New challenges have never scared Jodie Mather; in fact, across her time in football, she’s always been looking for the next step. Previously a netball player and coach, an injury led her to take up footy as an alternative, and when injuries derailed her playing career there too, she stepped into coaching. As the SFL Women’s was forming, there was no club on the eastern shore, so Mather built the female program at the Lindisfarne Football Club from the ground up. After running that program for a number of years, she made her next leap this season, joining Kingborough in Division 1 of the SFLW and leading a high-performance program there; with the Tigers currently sitting at the top of the ladder and undefeated, and Mather being involved with Tassie’s state women’s team, it’s safe to say that was a good choice too.
“That’s kind of my footy journey in a nutshell,” Mather said. “It definitely hasn’t been as smooth sailing as that, there’s been plenty of bumps along the way.”
Now, Mather is part of the “She Can Coach” program, an initiative established to increase the number of women in coaching, improve their capacity, increase the visibility of coaching role models for women, and develop a network of women in coaching across all levels of the game. She saw the program advertised and applied, and before long she was heading to Melbourne for the first sessions with coaches from around the country.
“I think when you go to a coaching course you kind of think you might learn some drills and stuff to take away and how can you better the players that you support, [but] it was very different to that,” she said of those initial sessions.
“It was really a program about investing in us as coaches, so how you communicate with your players, how you communicate with parents and other people attached to football in general, the types of preferences for learning, but also how you sort of look after yourself as a person and how you’ve learnt from your experiences in the past and how you can learn from them going forward.”
“It was a big two days of self-reflection and self-investment which is kind of different from any of the programs I’ve done previously.”
So much of coaching is focused on the athletes and how to best cater to them; the She Can Coach program aims to improve a coach’s ability to help their players by first helping and prioritising themselves. That goes beyond just one in-person seminar, with regular connection through WhatsApp, small group sessions, and regular mentoring helping coaches to stay connected.
Mather says there are already lessons and ideas that she has brought back to her work at Kingborough, and that she’s hoping to pass on to other female coaches in Tasmania. For example, part of the discussion was around finding male allies in football, and using them to help challenge the long-engrained perspectives around women in a male-dominated sport.
“It was not about coming in and saying ‘we’re here to take over’, but more about how can you powerfully get your point across and work with the people that are there and potentially align some people to support you along the way,” Mather said. “I have great allies who are female coaches, but I also have some really strong allies who are male coaches, and they have really supported me on my journey.”
Most importantly, Mather is hoping to see more women join her in the coaching ranks to match the huge rise in female participation in the sport. “It’s so good to see females of all different ages and those that have come through a junior pathway to those that might be playing team sport for the first time being embraced in a program – it’s such a space of optimism at the moment because there is such an exciting future ahead,” she said.
For those thinking of taking the plunge and getting involved, her advice is simple. “Back yourself in – you can find plenty of reasons not to do it, but my experience and the experience that I’ve learned of others that have got on the pathway is that it’s such a rewarding role to take on and there are plenty of supports out there for you and you don’t have to look far to find them.”
“I think there’s a lot of misconceptions, but if you just jump in you’ll find it’s not as daunting a space as you might think.”