Netball said 'no' to Liz Ellis. She refused to let it stop her

When former Australian Diamonds captain Liz Ellis was knocked back in her attempt to join Netball Australia’s board last June, she approached the rebuff in the same way she once attacked her sport — with resilience and tenacity.

Ten months later, on Monday, Ellis was unveiled as the board’s newest director as the governing body continues its recovery from the after-effects of its bitter pay dispute with its players.

Speaking of first being rejected, Ellis says she approached joining the board as a matter of not if, but when.

“Through your playing career, you learn to deal with setbacks and I just had it in my head that it was a setback,” she tells Wide World of Sports.

“This is: I’ve been told no but no is not the end. No is just go away and find a different way to get a yes.

“I knew that at some point the opportunity would come up again and I just had to be ready for it.

“I opened up a dialogue with [board] chair Wendy Archer and she and I had a lot of good, honest discussions over the last 12 months that were off the record — no one knew about them.

“But I knew that when the time came, she knew that I was serious.”

With her two children now in school and three seasons between her last appearance in the commentary box, Ellis believes now is the right time for her to be brought into the fold at Netball Australia.

“Last year I expressed a desire to join the board and there weren’t any positions vacant,” she says.

“I was told that the board was pretty happy with the people it already had and to wait until something else came up.

Liz Ellis.

“So, when the nominations opened and there was a process this year that you could apply, I thought long and hard. The sport’s had a pretty tumultuous couple of years and I thought, ‘Do I want to enter into that fray and really have it consume me?’.

“But, I thought now is the time, the opportunity is there. I really do desperately want to give back to the sport.

“I’ve got a daughter who plays netball and loves it and I want to be able to look her in the eye and know I did everything I could to get this sport humming and to make it as great a place as it can be — not just for her — but for women and girls across Australia.”

In light of her selection, Ellis says netball has a long way to go — especially in repairing the fractured relationship between Netball Australia and the players.

In December, the governing body and the Australian Netball Players’ Association finally reached a new collective player agreement after the athletes went more than 10 weeks without pay after the previous deal expired.

“The thing that has struck me the most since the announcement is that people are really happy about the fact that I’ve been appointed,” Ellis says.

“But I’ve been really at pains to point out that this is not the end, this is not solving netball’s problems. This is adding someone who can help get to the root of issues and start offering up solutions.”

The pay dispute reached a fever pitch in November when the 51-year-old was accidentally snubbed from presenting the showpiece award named in her honour at the Netball Australia Awards before she sensationally called out Netball Australia’s “callous disregard” for its athletes.

After negotiating a hybrid revenue share and profit share model and real player-administrator partnership, Ellis has already seen improvements at the national level in recent months.

“There has been a lot of change at the governing body from when I levelled that criticism,” she says.

“The CEO (Kelly Ryan) has left in that time, Wendy Archer will be stepping down as chair in May, there have been two more board appointments, so, I think, that was a particular crisis that when it came to a head really forced a renewal of the sport.

“I’m certainly not going to take any credit for [those changes], the players really stuck to their guns and got the change that they wanted.”

Ellis has previously served on the boards of the Australian Sports Commission, NSW Institute of Sport, Sydney Olympic Park Authority and Players Voice.

Now, taking netball to the pinnacle of Australian sport is something Ellis believes can be achieved with a matter of “tweaks” at the top level.

Ellis led the sport’s independent State of the Game Review in 2020 which aimed to assess Australia’s netball system and blueprint the game’s future beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

The subsequent report detailed eight strategic recommendations to aid the growth of netball.

Despite being completed years ago, Ellis sees the review as a relevant place for netball to kick-start its revival.

“The State of the Game Review is still a really good place to start and there are recommendations made in that review that are still just as pertinent today as they were four years ago,” she says.

“I don’t want to comment on what I’m going to find when I look under the hood because I don’t know how relevant they are, or whether things have changed, but my gut feeling is that they’re a good place to start.

“A lot of hours went into that report and it gave the sport a way forward. I think it also gives the sport a bit of a touchpoint.”

Asked what Ellis would like to bring to the table with Netball Australia, her deep passion for the sport comes through.

“I just want to be a part of a board that reinvigorates Super Netball [and] that makes sure the league takes its place as a top-tier sport in Australia,” she says.

“I’d also like to see netball become the No.1 participation sport in Australia — we’re currently No.2, we’re No.1 for women and girls but I think we can chase down football.

“This is something I’d really like to start to set some challenges for the sport to say, ‘OK, this is where we want to get to, how do we do it’. And it can’t just be Netball Australia doing that, it’s got to be the entire system and I think there is a a good opportunity for that to happen now.”