What you need to know:

• Wheelchair Rugby Australia is five years into its journey of self-governance, and it’s on a steep trajectory to cut through to the mainstream.
• The sporting body, helmed by CEO Chris Nay, will next year host the first major international wheelchair rugby competition on Australian shores, set with four days of live coverage on Foxtel and Kayo.
• Nay says the broadcast deal, first signed with Foxtel Group in 2021, has been instrumental in the sport’s growth to date by creating critical exposure to sponsorships.
• Foxtel Media’s Mark Frain and Martin Medcraf have also put in some heavy lifting behind the scenes to get Nay in front of some of the biggest names in marketing. 
• Nay’s ultimate vision for the code is to reach the pinnacle – to embed the Australian Steeler alongside the Boomers and the Matildas in the Australian sporting psyche.
• To get there, he’ll need to continue WRA’s evolution towards a nationally consolidated governance model – and for that, they’ll need bring in an additional $700k in annual revenue.
• With that in mind, WRA and Foxtel have been hitting the market to get a full slate of big brands on board for the 2025 season.

Wheelchair Rugby Australia (WRA) boss Chris Nay has honed his pitching skills this year, having put pen to paper in front of some of the country’s biggest names in media and marketing to sell the wheelchair rugby story – and it’s a good one.

Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain, UM CEO Anathea Ruys and Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom are among the group Nay describes as some of the sport’s earliest supporters since it broke away from multi-sport governance under Disability Sport Australia. The late Lisa Ronson was also key contributor as one of WRA’s inaugural board members.

Nay – WRA’s inaugural chief executive after convincing DSA to give the sport a shot at self-governance in 2019 – has huge ambition for the code. The north star, he tells Mi3, is for wheelchair rugby’s national team, The Steelers, to sit next to the Boomers and the Matilda’s at the top of Australia’s national sporting pedestal. 

That’s a long way from the poorly-funded and struggling set-up of just a few years ago. But Nay says the players have earned it.

“As Australian people, we love the Boomers, seeing Patty Mills and the boys doing their thing in the Olympics – they just seem like a team of good guys and they represent our country really well. The country has fallen in love with the Matildas and everything that they’re doing and their success. They’re really the two national sporting brands that will last the test of time as always synonymous with the Australian psyche,” says Nay.

“Why is it not Boomers, Matildas and Steelers? Because we’re the most successful team Australia has ever had across an Olympic or Paralympic games ever. We’re the current world number two – we just won bronze in Paris.”

A bold vision – and it’s landing with executives. Nay has spoken to dozens of head marketers in meet and greets and roundtable dinners hooked up by his adland mentors. Next he’s locked-in gigs to present to staff at NRMA and UM, and will take the stage at a well-known ad industry conference next year in Cairns.

The behind-the-scenes support, backed commercially by a significant media partnership with Foxtel, has WRA well on its way to cutting through to the mainstream – and meant Nay could expand from working out of his apartment on a solo mission to a crew of four operating out of a Surry Hills office space.

Over that four-year period, the sport’s national governance model has evolved significantly as WRA takes on increasing responsibility for state and community leagues, firming up the pipeline between the grassroots and elite games. That will culminate next year when the current high-performance program transitions to WRA, bringing the organisation’s total resourcing up to 15 heads.

Broadcast boost

Nay says the Foxtel Group partnership has been key to WRA’s trajectory since the code struck its first broadcast deal in 2021. It was at the time the biggest disability sport broadcast deal in Australian history, worth upwards of $100k for three days of competition. Per Nay, the majority of those funds are funnelled back into the production of the broadcast itself, but he says it’s worth “so much more” than the dollar value.

“It actually gave us the footing to be able to start selling real estate and stuff on on our content for the first time, because it’s actually being broadcast right across the country,” he says. “The growth and development and things that we’ve been able to achieve since having the Foxtel partnership has been huge.”

Initially slated for streaming only on Kayo, the deal was expanded into linear at the last minute as pandemic restrictions threw Australia’s major sporting leagues a major curveball. 

“Luckily or unluckily, the country went into Covid lockdown that weekend… and so sports started getting dropped from [Foxtel’s] channels,” says Nay.

Because WRA had already flown its athletes into Queensland for the competition a day prior, the games went ahead, and the coverage was bumped onto linear to fill the empty space.

“We increased 25 per cent in terms of number of players in the sport, just off that first broadcast. Our revenues increased tenfold, which meant we were able to establish a national league, the players were able to play three more times [a year],” recalls Nay. 

The early success of the coverage laid the precedent for the next three years of deals, and in 2024 Foxtel opted to sign its first multi-year contract with the code. The two-year deal runs through to an inaugural international competition that’s due to host 14 teams in Adelaide over four days in May 2025 – it’s set to be WRA’s biggest milestone to date.

The official title of the competition is yet to be announced, though Santos holds the naming rights after rolling over the three-year deal it signed onto in 2022. The South Australian Government is the other major partner, per a three-year hosting deal that runs until 2026, and Foxtel is currently in market with WRA to fill out the rest of the sponsorship lineup.

