Reading Kylie Spears’ resume, purely from a time perspective it is hard to see how she has time to add anything extra to her to-list.
As well as being President of Melbourne East Netball Association – a role which she has held since 2010 – and Netball Victoria’s State Titles Officer for the Chisholm region, Spears also sits on the Maroondah City Council, as a Councillor representing the Arrabri Ward, is the State President for the Australia Local Government Women’s Association, and is the Director and Manager of Swim Like A Fish Swim School. In her spare times she Chairs the Maroondah Disability Advisory Committee, Maroondah Business Advisory Committee, and is a Director on the Eastern Regional Libraries Corporation.
And they are all listed under ‘current’ roles.
Now Spears has something else to add to this extensive list; Netball Victoria Elected Director.
“I had thought about it for a number of years,” Spears said of her decision to put her hand up to be elected for the Board, “[but] I wanted to have a little more rounded experience probably than I had. So that’s what doing the regional component has enabled me to do…meet and look at lots of others and lots of other Associations as well, and meet a lot of other interested and like-minded people around netball, which was really good.
“I think I just needed to have a little push…I just got a couple of phone calls that said ‘you should give it a go’, and I think because I’ve been doing Council and because you put yourself up in that respect when you’re elected from the whole of your constituency and community, you’re putting yourself out there, so you do it and you know that you could fall over, but you hope for the best.”
Spears would describe herself fondly as a netball ‘tragic’.
“I started [playing netball] when I was about six, and I played all the way through, and I umpired all the way through my school years. So [every week] you’d coach at eight o’clock, and then you’d umpire nine o’clock, and then you’d umpire at 11, and then Dad would come and get you and take you down to the next bit… Because I don’t come from Melbourne…I played my netball in Ballarat, and we’d go and play all afternoon and come home at three o’clock exhausted having umpired, coached and played netball all day.
“I did that all the way through [my school years], and then I moved to Melbourne to go to uni and so I started played with Vic Uni as it was then, at Burwood. I had a couple of decent injuries, so that sort of put the brakes on things. I had an ankle screwed, glued and plated when I went over on it so that was the end of that. Then…when my girls were born and started to play sport it was pretty natural that having two girls they were going to play netball – there wasn’t a lot of choice! –they started playing netball for Our Lady’s and for Southwood club, which are two of the clubs at Melbourne East, and so from there you become involved, you do things you know, you step up and off you go… My family would say it’s my life-long passion!” Spears laughed.
But Spears is more than just a figurehead at Melbourne East. In her time at the helm she has overseen a project that helped secure $16.5 million in funding, to help update their facilities.
“We had 10 outdoor courts and then five years ago we’d been working really hard…and we secured $16.5 million in funding, and that has got us a beautiful new stadium. So, we have four brand new indoor courts and four brand new outdoor courts.
“We got $10.5 million Federal funding, $3 million from the State, and $3 million from our local Council. After we’d got the funding through in actual fact, one of the things that was suggested to me was that you need to be able to see it all through and I was ready to take the next step in representing my community…so that was actually when I stood for local government and became a Councillor for Maroondah City Council.”
When asked what her vision was for what she wanted to help achieve during her tenure on the Netball Victoria Board, Spears admitted that the goalposts had been re-set thanks to COVID-19.
“What might have been previously, now is a whole new thing with COVID-19, so from my perspective and – I haven’t even been to a Board meeting yet you’ve got to remember, and the AGM where I was elected was held online! - COVID’s changed what our goals are. For now, it’s about re-introducing netball and getting our participation to be at where we were before, because that in itself is going to be…it’s going to give us some challenges to do that. You’re actually re-introducing people to it, and you know there’s going to be lots of people who have taken a step back in this last little bit and gone ‘ok, do I really want to go back to all of that activity?’ or ‘what can I afford to go back to?’ and I think that how we come back out of this is a really big indicator of how we’re going to go forward in the next couple of years.
“I’d also like to see us further support Associations, they’re our grassroots, they’re our grassroots members, they’re who make netball in Victoria. I know we have to have an elite pathway and I think that’s awesome and they’re great role models - the Vixens are amazing! - but we also need to continue to support our Associations to grow netball as much as we can. I know as an Association President, you know Netball Victoria says ‘We Make Champions’, and we coined the phrase ‘We Grow Netballers’ as an Association, because that’s the grassroots part of it.”
When asked what her answer would have been to the above question in a non-COVID world, Spears admitted it would probably be quite similar.
“It still would’ve been about growing participation and supporting Associations, because I think they’re two key things, from my perspective coming from grassroots.”
“Do you know what I think is the most important thing out of now?” Spears continued. “That we don’t come out like we were. A big thing for us is that we learn, and that we go ‘ok, we’ve got this opportunity and time, what do we want to do differently, to come out of it differently’, that’s the biggest thing I see. We need to reinvent, we need to rethink what we do and how we do it…this is an opportunity, and if you don’t treat it like that then this is just wasted time.
“This is an opportunity to make a change or to do something different or to do something better, and how do you do that? What, for your organisation, does that look like? That’s what I hope this can bring.”
