Women's Coaching Association Co-founder: Aish Ravi

The daughter of immigrant parents, Aish Ravi has developed a passion for teaching, both in the classroom and on the sporting field. Now in partnership with fellow teacher Jules Hay, Ravi has launched the Women’s Coaching Association.

Women’s Coaching Association co-founder Aish Ravi leads a busy sporting life, coaching and playing women’s soccer and playing Australian Rules football. All photos by Robert Keeley

 Aish Ravi has been driven to teach for a long time, which has led her on a circuitous route from classrooms on to sporting fields. Recently it has led her and her colleague Jules Hay to form the fledgling Women’s Coaching Association in Victoria. The basic idea, as in her teaching background, is to encourage young women to develop their talents and to back their fellow participants through what can be a challenging but rewarding experience. Ultimately that backing can and will include anything from material support and instruction through to underpinning morale. The association is already attracting a steady stream of interest from a wide range of sporting participants. It’s the start of a long road, but Ravi has already travelled quite a distance.

Of the WCA she says, “We want to be the peak body in the area to attract and retain, and develop and sustain careers.” She notes, “All sports separate into silos. But we all have the same problems – there’s a lack of women coaches in all sports. We need to tailor coach education. We’re also big on bringing men along on this journey. We want men to be more inclusive.” At the moment the association is self-funded. Says Ravi, “There are government grants available, but the process takes so long. We want to develop a membership and connections with sports associations and co-sponsorships. Funding has been really hard for us.” In their PhDs Ravi and her co-organiser Hay are looking separately at coach education, and pay equity for women. Despite the growth in women’s sport at the highest level (all the main football codes have embraced women’s development) there are still issues to work on, according to Ravi. Facilities often aren’t well kept or supplied and there can be issues with communication. “A lot of people think that if they get women in the door then that’s enough. Women often feel they’re not truly valued. Sometimes they’re using ‘hand-me-down’ equipment. There’s a long way we need to go yet. There are a lot of women like me, who have skills and passion. But a lot of strategies are not working.”

The daughter of Indian immigrant parents who had high academic expectations for her, Ravi spent some time in the US as a youngster with her family before they moved to Australia. Living in the southern Californian city of San Diego she developed a wide range of sporting interests and in Australia that continued when she went to school at Caulfield Grammar and joined in activities like soccer and tennis.

Ravi in the pre-game huddle before a recent local soccer match, where she was playing coach for the Bentleigh Cobras. Pic: Robert Keeley

After high school she continued her education at Monash University, doing a Commerce Degree, and then got a job as a market analyst with European car manufacturers Renault, BMW, and Fiat for around two years. Soon enough, she started losing interest in that direction. She admits to becoming easily bored and after a period of time she felt this type of work was largely “a desk job” which involved working as a glorified assistant, mainly writing reports and producing Powerpoint presentations. She says she’s always been more interested in working directly with people, so she decided to pursue a career in teaching. She ended up back at Monash undertaking a Masters of Teaching, and doing school placements, including at Prato in Florence, Italy. “I enjoyed it,” she says.

Later she was offered a position as Dandenong High School in southeast Melbourne, a place she says was highly multicultural, and she loved the work. “I felt I was making a difference.” She says there were a lot of refugees at the school and the job was about “learning and being safe”. She taught economics and business management, but she also worked on the school’s sports.

Two local teams and a pitch – the essence of local sport! Pic: Robert Keeley

She was then offered a job at the prestigious Melbourne private school Wesley College, where she became involved in coaching sport. As she became more involved she wanted to become better qualified to coach at a higher level. The school backed her financially to secure a ‘C’ licence and she coached the women’s first-grade soccer team for two years. She then moved to Carey Grammar school, a part of Victoria’s Associated Public Schools sports program. “I was very fortunate. I loved it,” says Ravi. After that she started a PhD.

She says there are similarities in coaching and teaching. So she raises the question, “How come I’m questioned about my knowledge and qualifications in coaching?” 

She now expresses the view that she “didn’t know what I was getting into with the PhD.”

