---
title: "AFL Barwon's Governance Reform: Transparency, Accountability, and Communication"
url: https://tidyhq.com/blog/afl-barwon-governance-reform-transparency-accountability-communication
date: 2026-04-17
author: "Isaak Dury"
categories: ["Governance", "Sport-Specific", "News"]
excerpt: "AFL Barwon and AFL Victoria are splitting their roles across local league operations, regional council oversight and state-level advocacy. A look at the reform, and some reflections from watching other federated sports work through similar transitions."
---

# AFL Barwon's Governance Reform: Transparency, Accountability, and Communication

> AFL Barwon and AFL Victoria are splitting their roles across local league operations, regional council oversight and state-level advocacy. A look at the reform, and some reflections from watching other federated sports work through similar transitions.

![AFL Barwon community football match action — players contest the ball in front of a crowd at a local Geelong-region ground.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/bp0k7h82/production/35956b9c2ca991dcd258ccb09dba5a922565c79f-1920x1080.jpg?w=1200&fm=webp)

## Key takeaways

- AFL Barwon and AFL Victoria announced a governance restructure in November 2025 splitting league operations, regional council oversight, and state-level participation and advocacy - with clubs told the short-term change is minimal and the long-term intent is clarity
- New AFL Barwon CEO Kate Patterson has named the things clubs asked her for - clarity, transparency around decision-making, and clear open lines of communication - which are the shared goals we hear across federated sport
- A clearer role split works when each level can see and share the information the other levels need - the information layer is the part most federated sports are still building
- Many Barwon-region clubs run their off-field operations on TidyHQ - committee, finance, policies, communications, sponsors - alongside PlayHQ's on-field competition and registration data. The two are complementary
- The 12-month transition is the window to let the technology stack catch up with the governance structure - our reflections are offered in case they're useful to clubs, leagues or regions working through it

Five months after [AFL Victoria](https://www.aflvic.com.au/) and [AFL Barwon](https://www.aflbarwon.com.au/) announced a governance restructure for football in the Barwon region, the [Geelong Advertiser](https://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/) ran a headline naming exactly the right three things: transparency, accountability, communication\.

![Geelong Advertiser front-page article: Transparency, accountability, communication - AFL moves towards better club outcomes. Photo of Lisa Patterson and Kate Patterson by Michael Chambers.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/bp0k7h82/production/da0628986bb60990eddec371352ae5cfc547f79d-4032x3024.jpg?w=1200&fm=webp)

*Geelong Advertiser - AFL Victoria Barwon regional manager Lisa Patterson and AFL Barwon CEO Kate Patterson. Photo: Michael Chambers.*

AFL Barwon's first Chief Executive Kate Patterson and AFL Victoria's regional manager for Barwon Lisa Patterson are leading the transition \- splitting roles across local league operations, regional council oversight and state\-level advocacy for 180\-plus clubs stretched from the Surf Coast to the Western District\.

The three words in that headline name a challenge every federated sport is working through right now\. The governance design is one half of the problem\. The information infrastructure underneath it \- the part that makes transparency, accountability and communication actually work on a Tuesday night \- is the other half\.

## What AFL Barwon has done

The restructure \- announced in November 2025 and still inside a twelve\-month transition window \- splits responsibility three ways\.

**AFL Barwon** \(the league entity, led by Kate Patterson\) now owns local league governance, administration, commercial revenue, and management of by\-laws, investigations and tribunal\. That's the operational machinery \- who plays who, how disputes get resolved, how the competitions make money\.

**The Barwon Regional Council** \- a body Lisa Patterson is currently recruiting for \- oversees football's direction in the region, rules and regulations, competition structure \(age groups\) and Barwon\-specific club and growth opportunities\. That's the strategic layer \- where the game goes, not how it runs this Saturday\.

**AFL Victoria** retains participation, advocacy, capacity building, facilities, partnerships and government relations\. That's the state\-wide layer \- growing the game, lobbying government, building infrastructure\.

