In which I make a choice to work with the women in the game, having noticed how male-dominated the culture can be. Shocked by the prejudice and encouraged by the talent, I find both a new voice and a new vocation.
LEON SMITH, WHOM I had known since he was a junior player, was now captain of the GB Davis Cup team. I had mentored him all of his adult life, having brought him to work with me when I was the Scotland coach at a time when he had dropped out of college in order to pursue a coaching career. Back then he had bleached blond hair, with a centre parting and a diamond in each ear. He was truly Beckham-esque and all the juniors thought he was ‘the bomb’, Jamie and Andy included.
He had been brimming with enthusiasm for that Davis Cup role, and sought my advice when he applied for the captaincy a year or so earlier. It had looked like it would be a choice between him and Greg Rusedski, and of course the smart money would have said Greg stood a better chance, having been a world-class player and GB Davis Cup stalwart. I wasn’t so sure though, and pointed out to Leon that it wasn’t necessarily all about playing level or experience, but also about his rapport with the players, the team-building and management, and that he could surround himself with others who could provide that playing expertise or any other gaps in his knowledge or experience. I had been around long enough to know that you don’t need to be an expert in absolutely everything. You need to understand what’s required and find the right people to help you deliver it.
I explained that if asked in the interview about his comparative lack of experience, he simply had to make a strategic effort to explain who he would employ around him to plug any of those gaps. He got the job and I was thrilled for him. I loved that he asked me to help him with his very first Davis Cup match in Eastbourne. He wanted me to do the video analysis of the opposition. He had taken me at my word regarding team building. I did the analysis of the Turkish team, put it on a DVD, went through it step by step, clip by clip, presented it to him and his team of coaches and left him to share it with the GB players.
Nevertheless, I promised to head down to Eastbourne for the match – even though neither Andy nor Jamie were on the team – for moral support. The Davis Cup was not just a huge deal to Leon that year, it holds an enormous emotional sway among British tennis players and fans. It’s a long-standing and prestigious event, like Wimbledon, despite not being as much of a money-spinner as the Grand Slams. But it’s the team aspect that really seems to tug at the heartstrings and capture the fans’ imagination. Its industry nickname, the World Cup of Tennis, is certainly appropriate: after the bulk of the year competing as individuals, the Davis Cup brings players together as teams, rooting for each other instead of working out how to beat each other, and enjoying a sense of comradeship that is often absent from the Tour. Similar psychologically and emotionally to the Olympics, it’s an event the players relish for the love of their sport and national pride, rather than because they need to do it for points, rankings or cash.
Mindful of all of this, I sat on my own in the stand behind the baseline for three days and texted Leon’s coaching team anything interesting that I picked up. It’s easier to analyse a match from behind the baseline rather than on the team bench at the side of the court. After that tie, Leon proved to himself that he could do the job, and before long he was flying.
A year or so later, in his role as Head of Men’s and Women’s Tennis, he asked me if I would be interested in taking on the captain’s role with the Fed Cup team, the women’s equivalent of the Davis Cup. It was the first time in forever that someone had approached me about coaching in my own right, rather than as someone related to one of the boys. At first, I wasn’t sure about heading back into that world because of all the travel, the commitment and the hours. Yet I didn’t mind the challenge of going back to the coaching life. And there was something else that tugged at my curiosity: this would be my first opportunity to do something specifically for the women’s game. It might be a chance to develop the female coaching workforce, to build the profile of the female players, to even up the playing field a little bit. That way, perhaps future female coaches and players might not have to go through some of the loneliness, the frustrations or the downright prejudice that I had endured over the last twenty-odd years.
I decided to take Leon up on his offer, and this idea only grew stronger when I spent much of December 2011 and January 2012 travelling with the squad to their various WTA tournaments. I wanted to spend as much time as possible with the squad and their coaches, in the knowledge that the better you get to know them as people, the more chance you have of influencing their performance and finding the right way – or the right words – to do it. I was also getting my first proper look at how the women’s Tour works. I was in Auckland at New Year and then Hobart and Melbourne for the Australian Open. Former British number one Jeremy Bates was in Auckland, and I headed to one of the player parties with him and Fed Cup team member Anne Keothavong, whom he was coaching at the time. I knew one or two of the players who were a similar age to Jamie and Andy and had been juniors with them, but I hadn’t been following the women’s game in the same way that I had the men’s over the years, so they were mostly unfamiliar faces. But one thing struck me that evening, and was reinforced the next day as I sat in the players’ lounge early on waiting to see the girls: there were very, very few female coaches.