But she felt there were people in teaching who were just going through the motions. “It was hard to see teaching changing when I actually did it. Teaching is undervalued in society.” She says there is more kudos available through her work now with the Women’s Coaching Association. She met Jules Hay through a connection at Monash Uni. Hays is also widely travelled and a great sports enthusiast, as well as a coach. At the start of 2020 they launched ‘Lead between the Lines’, an organisation to encourage diversity and gender equity across all types of sporting clubs and organisations.

Ravi’s team (in black and yellow) was up against it during this game and eventually went down to a skilled opposition team. But Ravi remained cool and positive with her players throughout. Pic: Robert Keeley

Ravi says she has an “entrepreneurial background”. She started the Bayside Futsal Women’s free football competition in 2019, which now has had over 400 women playing in it. 

The WCA began with a working party group of 29 people, but it has been streamlined into a volunteer board of just nine people. Says Ravi, “People now think we’re a peak body, but it’s a hobby for us at this stage.” 

Both Ravi and Hays teach part time and Ravi is now playing Australian Rules football with Melbourne Cricket Club FC and coaching soccer with Bentleigh Cobras (in 2019 they won their competition championship). She’s also developing an interest in Ironman events and bike riding. She calls her coaching style “very wholistic” and invests in the players, with the objective of getting them to invest in the team. She believes it’s an approach which is permeating all levels of coaching, from the top down, but it will take time. “A lot of players have come from an authoritarian dictatorship style,” she says. “But the authoritarian style is dying out. A lot of parents and players are aware it’s not healthy. But you can’t have ‘one size fits all’. That’s inclusion. You can’t treat everyone the same.”

Says Ravi about women in coaching, “There’s not a lot of leaders in the area. It’s problematic. No one is really speaking the same language.” She says, “Sport for women should be as much about health and having fun with your friends. At the moment, a lot of the time, the question is ‘Have you won?’.” For Ravi there’s a long way to go for women in sport and coaching, but at least there’s a been a promising start.

For more sports and general images see other sections in this website, along with a collection of blog columns.

In the rooms at half time Ravi emphasises team structures and patterns, then consults with individual players. Though struggling and behind, the atmosphere remains upbeat and positive. Pic: Robert Keeley.

Ravi consults with individual players are a more general discussion with the team. Her teaching background is a good discipline for team sport coaching. Pic: Robert Keeley.

Ravi in action on the field in her dual role with Bentleigh Cobras. On this occasion it was a tough day at the office! Pic: Robert Keeley.

Ravi in action late in the match. She was under constant pressure as the opposition pumped the ball into their scoring area throughout the game. Pic: Robert Keeley.

Ravi displays a great kicking technique (no doubt employed when she plays her other sport of Australian Rules football). Pic: Robert Keeley.

A successful save during a very busy afternoon for the playing coach! Pic: Robert Keeley.

WCA co-founder Aish Ravi. Pic: Robert Keeley.

St.Kilda AFLW: Player Profile

Clara Fitzpatrick ­– Irish Warrior

 After a long journey from the opposite side of the world, within weeks of starting her career with St.Kilda’s AFLW team Irishwoman Clara Fitzpatrick took a shortcut. In round two she embarked upon some time travel. Suffering concussion after a run-in with a leaping pack, she leap-frogged right past round three and straight into round four. She missed the game courtesy of an order from the club medicos. Having already received a head whack big enough for her to collect some stitches along her right brow, you could be excused for thinking Fitzpatrick might’ve had second thoughts about her life-altering decision to take up professional Australian Rules football. But she says she’s never felt more welcome than in this school of hard knocks.

Saints AFLW defender and mid-fielder Clara Fitzpatrick copped a blow to the brow which required stitches, and the next week was knocked out – quite an introduction to professional Australian Rules football!

“There’s a real community feel to this club,” says Fitzpatrick in a mellow Irish lilt. “It’s pretty amazing to see how it runs here.” She says she felt “a bit dizzy” for a couple of days after her collision, which occurred in the final minutes of round two against Adelaide, but “the AFL has good protocols in place.” Because she’s a qualified physiotherapist she had some awareness of that necessity. The Saints training began in mid-November last year and 29 year old Fitzpatrick says “the experience has been amazing. It’s more professional than anything else I’ve been involved in. And there’s the culture as well ­– we’re creating a family. I’m absolutely loving it!”