As Lisa puts it in the article: *"Having a more consistent structure across the state is important as it ensures alignment in decision\-making, improves accountability, and allows AFL Victoria to focus on growing the game while regions and leagues are better equipped to manage local competitions\."*

This is not an isolated move\. Similar restructures have rolled out across other Victorian regions \- a staged alignment with the [AFL's community football](https://community.afl/) direction, and part of what the [Australian Sports Commission](https://www.ausport.gov.au/) and state governments have been pushing for years under the banner of "good governance in sport"\. The national version of the argument: [what good governance actually means in grassroots sport](/blog/what-good-governance-means-grassroots-sport)\. The international context: [FIFA's governance study](/blog/what-fifa-governance-study-reveals-about-federated-sport)\.

## The three words in practice

The reason the *Advertiser* headline landed for me is that Kate names the exact three things clubs have told her they want\. Quoting her directly:

> "From my discussions with clubs so far, they really want clarity, transparency around decision\-making and clear, open lines of communication\. Whether that's from AFL Barwon around the competitions, or understanding what support and resources are available through AFL Victoria, we need to get those things right\."

## What 'working' looks like on a Tuesday night

A committee secretary at a Barwon\-region club shouldn't need to read a governance framework to feel the reform landing\. She should be able to answer three questions faster than she could six months ago:

1. What decision has just been made that affects my club, who made it, and why?
1. What does my club owe \- fees, reports, acknowledgements, compliance items \- and to whom?
1. What support is available from the region or the state body, and how do I get it?

When those three questions are easier to answer, the structure is doing its job\. When they're not, there's usually an information\-flow layer underneath that hasn't caught up with the governance design \- regardless of how well the governance design itself has been done\.

## Transparency is a data\-visibility problem

The data that would make transparency real already exists\. It lives in spreadsheets, Facebook Messenger threads, MYOB files, Dropbox folders, and the personal laptops of volunteers who will rotate off the committee at the AGM\.

A typical club secretary knows exactly who the current committee is, when the last AGM was held, whether the public liability certificate is current, and who the nominated safeguarding officer is\. But none of that sits anywhere the league can see without asking\. When a league needs to confirm every affiliated club has current insurance, a named safeguarding lead, a completed AGM and an acknowledged by\-law update for the season, the request usually goes out as an email\. A few rounds of chasing later, the picture gets assembled \- and by the time it's done, some of it is already out of date because a treasurer has rotated off or a certificate has expired\.

A quick scope marker\. PlayHQ handles the on\-field side \- competition, player registration, fixtures, results\. AFL Barwon's reform, and this article, is about the off\-field side: governance, by\-laws, tribunal, communication with clubs\. The two layers are complementary\.

Many clubs in the Barwon region already run their off\-field operations on [TidyHQ](/) \- committee workflows, policy registers, AGM and meeting records, sponsor management, events, volunteer coordination, and internal communications\. [TidyConnect](/tidyconnect) gives a league read\-access \(with each club's permission\) to the things a league actually needs to see \- current insurance, affiliation status, a named safeguarding lead, a committee in place \- without having to ask for it each time\.

The governance principle we started from: clubs shouldn't have to migrate, re\-enter data, or change how they operate at the club level for a league to get visibility\. Clubs on other platforms keep using them; clubs on spreadsheets can keep using those too\. The point is that the league doesn't have to chase\.

*(Animation: How TidyConnect gives leagues real-time visibility across affiliated clubs - information flows down to clubs and reports back up without manual chasing.) - see /lottie/tidyconnect-ecosystem.json*

## Accountability is a feedback loop, not a dashboard

The word "accountability" gets used loosely in sport governance\. It often means "we will audit you" or "we will publish the results"\. Both are downstream\. Upstream: every level can see, in real time, whether the commitments it has made are being kept\.

