Volleyball NSW and Squash Australia (Rely customers) were both recognised at this year’s Pride in Sport Awards. The interesting part isn’t that they won. It’s how they got there, and what their stories tell other sporting organisations about the inclusion gap between policy and practice. This article delves into the context around the Pride in Sport awards and how participants are not chasing surface recognition. They are building measurable programs that deliver participation outcomes.
Sport is operating in a more demanding integrity environment than it was a decade ago. Member protection expectations have hardened. Sport Integrity Australia has launched the NIF. Funding bodies ask harder questions. Members, particularly younger participants, vote with their feet. And the workforce of paid and volunteer officials, coaches and administrators expect culture to be more than a values poster on the office wall.
Inclusion sits at the centre of sport integrity. It is not a separate program competing with safeguarding, complaints handling, governance and integrity. It is the same conversation. An organisation that takes LGBTQ+ inclusion seriously generally has stronger cultures and is a better representation of our community.
The largest study of its kind in a decade, Free to Exist, led by Dr Ryan Storr and Dr Carleigh Yeomans at Swinburne University in 2024, found that LGBTIQA+ young people aged 16 to 25 participate in sport at roughly half the rate of their non-LGBTQI+ peers, around 30 per cent against 60 per cent. The headline percentage of LGBTIQA+ young people witnessing discrimination has come down from 80 per cent (Out on the Fields, 2015) to 53 per cent in 2024. That is real progress, but it is also a fifty-fifty coin toss every time a young LGBTIQA+ person walks into a club. Among young gay men in men’s sport specifically, 76 per cent still witness homophobia and 63 per cent experience it firsthand. That number has barely shifted in a decade.
Ten years of Pride in Sport
Pride in Sport launched in 2016 as a national initiative led by ACON, Australia’s largest LGBTQ+ health organisation. The Australian Pride in Sport Awards have been held annually since 2017, making them the longest-running awards of their kind dedicated to LGBTQ+ inclusion in Australian sport. The 2026 event marked the program’s tenth anniversary and was held at CENTREPIECE at Melbourne Park on 14 April.
The substance of the program is the Pride in Sport Index (PSI), a national benchmarking instrument used by sporting organisations to assess their LGBTQ+ inclusion practice across governance, policy, workplace, member experience and visibility. Organisations submit, are scored against an external standard, and recognised in tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum). It is, in effect, a maturity model for inclusion in sport.
What makes the PSI useful, and uncomfortable, is that it is external. It does not accept self-assessment. Sporting bodies used to running their own internal “we’re inclusive” narrative find a submission process clarifying. The PSI rewards what is documented, evidenced and lived, not what is felt or stated.
That distinction matters because the rest of an organisation’s integrity infrastructure – member protection policies, complaints handling, reporting channels, board oversight – follows the same logic. Either it exists in practice or it doesn’t.
The 2026 awards in summary
UWA Sport was named Sporting Organisation of the Year and Perth Pythons Hockey Club took Community Sport of the Year. Six organisations achieved Platinum Tier: Hockey ACT, Macquarie University Sport, Netball Victoria, Tennis Australia, Touch Football Australia and UWA Sport. Nine reached Gold. Volleyball NSW was named Most Improved Sporting Organisation. Squash Australia was recognised at Silver Tier and had two individual finalists: Shaun McEachin in Executive Leadership and David Cowell in LGBTQ+ Role Model.
Pride in Sport’s National Program Manager Ben Cork framed the milestone as a celebration and a continuation of the work. Co-founder Andrew Purchas OAM noted that this year’s finalists span everything from grassroots clubs welcoming members for the first time, through to leadership embedding inclusive practice across whole organisations. Both ends of that spectrum sit inside the two sports worth looking at closely.
Volleyball NSW: progress at gradient
Most Improved attracts less coverage than the headline tier winners, but the trajectory of a smaller organisation is what other administrators can learn from.
