Athletics Australia’s Summer Holiday

The launch of the 2017 Athletics Australia summer calendar reignited debate amongst pundits about the state of the sport. The schedule showed a significant change in focus for AA, with a move towards state championships (Most of which are held on the same weekend), as opposed to a series of high-level events across the season. Coupled with this is the Nitro series, touted as an exciting initiative that will revolutionise the sport, but as yet no details of exactly what it is have been released.

With so much interest in the announcement of the calendar we thought we should contact AA to get the lowdown on what they’re up to and why they shifted focus to the state championships. “We worked very hard in the lead up to Rio, so it’s only fair we had a bit of a break. In some ways, you could say we’re taking the summer off, but plan on coming back reinvigorated in 2018 ahead of the Commonwealth Games.” It’s refreshing to have such honest replies and showed that AA had taken on some of the complaints from the past with regards to transparency in their communication. That said, one could argue that they’re shirking their responsibilities and putting the workload back onto states. “The state bodies have long been able to ride on the coattails of AA. They might say they’re flat out managing weekly events, but we’ve got to manage a serious amount of administrative staff and a healthy government supplied budget. It takes a lot of time and energy to creatively spend millions of dollars and continuously revamp our athlete funding models.”

One of the key issues faced by AA in the past has been a lack of media coverage and interest from the masses. To address this they have a clear strategy. “Our focus will be on further investment in our live, online coverage. Last year we had fantastic numbers tuning in, sometimes in the hundreds. Who knows, with the ten’s of thousands of dollars were putting into it this year we might even get 1,000 people to watch. That’s like filling the MCG!” Another initiative is to generate interest in the characters of the sport and shift the focus from being measured by performance alone. “With great personalities like the dancing high jumper, Jenneke, and the young indigenous hurdler John Steffensen, it would be silly of us not to promote the personalities in our wonderful sport.” Clearly management at AA are in touch with their community.

Their ongoing consultation with athletes and implementation of the feedback provided is proof of their collaborative approach to growing the sport. “We’ve put a lot of energy into working with our members to gain an understanding of their wants and needs. Yes, a funding model to support athlete development would be great, but we prefer to focus on those already at the pointy end and rewarding them for their efforts. Our model is about teaching independence and making athletes focus on doing what they can, with their own means, rather than being reliant on us. After all, this is an individual sport so why take a team approach to management?”

What Athletics Australia is doing might seem unorthodox to some, but maybe there’s method in the madness. “We’re confident that things will only get better in the years ahead. Lets be realistic, with the current state the sport is in there’s only one way we can go, and that’s up. In keeping with the fire analogies we use in naming our teams, like Spark and Flame, we’re going to do our level best to set things on fire. We’re going to burn the place down!”