Sponsors needed

Foxtel’s partnership with WRA goes well beyond that of a traditional broadcast deal. Along with Frain, Foxtel Media’s sports sales and partnerships director, Martin Medcraf, has been a strong advocate for the WRA brand in market.

“They’re so successful as a small sport, and for us and I think in their eyes it just looks like such a great opportunity for corporate partners to get involved with something that hasn’t traditionally had sponsors,” he tells Mi3.

“We [at Foxtel] are very comfortable and proud of the fact that we’re telecasting and supporting the code… it’s something that the whole place enjoys.”

Per Medcraf, conversations are already underway with several “big end of town clients” who are looking into sponsorship opportunities for WRA’s 2025 season.

The opportunities go beyond the usual court signage and uniform logos to include ad placement on TV and billboards, naming rights for various wheelchair rugby coverage and updates, and ambassadorships with WRA athletes.

“All that money goes straight back into the sport. It doesn’t get spent anywhere else. It just goes straight back into building the sport into and expanding in other states as well,” explains Medcraf.

Foxtel has promoted the sport natively, including “cross-pollination” on magazine programs like the Matty Johns Show. And it’s been paying off – Medcraf estimates audiences will be up 20 per cent year-on-year through 2025.

“Everyone in Australia loves a winner and this is a winner. The adversity that they’ve come through to actually do what they’re doing – and winning it on a global scale – is amazing,” he says.

“We just want corporate partners to recognise that and to be on board with that and be on this journey. It’s uncluttered as far as corporate partners go… So for clients that want to come on board, they are getting on board with pretty clear air.”

Cash intensive…

Getting those clients on board is top of mind for WRA’s Nay. Unlike many other disability sports, he explains wheelchair rugby’s growth is dependent on its ability to commercialise.

By Nay’s count, the code will near to bring in an extra $700k per annum to get where it wants to be in the short term – which will ideally involve consolidating disparate state-level governance bodies into a unilateral model under WRA.

“We talk about bridging that gap to equality, and that’s essentially what we’re trying to do by commercialisation as well. It will allow us to have some funds to actually put back into the sport, rather than just get the sport happening through a logistical standpoint.”

The logistics aren’t easy. Wheelchair rugby requires players to have “quad impairment” – i.e. they must have a disability that affects both the arms and legs to be eligible. From the onset, it means the accessibility requirements involved with running wheelchair rugby are much higher than most sports.

Take the upcoming competition in Adelaide next year. The fourteen teams competing are booked “across eight different hotels because of the number of wheelchair accessible rooms”. That means no discounts on accommodation or meals for bulk-bookings.

Then there’s the athlete’s chairs that travel as excess baggage, the ground staff needed to facilitate transportation between airport, accommodation, and venue. It entails multiple trips by accessible mini busses to get players where they need to be, with trucks containing competition chairs running to and from the venue separately.

Athletes, as it stands, are unpaid, and those who travel with a carer are required to cover the additional costs involved.

At the same time, the eligibility requirements significantly reduce the wheelchair rugby’s potential “playing pool”, and given grants are often awarded based on reach and community impact, that limits the amount of Government funding WRA receives.

“We’ve probably got 120 active athletes across the country right now – how many people do you know that are quad impaired?” explains Nay.

… but massive impact

What Nay and his team are focusing on, and what they hope will resonate with much-needed sponsors, is the massive individual impact of involvement.

He gives the example of Riley Nixon, a nine-year-old boy who lost all four limbs to meningococcal B at two years old. After seeing Nixon’s story on episode of 60 Minutes, Nay tracked down his father on Facebook and got in touch.

“I know it’s all sort of pretty sad and fresh now, but essentially, your son has a unbelievable pathway,” Nay recalls telling Nixon’s father. “He fits the demographic perfectly for what we need. Most people acquire their injuries later on in life, but if he’s six and he starts enjoying wheelchair rugby, imagine the amount of sport development he’s got ahead of other people.”

So, Nixon came along to training. “Now little Riley Nixon is like our ambassador. He loves it, loves wheelchair rugby, it’s changed everything for him,” says Nay.

Perhaps the best-known face of the Aussie Steelers and known for avoiding using a wheelchair until he was 12, Ryley Batt became the youngest wheelchair rugby player to make his Paralympic debut at Athens in 2004. He was 15 years old.

Batt has since been to six Paralympic games, won four medals, and keeps up a professional training regime alongside his day job at Suncorp Group – where he’s also become a GIO brand ambassador, in addition an ambassadorship with Woolworths.

Of course, Nixon and Batt are not alone in their experiences, and the work WRA is doing is fast-gaining attention from in the broader sporting world.  

“There isn’t an athlete in the country that I couldn’t ring right now and they wouldn’t answer and give me what we needed, because they put their trust in what we’re doing,” says Nay.

“For the first time, [wheelchair rugby players have] had advocacy, lobbying and better outcomes designed specifically for them. And they’re feeling it, they’re seeing it – the willingness to continue that work is there.

“We’ve got such great positive momentum, a great story. We’re achieving things. We’re bringing the international competition home. We’re trying to get our brand established at the forefront of consumer psyche like Boomers, Matildas and Steelers… I feel like we’ve got a great story. It’s just our ability to be able to sell it and work that in with people that want to come along with us and do it.”