Throughout my career, from my decision not to head to train in the US because I couldn’t find anyone who had done it before, through years of watching my boys believe in their own abilities because of what they had seen their own heroes achieve, I have been aware of what an enormous impact positive role models can have. These people don’t have to be saints, but they have to be visible. For young boys and girls to truly believe that something is within their grasp, they have to be able to see it. And the convention in all sport, but particularly tennis at this time, was that the men’s game was the more important. The women’s game was still dominated by male coaches, male pundits and male leaders in governing bodies. Sure, I had an instinctive sense of this as a result of thirty years in tennis, but I had never seen it laid out before me quite as explicitly as I did that week.
That trip was a huge eye-opener for me – I had never stopped to actively consider the dynamics in the women’s game before. But as I sat there and watched player after player greet or arrive with her coach, I realised that of course there are more male coaches than female: it’s a job which is hugely incompatible with many women’s lives. It demands being on the road for at least thirty weeks of the year, a near impossible feat when women are most often the ones taking care of the family. It had never been too much of a struggle for me, because being on the road had meant seeing more of my kids, not less. But my family was not the norm.
Then there is the simple fact that being a coach is the kind of job which is very badly suited to career breaks. To be a top-level coach, you have to be prepared to submit to the demands of top-level players, and that doesn’t lend itself to pragmatic considerations such as getting pregnant, taking maternity leave, or having a steady income. Most coaches are self-employed, living contract to contract, sometimes with little more than a verbal contract, so there’s nothing like maternity pay, let alone severance pay, pensions or other benefits. Again, these were never concerns for me.
On top of these factors, I also started to notice that most of the women players on the Tour preferred not to warm up or hit with each other in practice. They liked to work with men as hitting partners, so they were often inclined to hire coaches who could double up as both. In the men’s game, you’ll get male players playing practice sets with each other, even though they might be huge rivals on the Tour. Women don’t seem to like hitting with other women. In this way, they protect themselves by avoiding comparisons to other women. A great deal of this comes down to the complicated female psychology of competition. In the long term though, it’s actually keeping men in a position of power in the women’s game, simply by a matter of economics.
This had fostered an atmosphere where, on scanning the players’ lounge or the practice courts, it looked as if men were in charge. Just a glance around the room showed a lot of women being told what to do by men. The WTA Tour even allows on court coaching. Once a set, the players can call their coach onto court at an end change – to tell them what to do. This doesn’t exist on the men’s Tour. So the women’s Tour was as much of a male-orientated culture as the men’s tour. This in turn created some uncomfortable dynamics, for the younger players especially.
If you’re away from home for weeks on end with a man with whom your relationship is merely professional, who do you talk to about your fears and worries? Where do you get your comfort, your personal advice, your solace in tough times? With whom do you comfortably discuss the changes in your body? Or even what’s going on in your head? At best, you might be lucky enough to find a sympathetic coach or one who might have daughters, and has dealt with these sorts of situations at home. At worst, you could find someone who sees coaching as merely a matter of delivering technical and tactical advice, rather than providing emotional support as well. It perhaps also explains why so many parents coach their daughters.
On my return from that trip, I started to research why there were so few female coaches in the UK and why most got stuck at the lower levels. A large part of the problem seemed to be the coaches pathway for women. Or lack of it. There weren’t enough opportunities for women to develop their skills or progress. I immediately made it part of my mission at the Fed Cup to take a number of female coaches with me on trips, wherever I could. As far as I was concerned, Leon may have taken me on as the Fed Cup captain and coach, but I was going to expand that role as I saw fit, and look at the bigger picture; it was time to build the image of the Fed Cup, to create a workforce round it and to look to the future. And to do that, we would need a bit of old-fashioned team building. I was almost tempted to start buying puzzle books again!
