Te Hāpaitanga is a holistic coach development initiative enabling more women to pursue and maintain careers in high performance coaching in New Zealand.
Breaking through barriers and rewriting the playbook: Te Hāpaitanga’s transformative journey empowers female coaches to thrive in high-performance sports. Discover how diversity is fostering innovation and reshaping the coaching landscape in the third part of our series with Luke Kirkness.
Success as a coach is not solely determined by skill but by the ability to navigate a complex and challenging landscape.
The programme builds a pathway for progress in high-performance coaching, offering women the tools, support and community they need to thrive in a traditionally male-dominated field. Through the programme, barriers are broken, biases are challenged, and diversity is celebrated, helping to lead to a more inclusive and innovative coaching landscape.
Only four women were in high-performance director (HPDs) roles across 28 different national sporting organisations (NSOs) at the start of the initial pilot in 2020. Today there are 12 female HPDs across 48 NSOs.
Helene Wilson, HPSNZ’s women in high-performance sport manager, emphasises the importance of creating networks and communities within the coaching landscape, noting that these connections benefit not only coaches but also athletes.
“The whole women in sport movement has the ability to connect women with other women in sport. You go back 10 years and coaches wouldn’t even know the other women but now there is this network who ask people for advice.
“For athletes to know that these women are being trained as coaches and in high performance, it helps women athletes to have a women coach in the environment. They are used to having men, and men and women have a different approach to coaching.”
Mentor Helen Wilson (netball) with coaches Gemma Lewis (football) and Natalie Lawrence (football) at the first Te Hāpaitanga residential at Whakatō Marae in 2020. Photo / Photosport
However, despite the successes of Te Hāpaitanga, Wilson says it will take time before the seeds are sown.
“When you’re in the business of developing people so they know themselves better and can serve the athlete, sport and system in a way that enhances it, it’s a long slow burn. The biggest challenge is not developing the women but putting them into the roles where they can continue to develop and learn on the job.
“The easy thing is attracting people who want to be developed, but how do you stay there and how does the system see the women for the difference they bring rather than bringing in the coaches whose skillset is the same as coaches already coaching.
“When you’re developing someone, you might not see them in a head coaching role for another three to five years but continuing to work with them on your leadership is vitally important as an increase in leadership responsibility in HP is massive”
Former Tall Fern Jody Cameron heads the programme, joining midway through the second cohort, and says cross-code coach interaction is one of its most valuable assets, highlighting the benefit of diverse thinking, mindset, and experiences in accelerating coaches’ development.
“That diverse thinking or lending to each other in terms of thinking, mindset, skillset and experiences helps them to develop quickly... it just benefits everybody. You’re not going on this journey by yourself, which can be lonely in high performance. If you think about it, it’s a free resource where you can get solutions to problems.
Te Hāpaitanga programme lead Jody Cameron led the Tall Ferns against Serbia in June last year. Photo / Photosport
“It might not even be a problem in another sport, someone might offer some advice about how they avoid something from happening or an option on how they tried to avoid it.”
“When I don’t hear from the women [after they leave] it’s a good thing. They don’t need to tap into the NSO or myself, they just speak with each other and figure it out. The confidence soars – you can tell in their language and how they ask questions and what kind of thinking they bring to the table by the end.”
Because female coaches have to work with men, Te Hāpaitanga has several men who act as mentors, speakers and advisors – former Football Ferns head coach and current All Whites assistant coach Tony Readings is one of them.
Speaking to the Herald, Readings emphasised the significance of diversity in coaching environments. He says innovation flourishes when voices from different backgrounds come together in pursuit of a common goal, asserting that “every coach has their blind spots”, and that embracing diversity leads to a more comprehensive and holistic approach to coaching.
“You can always learn from other coaches, we all have our own strengths, weaknesses, biases, and see the world differently but you can always learn from others and there’s more wisdom when you’ve got voices in the room that offer a different opinion. It’s key to any working environment.
“You can apply a more comprehensive and holistic approach to your coaching with diversity. I think it’s vital. Working in the Te Hāpaitanga group, I see a lot of diversity amongst the coaches when they are connecting and collaborating. Every coaching environment should strive to have diversity.”
Former Football Ferns head coach and current All Whites assistant Tony Readings looks over footage with players. Photo / Photosport
Reflecting on his own experience, Readings emphasised the profound impact of having mentors who provided guidance and wisdom that accelerated his learning faster than learning on the job.
“My experience of the advantage of coaching in New Zealand compared to overseas is the ability to access cross-code mentoring is a lot easier because of the values and size of the country, and because it’s so much more accessible it means the learnings can be a lot broader and deeper.
“What I’ve found from my own coaching or from coaches I’ve worked with, when you apply ideas from a different context this is often where the innovation comes from. In this instance, a different sport and when you adapt it to your own context that is often where innovation can become a competitive advantage.
“I think one advantage we have here in NZ is innovation and being able to learn from different sports and mentors. Diversity of coaches means the potential for innovation is greater because of it.”
Luke Kirkness is an Online Sports Editor for the NZ Herald. He previously covered consumer affairs for the Herald and was an assistant news director in the Bay of Plenty. He won Student Journalist of the Year in 2019.