Volleyball NSW reached Silver Tier and was named Most Improved at the 2026 awards. The category is judged against the previous year’s submission, so a win signals identifiable, recent operational changes that produced a measurable shift on the index. That is what other state bodies, particularly those weighing whether a first year of effort would even register, will want to study.
Lachlan Marsh (Portfolio Manager – Affiliation, Membership & Inclusion) and Rebecca Walter (CEO) describes Volleyball NSW’s earlier PSI submission as a reality check. The organisation had strong intent and genuinely believed it was being inclusive, but a lot of that work was informal, inconsistent, or sitting in people’s heads rather than embedded in systems. Inclusion was happening in pockets but wasn’t yet visible across policy, processes, training or accountability. The submission, the organisation says, made clear that caring isn’t enough on its own; real progress comes from turning good intentions into repeatable ways of working that outlast individual effort.
The biggest gains came from lifting awareness and backing it with structure. Volleyball NSW put real effort into recognising days of significance, identifying safe spaces and ally champions, and making inclusion visible rather than assumed. Internal accountability was strengthened so that inclusion work had clear ownership instead of sitting loosely across roles. Processes were documented, so awareness efforts, responsibilities and decision-making weren’t ad hoc but consistent and easy to understand. Bringing those pieces together made inclusion more deliberate, measurable and sustainable, which is what moved the index.
Internal resistance, where it existed, was less about ideological pushback and more about people understanding why the work mattered in the first place. Once that context was clearer, and the relevance to the organisation’s values articulated, engagement followed.
What Volleyball NSW underestimated was the volume of work once it committed to doing the job properly. The initiatives themselves were not complex or costly, but embedding inclusion takes time, attention and consistency. As a smaller state sporting organisation (SSO), this work competes with other priorities, which meant progress required deliberately making space for it rather than treating it as an add-on.
The work is funded through existing budget rather than a special allocation, on the basis that it aligns with broader strategic priorities.
Over the next 12 to 24 months, Volleyball NSW plans to put more time and resources behind the work already started and continue building it into standard practice. With more capacity, the organisation says, Gold was genuinely achievable this year; the plan now is to strengthen and formalise processes, embed annual training, and ensure consistency across the organisation. Gold will require those practices to be sustained, well-evidenced and clearly owned.
The organisation’s message to state bodies sitting on a “we’ll do it next year” mindset is direct: next year usually becomes another delay, and inclusion work doesn’t get easier by waiting. You don’t need everything perfect to start, and momentum matters as much as planning.
Squash Australia: visibility and leadership
Squash Australia achieved Silver Tier in the 2026 index, alongside Cricket Australia, Rugby Australia, the NRL and the NBL. Two of its people were also named as individual finalists: Shaun McEachin in Executive Leadership and David Cowell for the LGBTQ+ Role Model Award.
That combination is worth noting. Smaller national sporting organisations sometimes assume the inclusion conversation belongs to the codes with the biggest budgets and the longest-running programs. The Squash Australia result suggests otherwise: a Silver Tier organisational outcome alongside two individual nominees points to leadership that has been visible, not just compliant, and to people willing to put their names to the work in a national setting.
Squash Australia’s CEO, Robert Donaghue, attributes that visibility to a combination of structured intent and organic emergence. The governance and leadership have made deliberate choices to embed inclusion in strategy, policies and day-to-day operations, which sets the tone. The visibility of individuals such as McEachin and Cowell has been more organic, a reflection of a culture where people feel supported to step forward, share perspectives and lead in their own way. That only happens, the organisation says, when there is alignment between what it says and what it actually does.
The organisation does not have the same resourcing as the larger sports, so it has been deliberate about integrating inclusion into existing functions rather than treating it as a standalone workstream. The trade-off is that progress can be more incremental, with heavier reliance on partnerships, shared learning and the commitment of its people. The upside is that inclusion becomes part of everyone’s role, which tends to produce more authentic and sustainable outcomes.
Squash Australia has looked to sports further along for guidance on frameworks, language and how to measure progress; there is no need, it says, to reinvent the wheel. Where it has been deliberate is in scaling those approaches to fit the sport, focusing on practical, achievable initiatives that resonate with the squash community rather than adopting large-scale programs that may not be sustainable. The aim is relevance and consistency, not doing everything at once.