Run by the International Tennis Federation, like the Davis Cup, the Fed Cup does not require players or coaches to be on hand year-round. The top sixteen countries are divided into two world groups, while all the other nations are divided into regional ‘zones’. At the beginning of February each year, the two teams who come top of each sixteen-team zone go into a play-off with one of the teams relegated from the higher-up ‘world groups’. This is the chance for countries to move up to the top tier world groups and to get home-and-away ties.
Despite being what I called the ‘big sister’ of the Davis Cup, the Fed Cup is generally much less well known than its male counterpart, although it does have the curious accolade of consistently having slightly higher viewing figures than the Davis Cup for the actual final. In fact, research has shown that tennis is one of the few sports regularly watched by more women than men, which is far from represented by the timings of games (prime-time slots go to the men), the prize money (women have had to fight for their prize money to be equal), and so much else (don’t even get me started on sponsorship!).
None of this was helping the Fed Cup’s image in Britain though, where very few people even knew what it is. The zonal matches in February usually attract very little press attention because they take place just after the Australian Open, and most UK media have headed home for a rest. If you don’t break out of those zones in February, you don’t play in the Fed Cup again for another year, making it all but impossible to build any sort of momentum in the press or within the team itself. I had my work cut out.
In preparation for our first trip in February 2012, I set about creating something of a media and social media blitz. The team was on Facebook, Twitter, making fun video clips, writing blogs for places like the BBC Sport website, and trying wherever possible to show that team tennis was something young women could engage with. I wanted us to be seen having fun and for readers to get to know our players – Laura Robson, Heather Watson or Johanna Konta, say – in places where young and not so young women go for their news and entertainment already: women’s magazines, female sections of the newspaper, non-sporty places, as well as sporty blogs, rather than trying to drag them over to the more overtly male domain of sports pages with a sense of duty or worthiness.
It is always going to be largely women who will watch and support women’s sport, so if you’re trying to connect with women, I believe it’s important to do it on their terms instead of trying to change them to suit what you’re already doing. I understood the value of engaging with the image and fashion side of things, too. I wanted to show that sport can be glamorous, as well as exciting. If young women and girls are already reading about what their icons are wearing, let them hear about our team tracksuit too. Or let’s get the team into a photo shoot wearing fantastic team dresses with great make-up. After all, it’s not as if footballers aren’t posing with ever more adventurous hairstyles and in new outfits day in, day out.
What I didn’t want was to bombard young women with stats about matches, scores or training plans, or anything to do with weight loss. Personally, I would much rather read about a sportswoman’s actual life if I came across them in a magazine. I am always fascinated to hear stories about people like Jo Pavey, the athlete who is coached by her husband, or Catriona Matthew, the professional golfer whose husband is her caddy and who travels with her mum as the nanny to keep the family unit together.
Women face all sorts of challenges every day. When you hear about someone who has stepped out of her role and become the breadwinner, it’s always an interesting, often inspiring story. I would love to see more of these stories in women’s magazines alongside the day-to-day travails of reality TV stars I have never heard of – I was determined to try and get my girls into the pages of the magazines, getting their personalities and their sport out there.
That first year, the team was largely split in two, by age and experience. The old guard were Elena Baltacha and Anne Keothavong, who were both around twenty-nine years old and had played in plenty of Fed Cup matches in their time. If I had been able to choose two people to lead my team, hand on heart I would have chosen those two every single time. Both of them had made the top 50 in the world, yet although they had achieved a lot, they weren’t quite household names in the UK. But in terms of passion, dedication, commitment and experience, they were perfect role models for the two younger girls, Laura Robson and Heather Watson, both still teenagers then.
I joined the Fed Cup full of ideas about team building and plans for the future, but to my shock I discovered that the two older girls did not speak to each other. Even more shocking was that this had been going on for years. It was a classic example of how two female players born in the same year, who had come up through the same very narrow British tennis system, came to see each other as enemies. I had never seen a division like this – based on little more than sheer competitiveness nurtured by a toxic system – anywhere on the men’s Tour. These girls had barely spoken to each other since they were teenagers, because they thought that to be competitive and ambitious ruled out any potential not just for friendship, but for respect. I was determined to change this. If the same had happened to me, I would have been half the woman, with half the career. The friendships I had made as a young player had sustained and supported me all my life, sometimes proving the only thing keeping me sane at all!
