Imagine, if you will, a busy match day at The Rec in Bath.
It’s called The Rec, because that’s short for the Recreation Ground, although, it’s quite apt, because if you have ever been to the rugby ground in Bath, you’ll know it isn’t as state of the art as it should be. Which is ironic, because it is situated in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site no less.
That was where I worked in my early to late 20s and where my formative years in sport were carved, learned, earned and moulded. I was the Head of Media and PR, which meant I dealt with the press, covered all aspects of the media (including websites and socials), wrote the match reports, and got players in front of journalists and cameras the moment they were needed, usually while everyone else was still catching their breath from the final whistle. Whilst it always makes me jealous to learn that there are teams of people who cover all these aspects rather than just me, it sounds simple enough written down like that. It rarely was.
On one particularly fun matchday afternoon I had about thirty seconds to get one of our players out of the changing room and in front of a television camera. It was a live match, so there was no scope to wait around when it was time for the interview. If you’ve ever worked around live television, you’ll know that thirty seconds is not really thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is now.
There was a producer waiting, a live slot coming, and a player in the changing rooms, apparently oblivious to the fact that several people’s jobs currently depended on him walking through it. And I wasn’t allowed in. Fair enough, really. It was the changing room. They were quite possibly all naked. So, as I had done plenty of times before, I hastily found the Team Manager, asked him to go in and get the player for me, and waited outside, with the floor manager shouting at me that we had 15 seconds left.
And then the CEO appeared. He came round the corner, saw me standing outside the the changing room door, walked straight over, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away. “You can’t be near the changing room,” he said.
I tried to explain to him that I had 10 seconds left to get a player out but none of it seemed to matter to him, because the accusation underneath what he was saying wasn’t really that I had broken some important operational rule. It was closer to: you’re trying to see the players with their clothes off. When, actually, I was just doing my job and no one had ever thought to create a system to help me do it. And the CEO had turned it into something sexual. What chance did I stand against that kind of thinking if even the man at the top couldn’t see past his own view of me?
Welcome to the dressing room!
‘Five seconds’ shouted the floor manager…
