England Netball is the national governing body for the second largest female team sport in England. Overseeing and responsible for Netball’s strategic plan, they oversee membership, participation and the highly successful Roses senior team, and player pathways.
Netball Super League is the UK’s top-level elite netball competition featuring teams from England, Wales and Scotland.
To support England Netball and the Super League as they build on their Adventure Strategy and make two key leadership hires. A first ever Managing Director for the Super League, along with a Chief Commercial Officer for England Netball.
The growth and transformation of the current domestic league is crucial to the future success of the sport and realisation of the Adventure Strategy aspirations. The NSL’s vision is to develop the most competitive, commercially vibrant and captivating netball league in the world – hence the need for two key appointments.
Our practice leads for MD and Commercial assignments worked closely to build a really clear competency framework for each role. What made the searches quite agile is that an understanding of the sport, commercial challenges and broadcast opportunities was key, but that experience could potentially sit in either role, supporting the other.
We quickly mapped the netball landscape, globally, covering both teams and national governing bodies. In tandem we looked into sports that have gone through really positive growth and transformation in recent times, such as cricket with the Hundred. Identifying key targets to approach, we also created interactive candidate briefing packs and ensured we advertised the roles to a wide and varied audience to reach under-represented groups.
From here we utilised an anonymous shortlisting stage, providing answers to work scenario questions rather than traditional CVs and covering letters. This helped level the playing field and ensure that ability shone through ahead of years of experience.
A small number of highly relevant individuals were selected for interview and we worked closely with England Netball and Netball Super League to prepare interview packs, questions for the interview panel and we discussed any potential biases that need to be mitigated during interview.
In early March 2023 two appointments were made. For the Netball Super League Managing Director role we were able to secure a leading figure in both women’s sport and netball who has operated at both league and franchise level who intrinsically ‘gets’ the challenges and opportunities.
England Netball secured a highly capable and experienced Chief Commercial Officer who has grown commercial revenues across multiple sports and has negotiated broadcast deals for both linear and OTT platforms.
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