McEachin and Cowell’s message to leaders in other sports who are quietly supportive but not yet visible is that visibility matters. Support behind the scenes is important, but visible leadership creates permission for others to engage and helps drive cultural change. That doesn’t mean having all the answers; it means being willing to listen, learn and show up. Small, genuine actions can carry significant weight, particularly in national sporting environments where signals from leadership are read closely.
What the two stories share
Both organisations describe their first PSI submission as exposing the gap between intention and infrastructure. Good intent was present; the mechanisms to sustain, measure and replicate it were not. Both also emphasise that resistance, where it existed, was about relevance rather than ideology and that documentation and ownership, not enthusiasm, are what carry inclusion work through personnel changes. That is standard governance practice in every other area of sport administration. Inclusion is no different.
The other shared point is financial. Neither organisation created a separate funding line; inclusion was embedded into existing budget and strategy. That makes the work more sustainable, but it also means it competes for time and attention alongside everything else… a trade-off both organisations acknowledge openly.
Beyond the benchmark
The PSI is a benchmark of practice. It tells you whether your governance, policy, workplace and visibility hold up against an external standard. It does not tell you what is actually happening in your sport at the case level incl. how many incidents of homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, harassment or exclusion are being reported, where they cluster, who is reporting and who isn’t, what the time-to-resolution looks like, or where the same names keep recurring across files.
In May 2025, Sport Integrity Australia and Pride in Sport jointly released the LGBTQ+ Sport Integrity Guideline, giving sporting organisations practical guidance on identifying, managing and resolving incidents of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Sport Integrity Australia has been a Pride in Sport member since 2023. The implication is that at the regulator level, integrity and inclusion are no longer treated as separate workstreams.
Where to start
For sporting bodies wondering where to begin, the answer depends on where the organisation already is.
If an organisation has not yet submitted to the PSI, that is the starting point. Submission produces an honest baseline and a list of operational gaps. Administrators consistently report that the first submission is the hardest. Less because of the work involved than because of the candour it requires.
From there, the work is iterative: identify what is missing, build or adapt the infrastructure to close the gaps, document what you have done, and submit again. Both Volleyball NSW and Squash Australia followed that sequence. Neither waited until everything was perfect; they started, learned what was required, and kept building.
Irrespective of tier, the underlying member protection, complaints and integrity infrastructure has to be capable of handling the cases that visibility brings forward. The Sport Integrity Australia and Pride in Sport guideline is the current reference document for that work. Organisations that increase visibility without strengthening response capacity tend to learn that lesson the hard way.
Where to learn more
The Pride in Sport program publishes the PSI methodology and full 2026 awards results at prideinsport.com.au. Sporting organisations interested in benchmarking can register as members and access the framework directly. The LGBTQ+ Sport Integrity Guideline is available through Sport Integrity Australia. The Free to Exist report is available through VicHealth and Swinburne University.
A note on scope
This article is about Pride in Sport and the 2026 awards and is deliberately scoped to LGBTQ+ inclusion. It does not attempt to cover intersectionality, the way LGBTQ+ identity overlaps with race, First Nations identity, disability, cultural and linguistic background and class.
Acknowledgment
Rely attended the 2026 Pride in Sport Awards as a guest of revolutioniseSPORT.
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Sources referenced:
Storr, R., Yeomans, C., Albury, K., Ridgers, N., Sherry, E. (2024). Free to Exist: Documenting participation data on LGBTIQA+ young people in sport and physical activity. Swinburne University for VicHealth.
Denison, E., Kitchen, A. (2015). Out on the Fields. Repucom for Bingham Cup Sydney 2014.
Sport Integrity Australia and Pride in Sport (2025). LGBTQ+ Sport Integrity Guideline.
Interview with Squash Australia’s Robert Donaghue
Interview with Volleyball NSW’s Lachlan Marsh and Rebecca Walter