In practice that means:

- **Clubs** can see their own compliance status at any time \- insurance, safeguarding, affiliation, finance\. No surprises at the end of the season\.
- **Leagues** can see compliance roll\-ups across affiliated clubs without chasing\. When the league says "clubs need to lodge their safeguarding statement by March 31", there's a screen that shows who has and who hasn't \- without an email thread\.
- **Regions and state bodies** get visibility at the level they need \- aggregated, anonymised where appropriate, and focused on the questions they're actually trying to answer\. Participation\. Diversity\. Facility utilisation\. Safeguarding compliance rates\. Nobody needs to see every junior's name to answer those questions\.

Accountability isn't surveillance\. It's a feedback loop\. Every level sees its own performance against the commitments it has made \- and every level above sees the same picture at the right altitude\. We've written about the distinction in [the big brother problem in federated organisations](/blog/the-big-brother-problem-in-federated-organisations)\.

The new AFL Barwon structure creates clearer roles across club, league, region and state \- which is the right shape\. The work that goes alongside any reform like this is the information layer that lets each level answer its own questions without manually pulling data from the level below\. That's the layer we've been focused on, and it's designed to sit alongside on\-field platforms like PlayHQ rather than replace them\.

## Communication is the last mile

Kate's line about clarity and "clear, open lines of communication" is the part of the article I thought about the most\. Across community sport more broadly, a lot of governance communication still relies on email forwarding \- which works for some messages and loses context for others\.

A familiar pattern, not specific to any one body: a state\-level policy update gets emailed to regional bodies, who forward it to club presidents, who forward it to committees, where it eventually lands with the person who actually needs to act on it \- often with the original context stripped off along the way and no easy way to confirm back up the chain that anyone read it\.

The thing we've been working on is what you might call **role\-based communication routing**\. When a by\-law amendment is issued, it reaches every club's president and governance contact with a one\-click acknowledgement\. When a safeguarding bulletin goes out, it reaches every club's nominated safeguarding officer directly\. When a capacity\-building grant opens, it reaches the clubs that qualify\. It's less about replacing email and more about giving the governing body a way to see that the message landed in the right hands\.

A practical example of where this matters\. Under the new AFL Barwon structure, the league owns by\-laws, investigations and tribunal\. A tribunal matter can touch a club, the opposition, league tribunal members and \- on appeal \- the state body\. Coordinating that conversation well is a real challenge in any federation; case files on shared drives and email threads that lose the thread of who saw what are the usual failure mode\. A role\-based system gives each participant the exact thread relevant to them, keeps sensitive information scoped appropriately, and means the case history lives somewhere durable rather than on a volunteer's laptop\.

This is the kind of infrastructure we think any governance reform benefits from, regardless of the specific structure chosen\.

## Why the Barwon region is worth watching

The Barwon region covers a large number of clubs across the [Geelong Football Netball League](https://www.aflbarwon.com.au/gfnl-clubs), [Bellarine Football Netball League](https://www.aflbarwon.com.au/bfnl-clubs) and [Colac & District Football Netball League](https://www.aflbarwon.com.au/cdfnl-clubs), junior leagues across boys' and girls' competitions, and women's senior football\. It's large enough to be meaningful and cohesive enough for a twelve\-month transition to be realistic\.

It also has a concentration of clubs already running modern digital infrastructure\. Many of the senior and junior clubs across the Barwon\-region competitions are existing TidyHQ customers, which means a meaningful share of the information a new league entity might want to see is already being captured at the club level\. The job \- wherever a federation chooses to use it \- is surfacing that information appropriately, not re\-collecting it\.

If you're a club secretary or league administrator in the Barwon region reading this, you'll already know which clubs have their systems in order and which are still using a mix of Facebook, email chains and a volunteer's Excel file\. The cost of running properly has fallen, and that gap has been closing across community sport nationally\.

## What a twelve\-month transition tends to need

Twelve months is a tight window for a regional restructure, and we've seen similar transitions play out in other sports\. A few observations on what tends to matter at each level, offered in case they're useful:

**At the club level\.** Clubs benefit when their off\-field operations \- committee workflows, policies, meeting and AGM records, sponsor management, events, volunteer coordination, and internal communications \- live in one place rather than five\. PlayHQ covers the on\-field competition and registration side; the off\-field side is where our work has been\.

