July 20, 2023. At around 10pm, when 42,000 fans began to swarm out of Eden Park – euphoric after witnessing history – three women waited together in the stands for their friend to finally appear.
The quartet, known colloquially as the Big Four, had worked together for the two years leading up to that point, helping each other run four global women’s sports events – one after another – on New Zealand shores.
One of those women, Jane Patterson, was COO of the New Zealand half of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. And as had become Big Four tradition, she’d invited the other three to the start of her event. It just so happened to be the Football Ferns’ first-ever World Cup victory, against Norway.
“We hadn’t seen her all night – she’d been busy being Jane,” says Rachel Froggatt, who ran the IWG World Conference on Women and Sport last November. “Then after the match, she came absolutely bombing down the stairs and almost launched herself at the three of us. We just grabbed her, and we all cried.
“Because we’d been a team that whole time, and this was the big one. This was the moment where everything we’d worked on came together.”
In a restaurant on Auckland’s waterfront, the Big Four have reformed, to reminisce on the best two years of women’s sport New Zealanders have ever seen.
It was something you may never see repeated in world sport. Not just four women’s events in succession in this little corner of the world, but four women – each in charge of their global events – banding together to support each other.
“We’ve all done a lot of major sports events, but the thing that was different this time is that we were working on one thing,” says Andrea Nelson, who was CEO of the ICC Cricket World Cup last year.
“We all understood that immediately from the first conversation we had. We treated each other like colleagues, not rivals. It was like our project was the same project and we celebrated each other’s successes.”
And supported each other through their challenges. Often through the What’sApp group chat they call the Big Four (the name coined by LockerRoom soon after the women joined forces) – chat they’re still using today, and intend to keep active.
Tragedies and setbacks
Michelle Hooper, tournament director of the Rugby World Cup played in November 2022, says during the delivery of a major event, you’ll see a full gamut of life experiences roll out in a four-year block.
“There’s always personal tragedy and there’s always disaster – like a worldwide pandemic,” she says. “And it’s how people cope with it.”
The Covid pandemic forced the postponement of three of the four women’s events – cricket and rugby by a year. “The pandemic taught us all so much, and we never lost our focus on delivering these events that were going to supercharge women’s sport globally. And now we can reflect on the momentum all four events were able to build,” says Hooper.
After the Cricket World Cup was delayed by 13 months, Nelson’s challenge was not being allowed to fill stadiums under Covid restrictions, until the last match in Christchurch. When she walked through the gates at Hagley Park for the Australia-England final, she was overwhelmed by the sold-out crowd, the cameras and the colour, creating a spectacle finally worthy of an international sports event.
“It just hit me. And I thought ‘Oh no, I bought a new mascara and I don’t know whether it’s waterproof’,” she laughs. “I had to walk a full loop of Hagley Park in tears. It was a moment I’ll never forget. Then seeing Michelle [Hooper] come down with her daughter to watch the final was a huge moment for me too.”
Nelson was overcome with emotion again at the final of the Rugby World Cup, after her step-mum (“my hero”) passed away during the tournament.
“I went to the final when I probably would not have left the house for anything else. I was so emotional, bawling my eyes out from the very first moment. But god, that final was glorious,” she says.
Patterson’s setback came on the morning the tournament began, when a gunman opened fire on construction workers in Auckland’s CBD. “It was a day of total extremes,” she says.
“I was in a meeting for my new job that day,” says Nelson, now CEO of Gymnastics NZ. “Someone asked, ‘Are you okay, you don’t seem like your normal self? And I said ‘I feel like I am Jane’; I was imagining everything she was going through.
“We all walked in each other’s footsteps a lot, and we always had each other. Whenever we had dark moments in this period, we could call each other up and say, ‘I need your help’.”
That moment came for Froggatt with a government announcement that New Zealand’s borders would reopen on May 2, 2022, but the seven-day self-isolation period meant international delegates wouldn’t be cleared in time to attend the IWG Women and Sport Conference in Auckland that same week.
“I thought ‘We’re not going to be able to deliver this – we can’t get anyone into the country in time’,” Froggatt says. So she phoned Hooper and asked what she thought about the conference moving six months to dovetail with the end of the Rugby World Cup.
“Michelle said ‘Wow, that’s great, do it!’ She didn’t see that as disruptive – she saw that as a massive win,” Froggatt says. “But if it had been a series of men’s events, would you have had the same consideration and collaboration?”
Says Hooper: “The IWG running immediately after the Rugby World Cup was amazing. I remember walking into the lobby [of Auckland’s Aotea Centre] and seeing all the incredible delegates [from 90 nations] who are the drivers globally for change.”
After an initial foot-dragging by Kiwis to buy tickets for football’s World Cup, sold-out and record crowds fronted up to almost every match.
“I went to the second game at Eden Park, USA against Vietnam, and it was a sell-out,” Nelson says. “I thought about a conversation I’d had with my team about how we were going to open the first edition of our tournament [pre-Covid] at Eden Park. Everyone said, ‘That’s crazy. You’ll never fill it’.
“So weirdly, without doing any of her hard work, I felt a great satisfaction in Jane’s success. We all did.”
What comes after Four
Patterson officially finishes her role with FIFA today and intends to take a decent break from work.
“The role of COO was definitely the most challenging and most rewarding job I’ve had, that’s tested every element of who I’ve become over the last 25-30 years,” she says. “Something we don’t always do well after a job is to just stop, reflect, breathe, then make an educated decision on what’s next. Not one with a fatigued brain.”
But she’s certain she wants to continue working with the Big Four.
“We found something really special very quickly, and there’s a lot of trust there. But that doesn’t mean we can’t challenge each other’s thinking or disagree,” she says.
“I’m really passionate about using our combined experience to help other women in our industry. It can be such a terrifying, gender-based challenge and I’d love to be mentoring and supporting people.”
Hooper, too, hopes the quartet can find a way to advocate together, using what they’ve learned particularly from these past two years.
She’s in the throes of launching her business, Sprintify, focusing “on accelerating the sustainability of business through rapid goal attainment”; an enterprise she was working on before taking up the RWC21 role.
“What we do in major international sports event delivery is fast-tracking change – in terms of problems, solution identification and taking people on that journey. And that’s what the Sprintify framework is,” she says.
Froggatt has also struck out on her own with her new business, Away We Go (or its name in te reo, Matike Mai), working with organisations “who want to grow for the purpose of delivering social impact”. This year she’s worked with NZ Rugby on their women’s commercial programme, the Whai women’s basketball team in Tauihi, and Paralympics NZ (where she was formerly commercial and marketing director).
She hopes the Big Four’s legacy is that other young women in sports leadership can “find their own posse”.
“They don’t have to be from the same sport, in the same positions or from the same backgrounds. Just find people they trust. Maybe we can be an example of that,” she says.
Running the Cricket World Cup influenced Nelson’s decision to take up the CEO role at Gymnastics NZ.
“By seeing the long-term benefits our event achieved, it wasn’t enough for me anymore to deliver the event, then leave. I wanted to be part of a long journey, so I made a conscious choice I wanted to be involved in a sport,” she says.
Gymnastics went through an independent review in 2021 after unsafe and abusive practices in the sport were exposed. But through leading the CWC21, Nelson learned challenges can be overcome through “positivity and bringing people with you”.
“It gave me the confidence to take on the role, and I’m so inspired by the progress the sport is making with its culture,” she says.
The influence of the Big Four is obvious, too. “It’s a unique thing where you can genuinely celebrate each other’s success and deal with each other’s challenges, because you all believe in something bigger,” Nelson says. “And now all I want to do is recapture that for the rest of my career.”