Ireland is a long way from Australia – obvious, but still worth noting because of the context it provides to Fitzpatrick’s circuitous route into the Australian Football League Women’s competition. She started her football journey amongst the small farms and greenery of County Down in Northern Ireland, about 50km south of Belfast. Her family lived in the tiny village of Bryansford (population around 400). She went to a primary school up the road and a high school just 30 minutes away. But, unlike every other member of her immediate family, including two brothers and one sister, (and with the exception of her grandfather who occasionally kicked a ball to her), she was attracted to sport. She tried a bit of netball, rugby, and even lifesaving (some challenge in the bracing Irish Sea waters!), but soon settled on Gaelic football, which is close to a national obsession, yet remains purely amateur. She played with Bryansford and then her county team. Between 2009 and 2012 Fitzpatrick studied her physiotherapy degree at the University of Ulster in Jordanstown and played Gaelic football for the university. Then from 2012 to 2014 she was part of University College Dublin’s Gaelic team while she studied her Masters of physiotherapy.

Fitzpatrick says one of the over-riding benefits she has picked up from the Saints AFLW team has been the “family” feeling amongst the group of mainly young players.

In 2015 from May to September she took off for Boston in the US, where there’s a strong Irish diaspora. Her aim was to play Gaelic football. Friends had told her about various tournaments in America so she decided to try her luck there. Her physio skills came in handy at times, but eventually she returned to Ireland.

In April 2016 a friend told her about a ‘come and try’ day for AFL football. On a fine Spring day around 20 people turned up to try this antipodean sport. Fitzpatrick says she knew of it through the International Rules series which had been played between her country and the AFL. With the assistance of the AFL Ireland Women’s group she played in two Australian Rules tournaments over 2016 as a member of the “Irish Banshees” team, once in May in London, and a second time in October in Portugal. But she says, “It was just random; I was still playing Gaelic football.”

Then she decided to take a year off “to come to Australia and see the world”. She didn’t really have any intention to play Australian Rules. She landed in Melbourne in November 2016 and the Irish contingent in town soon got her involved in the Gaelic club Sinn Fein which she played with over the next two years. Through club connections she got involved with the Diamond Creek football club, spreading her time between Gaelic and Australian Rules football. To support herself, for a time she got work on a dairy farm near Warrnambool, missing some football in the process. In 2017 a lot of Diamond Creek players started joining in the new AFLW competition. Experienced Diamond Creek coach Scott Gowans moved to Melbourne University as part of his step towards coaching the upcoming North Melbourne AFLW side. Melbourne Uni was a feeder team for North and Fitzpatrick went to Melbourne University with him. 

She says she fitted into the ruck slot at both Diamond Creek and Melbourne Uni. “I’d played in the midfield in Gaelic football. I was a little bit lost in terms of structures. There’s less structure in Gaelic ­– it’s a bit more random. But I was probably progressing – it’s learn as you do, and as you go. It suited me!” she says.

She played a season with Melbourne Uni, but was influenced by a friend to try out with the Southern Saints. She says that after meeting with them and training “I thought they were good with player development.” She started 2019 playing Gaelic football, but during this time she rang coach Peta Searle, who got back to her a couple of days later. “I think she looked at some footage of my games at Melbourne Uni,” says Fitzpatrick. “She invited me down to train around February and March for the start of the Southern Saints season.” She says at that stage it was a pretty big list. “I thought I had to develop my skills and that’s what Peta said,” says Fitzpatrick. “I think they thought if they could clean that up, they were happy with the raw talent.” 

Fitzpatrick says that while Gaelic football and its free-flowing nature have helped her come to grips with AFL football, the structures and game plans involved in high-level Australian Rules have taken longer to grasp.

As the musical chairs began and the list began to shrink, Fitzpatrick survived the culling and kept working away. “It was pretty crazy. There is such a good culture in the club, it makes it a bit more special. It’s such a caring culture.” The Irishwoman says she put a lot of work into listening to the coaches and the hard work ultimately paid off. She was announced as a member of the final list during a team meeting after she’d performed an Irish jig as part of a regular reading of penalties that various players copped. 