**At the league level\.** A league running a new remit is generally better served by a real\-time view of compliance, affiliation, finance and communication across its clubs than by chase\-and\-reply cycles\. Not dashboards for the sake of dashboards \- screens that answer the specific questions the league entity is accountable for\.

**At the regional council level\.** A regional body tends to want a strategic visibility layer \- aggregated trends, participation data and growth\-opportunity signals\. Less detail than the league entity needs, but broader\. This is the layer that's been least well\-served historically, because fewer platforms are built specifically for regional councils\.

**At the state body level\.** A state body generally needs clean, timely, aggregated data on participation, capacity, compliance and diversity \- without having to chase regions for it\.

The tech isn't the hard part\. Adoption is\.

Clubs adopting\. Leagues coordinating\. Regions defining what they need\. State bodies putting the data to use once they have it\.

## The direction underneath the reform

Reading Lisa's comments about "alignment in decision\-making" and Kate's comments about "ensuring we're continually improving", what AFL Barwon and AFL Victoria are doing sits in the same direction as a lot of serious governance work in community sport right now: separating strategy from operations, pushing accountability closer to the action, and letting each level focus on what it's best placed to do\.

It's the right direction\. The longer\-term question, for any federation working through this kind of change, is whether the information and communication infrastructure keeps pace with the governance design \- or whether, five years from now, a different pair of executives are photographed in the same pose in the same paper, using the same three words, explaining why the structure needs to change again\.

This is the layer we've spent the last few years building\. TidyHQ runs the club level \- committee workflows, policies, sponsors, events, volunteers, internal communications\. TidyConnect sits above it \- federation visibility, compliance roll\-ups, role\-based communication across clubs, leagues, regions and state bodies\. Together they're the governance infrastructure side of the work: not a replacement for the human parts of governance \(conversation, negotiation, judgement\), but a way to take routine data and communication off volunteers' plates so the human parts get more of the attention they deserve\.

For anyone reading this who's involved in the transition \- a club secretary, a league administrator, a newly\-appointed councillor, a regional staffer \- we're happy to compare notes\. No pitch\. Our thinking on the architecture is covered in [Introducing TidyConnect](/blog/introducing-tidyconnect-run-your-club-network) and [off\-field operations: the missing piece in sports federation software](/blog/off-field-operations-missing-piece-sports-federation-software), and the [contact page](/contact) is the easiest way to reach us directly\.

## References

- Sinclair, T\. *Transparency, accountability, communication: AFL moves towards better club outcomes*\. [Geelong Advertiser](https://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/), April 2026\.
- [AFL Barwon](https://www.aflbarwon.com.au/) \- regional governing body for football and netball in the Barwon region\.
- [AFL Victoria](https://www.aflvic.com.au/) \- state governing body for Australian Rules football in Victoria\.
- [AFL Community Football](https://community.afl/) \- the national community football framework\.
- [Australian Sports Commission \- Sport Governance Standards](https://www.sportgovernance.com.au/) \- the national framework for good governance in Australian sport\.
- [State Sport and Active Recreation Bodies \- Vic Gov](https://sport.vic.gov.au/our-sector/state-sport-and-active-recreation-bodies) \- state\-level context for community sport in Victoria\.
- Boillat, C\. & Tallec Marston, K\. *Governance Models Across Football Leagues and Clubs*\. [CIES, 2016](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323226542_Governance_Models_Across_Football_Leagues_and_Clubs)\. ISBN 2\-940241\-25\-2\.
- ISCA & Transparency International Germany\. *Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport*, 2013\. Published by [ISCA](https://www.isca.org/) with Transparency International Germany\.
- [PlayHQ](https://www.playhq.com/) \- the on\-field competition and player registration platform used across AFL Barwon\.
- [TidyHQ](/) and [TidyConnect](/tidyconnect) \- the off\-field platforms we build, used by a number of Barwon\-region clubs for club\-level operations and by federations for the visibility layer above\.

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