots of conversation, understanding the implications, the risks, employment risks, you’ve got an employment contract that says you can do some things you can’t do other things. ‘Do you understand that?’, ‘Yes, we understand that’. ‘Are we going to do it again?’ ‘No, we’re not going to do it again.’

“And yep, he shook my hand and said he wouldn’t do it again. And it’s fair to say I don’t have the same faith and handshakes that I had previously.

“Ultimately, there was no coming back from the situation.”

Castle said she worked through the steps of “what managing a crisis looks like”, making sure everyone right through to code sponsors were informed that terminating his contract was the right thing to do.

“We had a diversity inclusion policy that was part of the employment contract. But more importantly, it was something that everyone at Rugby Australia had signed up to.

“So as CEO, I’ve got a responsibility to provide a safe environment for the staff. And I’ve had a number of gay staff. And they were scared, they felt bullied, they felt uncomfortable,

“I had some female gay players who wouldn’t be in the gym same time. So those things become important responsibilities I’ve got as a CEO.

“And those things aren’t popular to discuss. There’s none of that in the media because it’s not the fun stuff to discuss.”

Castle subsequently fielded a lot of inquiries from other CEOs about diversity and inclusion planning, and also universities wanting to use it as a case study.

“Because it was really probably the first in the world where there is the unusual dynamic when you’re the CEO of a high-profile sport, because people around you get paid more than you.

“They’re more high profile than you are. And so therefore the dynamic of what makes the story is that they are a voice and they can often control the narrative because of how big they are.

“That athlete does something wrong, that becomes the story, or ‘that’s the athlete that makes a comment on something’.

“So that’s a very different dynamic than usually in a business, where the CEO is the most high-profile person and therefore the person that’s stepping forward.

And so yeah, it was it was a perfect storm in a lot of ways: the female CEO versus the greatest player. And those types of headlines were fantastic from media point of view. But for all of that noise and how difficult that was, it was a breach of employment contract from where we were sitting, and we just had to deal with it.

“And what was in front of us, and you had to keep coming back to, was: ‘employment contract safe environment’. Those were the two things that just kept us on course.”

‘Don’t read social media’

And in terms of featuring in media, Castle offers some advice: “When you are in the media — don’t read the media.”

“I was fortunate to have a media team who could read it and give me a gist of what it was saying, what the sentiment was, where it was going.

“Same with social media, don’t read social media. I would not have got out of bed in the morning if I had had to take all that on board.

“You go searching for the good stuff because you want confirmation that you’re heading in the right direction and you get horrified by the negative stuff. It takes some discipline not to do that, but that’s a reality.”

An unfortunate companion of Castle’s high-profile career has been public scrutiny of her alopecia (a disease that causes hair loss) that has led her to address it head on.

“I’m sure I’ve got alopecia areata, which means I wear a wig. I’ve got no hair, no eyebrows, and I copped some really horrific social media commentary. ‘Are you a Muslim or a pirate?’, ‘Are you too lazy to do your hair in the morning’, ‘like, why don’t you make a bit of effort?’

“Now males don’t face that. So there is definitely a piece of overlay around being a female leader that puts you into the middle of conversations that male leaders don’t have to face.

“And yeah, you can either think that’s all too hard, or you can try really hard to help change that conversation. Which is why I talk publicly about the alopecia piece because I didn’t want people to think I had cancer. I didn’t want people to think the job was too tough and my hair was falling out because it’s an autoimmune disease.

“And equally, I wanted to help the other young women there are out there who have got alopecia and to show them that yes, you can go on and have a career and do other things and find a way to work through it.

“And I’ve been lucky to have lots of parents ring me, or young women say to me, ‘thanks for sharing your story because it’s, it’s made a difference’.

“I’m just innately half glass full, I’m a realist, but I know that if you can take the positive out of that and share that story, then it will end up being a better outcome than not talking about it at all.”