Rain or shine, Andrea Nelson would head to the Māngere markets each Saturday morning to promote tickets to the 2017 Rugby League World Cup – offered in money, nose to nose, on the coronary heart of the communities she was making an attempt to succeed in.
Nelson was normal supervisor of New Zealand’s facet of the event, co-hosted with Australia and Papua New Guinea, and he or she knew rugby league demanded a distinct strategy to partaking its supporters, particularly Māori and Pasifika communities.
“I realized actually shortly that some issues that work in predominantly Pākehā sports activities are utterly totally different in rugby league,” she says. “And league has the ability to attach that only a few sports activities can match.
“The league neighborhood took me in, taught me what I wanted to know to attach with these communities. And I fell in love with the individuals. I felt actually at residence.”
Nelson’s early-morning market stints paid off – stadiums had been filled with virtually 100,000 spectators throughout the event (even when the Kiwis had a marketing campaign to overlook), and the Tonga v Samoa conflict at Waikato Stadium stays some of the vibrant, intense atmospheres New Zealand sport has seen.
Now, virtually a decade on, Nelson is returning to the game, this time within the high job at New Zealand Rugby League – after three-and-a-half years as chief government of Gymnastics New Zealand.
Nelson is the second feminine CEO in New Zealand league’s 115-year historical past – after Jennifer Haydock spent 14 months within the job within the late Nineties.
Her appointment comes amid a flurry of management modifications throughout New Zealand’s main sporting organisations. Former Black Caps quick bowler Geoff Allott is New Zealand Cricket’s new CEO, New Zealand Rugby final week named Steve Lancaster to go their organisation, and Raelene Citadel has been reappointed as Sport NZ CEO by means of to 2030.
Netball New Zealand, at the moment run by interim CEO Jane Patterson, is anticipated to call her everlasting alternative within the subsequent few weeks.
Nelson, who’s simply turned 50, replaces Greg Peters, who throughout his eight years as CEO elevated rugby league’s income by 30 p.c and greater than doubled enjoying numbers for girls and youth.
“I used to be working within the NZRL workplaces earlier than Greg’s tenure began, and I’ve seen first hand the large modifications he’s made,” Nelson says. “Rugby league is in a extremely implausible place proper now. However I feel each one who takes on a job like this brings their very own model and approach of doing issues. So, the game has an excellent basis, and I look ahead to taking it by means of the subsequent steps.
“I see the nice that the game can do for rangatahi round New Zealand, and that’s an enormous inspiration for me.”
It’s too early for Nelson to spell out the game’s largest challenges, however she believes league in New Zealand is in an “unimaginable second of alternative”.
“There are sold-out crowds on the Warriors, rising participation numbers, and big progress within the girls’s recreation,” she says. In 2024, wāhine made up 20 p.c of the nationwide participant base (rangatahi had been 30 p.c), they usually now have a stronger pathway, with the Warriors girls again within the NRLW.
Eden Park will host the primary State of Origin recreation to ever be performed in New Zealand subsequent yr, and the brand new Te Kaha Stadium in Christchurch will maintain a World Cup double-header, with the Kiwis and Kiwi Ferns, this October.
“I’m positive I’ll study concerning the points going through the game as soon as I be a part of [in July], however proper now, it’s all of the upside. From my perspective, it’s about organising rugby league to proceed to thrive.”
NZRL chair, Justin Leydesdorff, says Nelson stood out among the many candidates as an “distinctive chief with each world-class expertise and a real connection to the sport and its communities”.
“We wished a frontrunner who may sit throughout the desk from the largest decision-makers in worldwide rugby league, however who would additionally fortunately choose up a tea towel at an area membership on the East Coast,” he says. “Andrea is that individual.”
Nelson’s CV is laden with main occasion management throughout a number of sporting codes. After the Westlake Women Excessive pupil graduated with a diploma in journalism from AUT (and had a stint as a radio DJ) she labored in communications on the 2012 London Olympics.
She helped ship the 2015 FIFA U20 World Cup in New Zealand, adopted by the 2017 Rugby League World Cup, after which, by means of the Covid pandemic, ran the New Zealand leg of the ICC Girls’s Cricket World Cup in 2022 – resulting in her turning into a Member of the New Zealand Order of Benefit.
She has governance expertise too – overseeing the merger of Auckland and Northern regional soccer federations to kind Northern Area Soccer, and he or she’s now on the Auckland Cricket board and chairing the New Zealand Occasions Affiliation.
Nelson reckons the best energy she brings to her new position is optimism.
“Anybody who is aware of me is aware of I’m the center of optimism, and I carry that to each position I’m in,” she says. “That’s what helped us keep on observe when the borders had been closed and no spectators may come into stadiums for the Cricket World Cup. Optimism helped us by means of a number of the arduous conversations within the early days of that event.
“Rugby league’s ethos is ‘Greater than a Recreation’, and what it will probably do to assist individuals in the neighborhood. Constructive social change by means of sport is written into the DNA of rugby league and that speaks to the very coronary heart of my ardour.”
Being a part of change is what drove Nelson to a profession swap in 2023, taking over her first CEO position at Gymnastics NZ. The game in New Zealand was within the early phases of remodeling its tradition, after a damning overview into abusive practices.
“I used to be ready so as to add a burst of recent power and momentum – that drove us to the massive step we wanted to take as a sport,” Nelson says.
“The final three-and-a-half years in gymnastics has been large for me. I’ve realized a lot from the neighborhood about what it takes to construct a optimistic tradition for a sport, methods to sort out troublesome conversations and the way change can occur for the higher.
“The ability of optimistic relationships is what fuels sport, and in gymnastics, tackling huge cultural shifts has solely been achieved by the individuals working collectively. We’ve made optimistic influence on individuals’s lives. The ability to try this in a CEO position at New Zealand Rugby is unimaginable.”
The Warriors first ignited Nelson’s ardour for league.
“I wasn’t a sports activities fan after I was in school, however after I moved to Australia in 2000, we went to each Warriors away recreation within the season we made the grand closing,” she says.
Nelson says the help of her husband and two teenage sons permits her to observe her drive to run nationwide sports activities organisations.
“It’s not attainable for an individual to do these huge roles and not using a help community,” she says. “I’ve acquired my whānau, however I even have the ‘Huge 4’.”
She’s referring to the 4 girls who led World Cup tournaments and the IWG Girls and Sport convention right here in 2022 and 2023 – Nelson, Patterson, Michelle Hooper and Rachel Froggatt – who stay intently related and proceed to again one another of their new careers.
Nelson doesn’t see it as “an enormous deal” that she’s a girl main a sport lengthy dominated by males. Change is already evident at governance degree, with Honey Hireme-Smiler serving as deputy chair of the NZRL board.
“It’s implausible, however it’s not an enormous deal,” says Nelson. “I’m actually wanting ahead to seeing it proceed to occur throughout our sector. It’s not a headline – it simply exhibits you ways far we’ve come.”
