Shona Eichorn doesn't have to think hard about where her lifelong passion for sport came from.
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The Northern Inland Academy of Sport (NIAS) CEO grew up the eldest of five children in Lismore with sports-mad parents. The entire family followed cricket, tennis, and soccer - even to the point of sleep deprivation.
"We would all sit up watching everything from Wimbledon to Wembley to Ashes tests in the wee hours of the morning," Eichorn said.
"My dad and I would be the last ones standing with Milos and toast."
Eichorn even used to help her father out scoring at local cricket games.
It was unquestionably this upbringing, completely enveloped in the sporting world, that led Eichorn to study sports management at university. And she hopes that the young women at NIAS take some inspiration from the work she has done.
"What's that saying? 'You can't be what you can't see'," Eichorn said.
"I like to think that a lot of the girls in the academy programs might think 'I would like to do that job one day'.
"Sports management was very new in the days when I studied in Brisbane. Everyone thought it was a degree and a good time, but sports management is an exceptional career."
At the end of the NSW Women's Week, which overlapped with International Women's Day on Friday, Eichorn reflected on her career and the remarkable progress made in recent years by women's sport.
It is fitting that her career at NIAS, which began all the way back in 1992 when she was its inaugural CEO for five years before returning to the role in 2021, has taken place in two very different eras.
The first, throughout the 90s, featured very few female sporting fixtures that could be watched by the general public.
The most prominent at the time were the WTA, LPGA, and World Netball. At the same time, international women's cricket, soccer, AFL, rugby league, and rugby union were effectively invisible.
But by the time Eichorn's current term began, women's sport was flourishing.
A-League Women was initially established in 2008. The first WBBL in 2015/16 was followed by AFLW in the winter of 2016, while the NRLW was founded at the end of 2017 and the Super W came into being in 2018.
Female participation in all of these sports has subsequently skyrocketed.
"It is incredible," Eichorn said of the growth of women's sport.
And though initially she "did not even think I was a very unique and rare specimen in the sports ecosystem as one of the few female CEOs", Eichorn is pleased to see the change in mentality towards women's sport.
"Reflecting on the 32 years since that time, there's certainly been support for women's needs in sport, both on and off the field," she said.
NIAS has played a significant role in helping young girls from the North West become a part of the ever-expanding sporting atmosphere.
Eichorn rattled off names like Stacey Porter, Julia Boland, Emma Clifton, Alice Arnott, Lily Neilson, and Kate Jenner as examples of athletes who all went on to compete internationally after graduating from the academy.
And she was particularly proud that they now give opportunities not just to men and women equally, but athletes of all backgrounds.
"Now, all the various demographic groups [are represented]," Eichorn said.
"So reaching out and having more emphasis on providing for Indigenous athletes and their needs - because they're quite often dissimilar to the needs of a non-Indigenous athlete - and other culturally diverse communities."