Our first fixture was in Eilat in Israel, and I was so excited to get there. But when we arrived there wasn’t much of a fuss; the venue was more of a community sports centre really. I had been expecting something a little more grand, and I’d expected a bit more support too. Leon had come out, and a couple of others, but basically it felt more like a club match, rather than a global competition on the scale of the Davis Cup.
Still, the lack of ceremony did leave us more time for team bonding. I had brought a load of games with me, and had asked all of the others to do the same. We had the lot: table games, Pictionary, charades, as well as darts for the team room. The only game that almost didn’t make it, unsurprisingly, was Laura’s game of Pass the Bomb (the timer was shaped like a hand grenade!), which had been confiscated in the ferociously tight security at Tel Aviv airport! We had been briefed to expect heavy security, and had even gone as far as to engage a private security company to take us from the international to the domestic terminal.
In the evenings, I wanted to build the same trust and camaraderie in the team as I had wanted to foster in the kids I drove around the country back in the day: to keep everyone together, so that individual competitiveness, anxieties about matches or simply isolation and self-reflection could all be kept at bay. And by then we were also fighting a battle against the dominance of mobile phones and iPads, as well as social media anxieties. I combatted that with a host of girls versus boys competitive games. Our team was all female and our back-room staff were all male. Perfect for team-building.
I’m proud to say that not only did we qualify and get the chance to go to Sweden for the World Group play-off, but by the time we headed home, Annie and Bally, as they had become known and who had ignored each other for most of their lives, were now sitting together on the bus to the airport, as well as on the flight home, and, crucially, had also agreed to team up to play doubles together. They went on to become great friends. Result. Annie is married and has a daughter now but Bally passed away, cruelly taken by liver cancer just a few months after she retired from tennis. She was only thirty, had just got married and had a whole new life to look forward to. Her death hit me and the boys very hard. Yet another reminder of how precious life is, how we never know what’s round the corner and why we should make the most of every moment and every opportunity.
As always on these trips I had a back-room team of four and wherever possible I tried to give at least one place to a young LTA member of staff who showed potential. I knew that I had to invest in people to help us develop a stronger tennis workforce. The guy I had brought with me to do the video analysis was painfully shy, really quite inexperienced and unbelievably nervous when addressing an all-female team, but he was totally dedicated and by the end of the trip, and many team games and forfeits later, he was happily standing up and presenting his findings as if he’d been doing it for years.
When we headed to Sweden for the next round, I arranged for four female coaches to come with us. They were not directly attached to the team, but they came to learn, and I spent a lot of time explaining how everything was done and showing them the ropes for this sort of trip. They had no direct impact on the results we achieved that year, but they might do in years to come. I was busy building a workforce, creating opportunities for female coaches and trying to foster confidence wherever I could. Leon had given me a coaching role, but I was really doing people management, motivation and marketing.
It was out of these first experiences with the Fed Cup that the idea for my tennis programme for girls, Miss-Hits, emerged. With the Fed Cup, I was working with our best players, but what about the next generation, and the ones after that? So I started looking even further back at how many young girls we had coming into the game, and I realised this was where our problem lay. The numbers were tiny.
In the past the vogue had been for elaborate and expensive countrywide talent identification programmes, designed to discover the best seven- to ten-year-old kids. I had been involved in the LTA’s new Talent Performance Programme in 2007 as a part-time consultant for Scotland, but though the grassroots vision had been admirable, the selection process and the training camps had been set up as if for professional players, not eight-year-old girls. They were, frankly, a load of bollocks. It’s immaterial who the best seven- to ten-year-old kids are if you’re only using this kind of physical selection test. Inevitably, they’re all going to be kids whose parents can afford for them to play tennis from a young age and have private lessons. No wonder tennis seemed like a sport geared to the well-off.