“Oh geez!” she says in her Irish brogue, “It was unbelievable, very surreal. I was in shock!” When the final playing list was announced and she had made the cut she phoned home. She says her distinctly non-sporting parents didn’t know the extent of her achievement, “but they support me”. Now they’re rapidly learning about AFLW!

Last year, towards the end the Southern Saints season, Fitzpatrick took three weeks off to play in the Australasian team for the World games in Gaelic football around Dublin, but upon her return she was selected to play in the final home and away game against Richmond. She says proudly she kept Sabrina Frederick (the powerful Richmond forward) goalless. “It was lovely to be back in the team,” she says.

Fitzpatrick declares, “If you enjoy it, you play your best football. You don’t have to take the enjoyment out of it. Peta has high standards. But what I really like is how enjoyable it is to get around the girls.” She says St.Kilda is different to other clubs she’s been involved with, and more like Gaelic clubs. “Everybody is on a par here. It’s a tight club; the men get involved with the women’s team. It’s more like a family”.

She continues, “The experience has been amazing. It’s more professional than anything I’ve been involved in. The culture is great as well. We’re creating a family. I’m absolutely loving it.” 

Fitzpatrick felt the young team had gelled by mid-way through its short eight-week season, which made it all the more galling that after she was knocked out in the final minutes of the round two game against Adelaide she was required to sit out the round three game against Melbourne. It was in that round the Saints scored their first inspirational win.

Knocked out in round two against Adelaide after a desperate launch into a pack, Fitzpatrick was taken from the ground on a stretcher with concussion. She missed one game before returning in round four.

Her concussion came in the last quarter of the Adelaide game after she flew for a ball in the backline against a pack coming the other way. It was a roll of the dice that she lost out on. But the Saints were ahead at the time and desperate measures were needed. As a Gaelic footballer Fitzpatrick feels she has developed reasonable game awareness, but in this tense scenario she only had eyes for the ball, and as she hit the ground her head bounced on the turf. It’s not the only time she’s been injured. In her Gaelic career she has undergone two ACL knee reconstructions. She says she feels for the women in the league who are doing ACL injuries (including teammates Nadia Von Bertouch and Tarni White) and as a physio she appreciates the necessity to do as much as possible to avoid the problem. Having had ACL surgery she thinks the women currently injured should come back unimpeded. 

She’s aware she has to improve her skills, and of the necessity to get her head around game plans and structures, which aren’t a big part of the Gaelic game. But she says her backline coach has also told her not to “overthink” it. “He told me that structures are important, but not to get too caught up in it.” 

With skills she has developed from her experience in Gaelic football, Fitzpatrick has been a natural fit in the AFLW Saints backline, but also through the mid-field.

Gym work has also been a new element for her. “I enjoy the gym, but I haven’t done that sort of work regularly before this season.” She says she’d rather go running, “But it’s only there to do you good.”

Having lost three of the first four games (albeit two in the last minutes of very tight contests) at the mid-way point of the season it seemed unlikely the Saints would make the finals in their inaugural season. Nonetheless the team’s progress has been significant.

Fitzpatrick says she’d love to be involved beyond this first historic season, though visa and work issues may complicate her plans. “We’ve done pretty well so far,” she says, “For a first year team I’m pretty happy.”

(Note: After round five against Carlton all Saints matches – in fact all AFLW matches except a Friday night game – were concluded without crowds due to the influence of coronavirus. After round six the season was shortened so that finals could be played. St.Kilda won two of six matches and thus did not participate in the finals series. The final series was soon abandoned due to coronavirus.)

* Words and images by Robert Keeley.

At the professional level the AFLW players are educated in the mental approach to the game, as well as the physical and skill-based elements.

Training at the clubs RSEA Park facilities has involved skills, fitness, and gym work, which has been a new experience for the Gaelic footballer.

A pre-game warm up in the rooms before the game against Carlton.

Fitzpatrick in action during the heat of a contest against Carlton at Ikon Park. Good crowds attended most matches during the season – until Coronavirus hit!