Neil Balme

Growing up, Kate Sheahan played football as the only girl in boys’ teams. She was signed by Collingwood in 2016 but suffered a career-ending knee injury in her first game in 2017. Born at the end of the patriarchy, but just a little too soon to play in the big time. Today she is an ebullient and energetic mother of three young boys. She has seen football’s past and will be part of its future; she’s socially progressive, but able to laugh at the wide array of human folly that is the past. Her father, Mike Sheahan, had written a piece in the 1980s calling for the sacking of Balme as coach of Melbourne. Balme likes the man. If you work in AFL football and don’t have a spirit of for­giveness, you’d have more enemies than friends. And that would be tiring.

Kate is head of women’s football at Richmond. ‘I came on board in 2017, and Balmey was general manager of football at the time, and Brendon Gale said, “Report to Balmey.” At the time Brendon was thinking the AFLW should sit in the community department. And I went to Neil and said, “Balmey, if we want women’s football to be successful at this club, and to be a high-performance environment, we can’t have it sitting in the community space. And if you want me to be a future leader at this club, I have to be under you. I have to be in the footy department, learning from you. And he went into bat for me and said, “Yep. AFLW needs to stay in football.” And from that moment on, he felt this responsibility and connection to the program. From that moment, we worked very closely together on building every aspect of the program.

‘Because I knew I had so much to learn, and he had so much to offer, it was like I was tagging him throughout the year. I wanted to learn how he operated, and his thought processes on things. Because although he didn’t have a great grasp of what women’s football was now, we didn’t want it to be what it was now, we wanted it to be elite – the equivalent of men’s.’

As Kate sees it, Balme got caught up in women’s football through his love of the people involved, not necessarily the product itself. ‘It was like he was so taken with all the people he was coming in contact with that he just built these relationships and connections that were so deep he couldn’t help but feel that this program was as much his as anyone else’s.

‘The thing he does so well . . . it’s not always love. It’s challenge. We had a really difficult moment. I’d had my second baby, so I was sort of on maternity leave, and we were having an issue with a staff member, an issue of poor behaviour. But because he always sees the good in people first up, I went to him and said, “Neil, we can’t work with this person anymore. It’s just not working.” We were going to have to fire someone. He and I had a heated argument in his office. I started crying. And he started crying. And I think he’s so connected with his emotions – he saw the distress I was under, and the turmoil and toll it was taking – that he couldn’t help but be affected by it. And he wasn’t sobbing, but he was quite emotional. I think he thought he’d pushed me too far.

‘And so when you have those interactions . . . I knew he was my boss, and this is how much it hurts when someone you care and you respect so much is doubting you. And so that’s why it was such a piv­otal moment for me, and why I remember it so vividly – because he’ll push you and he’ll challenge you, but at the end of the day he’ll have your back, no questions asked.

‘If there’s one ambassador or figurehead at Richmond that embod­ies the AFLW program, it’s Balmey,’ Sheahan says. This seems a long way from Eddie McGuire’s contention that Balme and his football department had no interest in women’s football at Collingwood.

‘Last year [2020], in Covid, it was tough,’ she explains. ‘We talked on the phone four times a day. He’d come to my house, he came to every single player meeting when we were trying to bring them into the club, he was so committed, he came to every training session. In our first year we had to get rid of our coach, and he did it with me.

‘We had to tell our players via Zoom we were getting rid of our coach. And I was based at Sorrento at the time, and Neil said, “I don’t want you to go through this on your own. Coz it’s a pretty signifi­cant deal to get rid of a coach at an AFL club.” So he drove all the way down to Sorrento to sit next to me on a Zoom for fifteen minutes to inform our group we were doing this and why, and it was in their best interests, and for the right reasons. How good’s that? He could have jumped on Zoom in his own home. But he drove down to sit next to me to make sure I had the support I needed.

‘It was an emotional time. No one wants to sack people. He just knows our girls. He cares and invests in them as people. In recruiting, he said to me early on, “Kate, you get good people on the bus and you figure out what they do from there.” And that’s been our mantra. He’s very much about getting good people.’

And how do the young women see him, this old bloke?

‘They see him a bit like a godfather. He’s got this presence about him that – when he’s there, they smile. His office is next to mine, and if he’s in his office a lot of our players put their head in – “Hi Balmey, how you going?” “Great, darling. How are you?” It’s almost like going to see grandpa.’

It’s questionable whether Balme would want to be seen as a grand­fatherly, or godfatherly, figure. Such benign endorsements, while lovely and all, might even make a bloke look fondly on the days when he was known as an enforcer.

Kate Sheahan reckons she’s worked out why Neil Balme has fallen for women’s football. ‘It’s made the whole footy department a better place with what females bring. He’s worked in footy so long and dealt with young men coming through and had such an impact on their lives . . . But he now gets to do that with the females. And the females give a bit more emotion back to him than the males do, and that fills his cup back up.’