Quite aside from the fact that it is actually somewhat dangerous to label a kid as ‘nationally identified’ at seven or eight years old (the risk of emotional damage if they ever fall from that pedestal is enormous), spending so much on a selection method which benefits so few, rather than simply getting as many kids as possible playing the game and having fun at that age is madness. There might be smart, well-coordinated, passionate kids out there who haven’t been privately trained by an expensive or experienced coach to pass a special eight-year-old’s test, but who might be stars of the future. If we invest in growing the game at the grass roots, more players will emerge further down the line.
There weren’t many girls going into this system, and very few being identified. Research was showing that the numbers of girls playing tennis aged ten and under were decreasing and even fewer were competing regularly, which was leading to tournaments being cancelled. Instead of looking at the reasons why girls weren’t competing and changing the format to make it more fun – more team-based, for example – the powers that be took the easy way out and lumped the competing girls in with the boys. There will always be some little girls who are happy competing with boys – those with brothers most probably – but to many others it will be intimidating and might well herald the end of their involvement in the game.
It wasn’t the girls that were the problem. It was the system. And it was time to change it.
Once again, I looked at all of the research I could find. Tennis Australia had some great findings, and I studied what was going on with girls in other individual and team sports too. What was being done to attract them and encourage them, what was putting them off, what was keeping them in their game.
One of the key problems is the sheer volume of activities fighting for little girls’ attention these days. Most of those things are fun, lively, musical, non-competitive and can be done with their friends. Things like dancing, gymnastics, cheerleading are always cited as favourites – where they can have fun with their bodies and take pride in them, but not be engaged in active competition, which they often deem as being the domain of boys. And it’s no surprise that so many girls think that. Boys are repeatedly told it’s their role in life to be competitive, and to win, from a really early age. At around five to eight years old, they often tend to be more noisy, more physical, more confident and more competitive. We give footballs, building kits and all sorts of ‘doing’ things to boys as gifts, while girls are often given either appearance-based games or quieter tasks such as colouring-in, sticker books or crafts. Even a pregnant woman with a kicky baby will be casually told she has ‘a future footballer’ in her if she knows it’s a boy, but if it’s a girl she’ll simply be told her daughter ‘must be feisty’. It’s nonsense!
Then there is the problem of the cold, which research shows is a huge inhibiting factor for girls. This is a self-perpetuating problem, as the child who is less confident will move less, so they’ll make contact with the ball less, so they will become less competent and more static … making them even colder. No one knows more keenly than I do that playing sport in the dark and the cold is miserable in comparison to playing it in the warmth on a sunny day, unless the coach can make it active, engaging, stimulating and fun.
The prospect of a game like tennis being ‘too difficult’ is also a challenge. If you don’t have the coordination skills, developed at home or in the playground, you will find tennis quite difficult. These days, kids are so often on electronic gadgets, only exercising their thumbs, that they can be really clumsy – they simply haven’t had the chance to develop the motor skills that underpin most sports. So now I find we have to teach those core physical skills like throwing and catching before you can get them to hit the ball with a bat over a net.
The fifth major factor brings us full circle: the scarcity of female coaches. Primary school teachers tend to be female, so children get used to that dynamic. If their first tennis coach is male, it’s quite possible that some girls will struggle with an unfamiliar man delivering the session, especially if that man is inexperienced in how to work with girls. Or you reach adolescence and just as your body starts to change and you feel increasingly awkward and uncomfortable about it, the coach is male and may not understand what you are going through. Girls tick differently to boys and that’s why we need many more female PE teachers and sports coaches to help keep them in sport through the teenage years.
As you can imagine, once I had done my research, it no longer seemed surprising that girls were dropping out of the game as they reached adolescence. So many of the factors putting them off simply boiled down to ‘It’s not fun any more’, ‘My friends stopped playing, so I did, too’ and ‘I feel like it’s all geared towards boys’. But what was the solution? Well, one thing I immediately agreed on when I discussed it with Laura Middleton, who has been one of my closest friends since we were both players and doubles partners back in the 1980s, was that it was time to stop talking about it and do something. And my attempt to address this problem has been Miss-Hits.
