Athletics Insight: Kat Austin leaves Athletics NZ for key role at Athletics Australia

A Whanganui reunion for Scott Newman (left), Alec McNab and Kat Austin at the 2024 Diamond League in London.

Athletics New Zealand‘s loss is very much Athletics Australia’s gain with the imminent departure of Kat Austin from the Athletics New Zealand High Performance programme.

Austin, originally from Whanganui, will leave Athletics New Zealand at the end of the month to take up a position with Athletics Australia after 13 years in the Athletics New Zealand High Performance department.

Twenty-six years ago, a diminutive Year 9 Kat Austin finished eighth in the 1999 New Zealand Secondary Schools Road Race on a course that started at the back of Government House in Wellington and ran on back roads, finishing inside Newtown Stadium. Austin’s performance remains the best Whanganui Collegiate performance at the national schools road race by a Year 9 girl.

Sadly, injury and health blighted Austin’s competitive career – but it started her administration and organisation career.

In her final school year, Year 13 Austin was athletics club captain at Whanganui Collegiate School where, although not able to compete, she gave invaluable support in terms of organisation. This included a regular contribution to the weekly newsletters. “Kat’s Corner” gave a great teenage dimension to those newsletters.

On leaving school, Austin pursued these strengths by completing a Bachelor of Recreation Management at Lincoln University, a Graduate Diploma in Marketing at Canterbury University and a Graduate Diploma in Events Management from the Christchurch Institute of Technology.

We were lucky to be able to call on these skills when, three years after leaving school, she returned to Whanganui offering her help and expertise with the organisation of the NZSSAA Track and Field Championships at Cooks Gardens in 2007. This help came at an important time in her career and I am sure the practical experience at the time was valuable in terms of her future career.

From 2009 to 2012, Austin worked for the Wellington Rugby Union. She was seconded to the Rugby World Cup in 2011 for match operations. This all added strength to her administration experience and strengthened her CV.

I had no hesitation in writing a reference for her application for a position as Athletics New Zealand High Performance co-ordinator in 2012, the year I was privileged to be Athletics New Zealand president.

My confidence in Austin has been well-founded as she has held various key roles at Athletics New Zealand. From 2012 to 2014, she was High Performance co-ordinator. In 2014 and 2015, she was High Performance development co-ordinator and became High Performance teams manager from 2015 to 2017. From 2017 to the present, she has been High Performance athlete support manager.

Austin cut her teeth with team administration in her first year as operations manager at the Oceania Area Championships. In the following year, she had the same role at the World Youth Championships and she was at the World Junior Championships a year later in 2014.

In 2016 she was the athletics operations manager at the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, the first of three Olympics (Tokyo 2021 and Paris last year). Austin has fulfilled a similar role at three World Track and Field Championships (2017, 2019 and 2023). She was team leader at the World Indoor Championships this year and the highly successful World Indoors in Glasgow last year, where it is clear her leadership was a feature of a highly successful New Zealand team.

In 2012, when Austin started at Athletics New Zealand, Tom Walsh was just out of his teenage years and Hamish Kerr, Eliza McCartney and Anna Grimaldi were all 15 years old. Zoe Hobbs was just 14 and new teenage middle-distance sensation Sam Ruthe was celebrating his third birthday. Austin has grown with our very best athletes and has been their first point of contact; it is all they have ever really known in the High Performance department.

Current High Performance director Scott Newman, who shares Austin’s Whanganui and Whanganui Collegiate background, has said her energy is unmatched.

“She’s a doer, she fixes stuff, she makes stuff happen. No one does ops like Kat.”

He went on to say that our High Performance Sport New Zealand friends say, “there’s Ops, there’s Black Ops, then there’s Kat Ops”.

Her relentless work and years of knowledge have provided invaluable support for New Zealand athletes. She has become entwined in the Athletics New Zealand fabric.

Austin is off to Australian Athletics where, as the head of performance environments and operations, she will lead a team of four responsible for developing operations and processes that support their multitude of high-performance environments. She will be sadly missed by athletes and all at Athletics New Zealand.