Richmond Tigers, Melbourne Vixens and New Zealand Warriors CEOs reflect coronavirus-hit seasonBy Tracey Holmes
abc.net.au
2 November 2020Catastrophic, a wipe-out, and no time to debrief.
That is how three club CEOs from three different sports have described the winter they've just experienced.
"We're not going to get back to pre-COVID settings until 2023," Brendon Gale, chief executive of the AFL champions Richmond Tigers, said.
All of them looked worn out, none of them wanted 2020 to be repeated, and yet each of them sounded like proud parents when they spoke about their team's resilience on The Ticket's annual CEOs panel.
The Tigers and Vixens both spent time in Queensland-based COVID bubbles while the Warriors spent the most time away from home — in lockdown from mid-March to October after travelling to Australia for round one of the NRL, then finding out New Zealand had shut its borders.
'They just had to work it out'The Tigers boss said the season "was really quite affirming in that it just highlighted the importance of the environment of the football club".
"It's so much more important than fitter, faster, stronger and all the physical elements," he said.
Some off-field incidents potentially threatened to impact Richmond's title defence, although Gale said the club took responsibility, highlighting the growing importance of "self-understanding and self-worth" in all elite sport.
"Having a sense of who we are and what we stand for and what makes us 'us' [is important] … we tell our own stories," Gale said.
"We're not defined by others, so I think as the media becomes more fragmented, and social media — there seems to be a lot of anger — … we're in a world of perpetual judgments and scrutiny.
"Having that strong sense of self-understanding, self-worth, self-love, appreciating who we are and what we are is going to be more and more important for elite sport."
Financial hit 'huge'One of the biggest hits has been to budgets — every team in every competition will be coming to terms with a new reality.
The rebalancing of the budget and the long-term impact of the season that's been start now.
Gale said Richmond "can't sugar coat it".
For them, the financial hit "has been huge".
"We're in the business of mass gathering," he said.
"Our home ground is the MCG, our average home crowd is 62,000 for every home game — that went to zero.
"So that has a catastrophic impact on our business.
"We've had to make really hard decisions about standing down staff and redundancies.
"The next two years are going to be really tough."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-02/richmond-melbourne-vixens-nz-warriors-reflect-on-covid-season/12837568