Miss-Hits is a tennis programme designed specifically to get girls aged five to eight into tennis, to help them to love it, and to provide a fun, stimulating, easy-to-deliver sessions that might attract more women into tennis coaching, too. We’ve incorporated what girls want to do wherever possible. For example, we have built a warm-up to music into the programme, but we call it the dance section. Job done.
Laura and I created it together and invested in it. I am so proud of what we’ve managed to do. And we have a lot of fun doing it! It’s a twelve-week programme, divided into two six-week blocks, and we travel around the country and beyond, training coaches, in the hope of leaving a generation of new female tennis players and coaches in our wake.
I wanted it to feel like a tennis party. We created a gang of diverse animated characters – Selena Serve, Valentina Volley, Bella Backhand, and so on – to engage with the kids. There is a website, an app, teacher manuals, stickers of the characters, the lot. We don’t even start the kids with tennis balls but with balloons and soft chiffon squares that fall slowly, are brightly coloured and are something the children can learn to track or catch at a much slower pace than an actual ball. At this stage, we don’t even teach them how to hold a racket, we can just do the demonstration and set them off. There’s no point bamboozling them with technique. The key is in the demonstration; children don’t want to listen to you, they just want to play. I learnt that from my own kids. So we created games that do the teaching instead. We have our chiffon squares, balloons and little fluffy balls that tiny hands can grasp easily and aren’t scared to see flying towards them.
We worked on it for two years, piloted it endlessly and eventually came up with a programme which I absolutely love. It launched in association with the LTA in 2013. We had so much fun choosing the activities and equipment: certificates of achievement, the hit mitts, the Chinese skip ropes and even a cuddly toy called Billie the Ball Dog, which one pupil gets to take home for a week if they’ve done something particularly well or something amusing. The programme is backed up by a website and a free app. The app is a game in itself and teaches the kids the rules of tennis in an unconventional way: you choose which character you want to be, you’re swiping, understanding the simplest tactics of hitting the ball away from your opponent, and when the ball goes out of play, Billie the Ball Dog trots off and gets the ball for you. It’s a great support for the coaches, as teaching a child how to keep the score in tennis can be a difficult and often thankless task. I invested a lot of money into it – I could have paid off my mortgage instead! – but I don’t regret spending a penny because I know it’s going to make a big difference.
For me the fun of sport is playing the game, feeling yourself improve, and engaging with your community, whether that’s through schools or clubs. When I was coaching kids in Scotland twenty years ago, I tried to come at everything from the angle of actually playing the game, competing for enjoyment – even inventing games and competitions in the same way that the boys had done with that stepladder in their bedroom. You don’t always have the facilities, and you will always have mixed abilities, but you can also always have fun. It was this very philosophy that actually led to the development of my very first sports programme in 2011, Set4Sport. I took every game the boys and I had played when they were little – cereal box table tennis, home-made obstacle courses, umpteen balloon games, garden ‘crazy’ golf, and so much more – and translated them into fun, easy-to-follow activities for parents to play with their children. The activities were created for three- to eight-year-olds but the programme was aimed at parents. Giving them lots of ideas for playing actively at home and helping their kids to develop those crucial core motor skills that underpin every sport, using everyday household items. The games do the teaching for you. They are simple and fun and, played regularly, will not only develop coordination skills, but family bonding, too. If kids learn to enjoy exercise and competition at a young age, it can become a way of life. And what better way to do both than as a family. Sport can become too serious too soon for many kids who have shown even the tiniest bit of potential these days; I see this as a real danger. It is hard on the few ‘exceptional’ kids and off-putting for those who just want to have fun with their friends. If I were to have a philosophy for long-term athlete development, it would be that the skilled kids be encouraged to cling to their sense of play for as long as possible.
These days I love my work with Miss-Hits, and with a project I launched the following year, Tennis on the Road, which is basically a van full of equipment that I drive around Scotland with another coach, taking tennis into areas you wouldn’t normally find it – mainly rural or deprived. We build workforces in the local communities by showing parents, teachers, students, youth leaders and coaches how to deliver starter tennis. These projects, as well as my time with the Fed Cup, which ended in early 2016, have done wonders for my own confidence and my understanding of the tennis landscape in Britain. I just wish I could have done more for the Fed Cup while I was there, but we didn’t manage to field a full team for the last three years due to illness and injury among the players. It was a fantastic experience, though, and was the first time in decades that I had been recognised as a good coach in my own right rather than Jamie and Andy’s ‘pushy mum’. Whatever I do in my career, I want to be effective and I had come to realise that role models are important for stimulating interest and excitement in sport, but that any sport is only as good as its grass roots. And our grass roots are weak so I reckoned I could have far greater long-term effect on tennis in Scotland if I shared my twenty-five years of coaching experience by building a bigger and stronger workforce.
