By Linda Pearce
Newly confirmed Netball Australia chief executive officer Marne Fechner says the key battleground for the popular participant sport in the new age of national women's leagues headlined by the successful launch of AFLW is not athlete numbers but audience share.
Fechner, the former deputy CEO who has been acting in the position since the 2016 departure of Kate Palmer, now heading the Australian Sports Commission, said her immediate focus would be on "putting a fire under" an inaugural Super Netball season now at its halfway point, and the national roll-out of the modified Fast5 format later this year.
Super focused: Newly appointed Netball Australia chief Marne Fechner.Credit: Meredith O'Shea
But if the threat from women's football and Big Bash cricket, for example, is both real and growing, Fechner said she was less concerned about a potential talent drain than the commercially based competition from two financial heavyweights.
"I think our pipeline and our pathway is extremely strong," said the former state-level defender, whose almost 20-year administrative career included running the successful 2015 Netball World Cup in Sydney.
"Where I do think that the competition's going to come is around eyeballs. If we look at Suncorp Super Netball as a sports and entertainment product, we compete for bums on seats at games, and full venues, and we compete for eyeballs on TVs or devices, so I actually think that's our bigger challenge.
"Netball's been doing the participation game really well for a long time, and we understand what's critical there and we have fantastic member organisations that work really hard and deliver netball at the grassroots really well. I think that being a sports and entertainment product, which is where our commercial growth will come, is going to be our biggest challenge."
Fechner said netball's short-term vision had to be limited largely to its two biggest projects – including developing Fast5 as a "participation product" and as a potential route to netball's eventual Olympic Games admission.
"We know competition is coming at us 100 mile an hour from AFL and cricket, and we know that netball doesn't have the resources that either cricket or AFL does," she said. "So it's about really being focused on the things that are going to be really important to us over the next five years so that we can realise the aspiration of growth that we have for our sport and our players."
The new CEO rated as an "eight out of 10" the start of the highly competitive Super Netball league – the eight-team domestic successor to the trans-Tasman competition. TV ratings on 9GEM are up by 31 per cent on the Foxtel/TEN numbers from last year, while crowds have risen by 10,000-15,000 overall despite one fewer game each week.
"We're trying not to be distracted around the hype of AFL Womens in its first season, so in terms of how we're tracking against some really strong KPIs [it's going] really well," Fechner said. "I think our mid-season benchmarking is going to be critical, and understanding how all the clubs are going. Are there any pain points for them? How do we support that? What are our pain points? How do we overcome those? We'll have a look at those during the mid-season break and also at the end of the season ahead of 2018."
The timing of the second of GEM's Saturday-night games remains contentious in some circles, with 5pm and 7pm starts considered more family-friendly than the current 7pm and 9pm scheduling, and Fechner is well aware of the disquiet.
"It's definitely out there that seven o'clock and nine o'clock had been a challenge, but we'll talk to fans, we'll talk to people that were perhaps at games last year but not this year, and see why. Ask the question and get a feel. [Channel] Nine are side-by-side looking at all those things with us, which is a great thing.
We compete for bums on seats at games, and full venues, and we compete for eyeballs on TVs or devices.
Netball Australia chief Marne Fechner
"Everything's on the table. Saturday-night netball is what we want to deliver and we want to make that really successful, so if the times need to be tweaked to suit bigger audiences then that's something Nine wants and we want and Telstra wants and all of our partners want, so everything's up for review."
That includes the rules, with the two-point shot a topic that is regularly revisited, also at international level. "It's a conversation the sport's been having for a couple of years," said Nine's head of netball, Keeley Devery. "The fundamentals of the game will always stay. It's sport and it's great quality, but it is also entertainment, so you want people to watch it."