I had spent nearly ten years trying to improve tennis in Scotland during my time as National Coach, and my role there was totally subsumed by my new exposure on a bigger stage as the boys’ mum. The opportunities and respect that Leon Smith, the Fed Cup and Miss-Hits afforded me, allowed me to keep my own identity at a time when I was slipping back towards becoming tabloid fodder again, and prepared me to step into the spotlight – in a capacity of my own choosing – to a greater degree than ever before.
In the summer of 2012, the year that Andy and Jamie both played as part of Team GB in the London 2012 Olympics, I was asked if I would speak at a women’s event as the parent of Olympic athletes. I had never dipped a toe into the waters of public speaking, still shuddering at the memory of being humiliated onstage at the Scottish Sports Awards only a few years before. But the organiser was an inspirational Scot named Frank Dick, who had been the GB athletics coach during the glory years of Sebastian Coe and Daley Thompson, and who had taught me so much about his Athlete Centred Approach when I was a rookie Scottish National Coach. I learned loads from him. So whenever he asks a favour, I’m there, no matter how daunting.
I took a group of four female coaches with me to this event, keen to provide another learning experience for them. I steadied my nerves and did my bit up onstage, taking part in a Q&A as well as I could. The final speaker was a woman called Caroline McHugh, who gave a talk on The Art of Being Yourself, which struck such a strong chord with me. Her belief was that you don’t have to wait for someone else to give you permission to be yourself; you already are yourself and you shouldn’t waste time on ‘trying to be as good as’ anyone else, as you are already the best at being you. It felt like a radical readjustment to see myself in these terms.
I had for some time been regularly asked to appear as a public speaker, but had always said no. As far as I was concerned, my place was on the court. I wasn’t even that welcome in the offices of certain tennis or sports bodies as I was always, apparently, rocking the boat. But something clicked that day when I heard Caroline speak for the first time. I did have experience that I could be sharing with a wider audience. Perhaps what I had to say no longer needed to be restricted to coaching groups or tennis alone. She made me realise that I had a voice and I should use it.
Within a few months, a chance to put this little nugget of new-found confidence to the test presented itself when Women in Sport – a government-funded charity in the UK, then known as the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation – asked me to be the spokesperson for some research that they had recently commissioned. My first instinct was to shrink back to my previous self. ‘I only know about tennis,’ I told them. ‘I can’t speak for all of sport!’
But then they showed me the statistics. They were gobsmacking.
Their research had discovered that only 3 per cent of all sports journalists in the UK are women, that only 5 per cent of all sports coverage in newspapers is about women athletes, and that half a per cent of all sponsorship money, across all sport, goes to women. Suddenly all of those times I had been seen as a curiosity rather than a hard worker, a menace rather than a go-getter, made sense. Those rooms full of male coaches, those young female players encouraged to ignore rather than support each other, those pictures of me pumping my fists taken by banks of faceless male photographers … it all slipped into a different context when I saw that report. I had never been that bad; I had just been different. The inequality really hit me and prompted me into action. It was time to speak up. And so I did. A full day and a half of media engagement raising awareness of gender imbalance in sport.
Not long after that research gig, I was invited to take part in an eighteen-month project to deliver a strategy for the government on womens sport, and I loved being part of a group of influential women from the world of business, politics and sport. It was both fascinating and empowering. These days, projects like that are among my greatest professional pleasures, and I even have a new project, She Rallies, which launched in 2017. Not only do these projects help me feel that I am creating something of worth beyond the boys’ trophies, but the process of accepting that I have something of value to say has played an immeasurable part in helping me keep my head above water, most notably when the boys encountered their biggest professional challenges yet.