Through her Women in High Performance Sport residency, Kelly has driven meaningful change in Weightlifting New Zealand – using her superpower of building relationships, introducing a fresh style of leadership, and empowering the next generation of lifters.
Sport has been a constant in Kelly Ihaka-Pitama’s life. As a teenager, she was a talented shot put and discus thrower, competing against world champion Beatrice Faumuina. “I worked up to Commonwealth Games level but didn’t quite get to the Games,” she says.
Kelly studied sports science and worked in the sporting industry until she was 22, when she met her future husband; together they decided to buy a home and travel. She then began a successful career in freight forwarding and logistics. But sport was never far from Kelly’s mind, and she took up coaching in athletics and netball.
At 40, Kelly fell ill with a tumour in her thyroid. After surgery, she joined a gym, started doing CrossFit and then fell in love with weightlifting. “I love the sport. In the last 18 months it’s been a whirlwind relationship that’s gone from zero to 100,” she says. “I wish I’d found weightlifting at 16.”
She still competes in weightlifting, recently winning the New Zealand national title in her 45-49 age group and holds national masters records in two weight divisions. She trains at the Papatoetoe Weightlifting Club.
“I’m the eldest lifter at the club, and I get called ‘Māmā Kells’,” the 50-year-old lifter (who’s of Te Aupōuri descent) says. “And that’s the kind of aura I bring to any space I work in. And it’s something that weightlifting was missing.”
Kelly had been working as a team leader for a freight forwarding company; comfortable but still being challenged.
Then she got talking to Simon Kent, the president of Weightlifting New Zealand, who coaches at the Papatoetoe club. “Simon and I built up a relationship in a sporting, business and friendship sense. We worked together well,” Kelly says.
“With my business background, Simon thought the Women in High Performance residency experience would be something I’d be interested in. But I was also studying, working, training and being a mum to my kids.” Kelly was studying health science majoring in integrated health, and had two daughters, aged 21 and 17.
“But then my heart said, ‘Yes, I want to give this a go’,” Kelly says. “It took me six weeks to complete the forms… I’m an overthinker. I didn’t really know what I was getting into.”
Kelly’s successful application saw her take on two part-time roles – one as General Manager of High Performance Development at Weightlifting NZ; the other with HPSNZ. It was a chance for Kelly, South Auckland born and raised, to share her local knowledge with the HPSNZ Pathways team as they explored high performance opportunities in the area.
She was embedded in the team for six months, picking up highly beneficial experience, contributing to the wider HSPNZ pathway system and extending her networks beyond weightlifting.
“I’m grateful I took on this project because it gave me exposure to the high performance system. If I’d gone straight into Weightlifting NZ, I wouldn’t have initially understood the HP processes. It was challenging, learning from scratch, but what I learned was invaluable,” Kelly says.
It wasn’t easy for Kelly when she heard “if you’re in high performance sport in south Auckland and you want to be better, you should leave south Auckland’. That kind of hurt, because I’ve been living there my entire life, and there were high performance athletes who had stayed and been successful.
“But understanding how high performance rolls after seeing it and being amongst it, I get it now. I understand talent is talent, but it’s not high performance. But I had to work through that process.”
Kelly also learned a new vocabulary. “At my first meeting with the Pathways team, I didn’t understand the language they were speaking, talking in acronyms. But I wanted to learn,” she says.
“So I went into the community and met people and started learning their language and understanding the big impact that pre-high performance plays. I think that’s where my biggest learning came from, identifying talent across all sports. It contributed hugely to what I did every day within weightlifting.”
Simon Kent says Kelly Ihaka-Pitama’s work at Weightlifting NZ has been a game-changer.
“Before Kelly, we had volunteers trying to deliver HP outcomes. Then Kelly was able to concentrate on that fulltime,” says the weightlifting performance coach. “It’s often not the glamorous stuff, but stuff that needs to be done, that can slip through the cracks. Part of the role was sometimes rolling up your sleeves and helping out at a club competition.
“It’s been a massive transition for Kelly. She’d just started coming to the club and had a real enthusiasm for the sport and a willingness to learn, which was crucial. Her logistics background definitely brought the processes we needed.”
When she transitioned full-time into Weightlifting NZ, Kelly went through a process of figuring out how to lead in the sport. There were lessons she took from the HSPNZ role to shift the world of weightlifting.
“As part of the residency, we did the 360-degree leadership assessment. I call it ‘The tree of life’, because it gave me purpose and direction. And it helped me understand who I was as a leader, what my core competencies were in leading in a space, but also what I lacked, what I hid behind and ran away from,” Kelly says.
She spent six weeks working with Helene Wilson, HPSNZ’s Women in High Performance Lead, to help her recognise who she was as a leader.
“I discovered why I had reactive tendencies towards a situation, and how I could adapt to a situation in a better way. How to move forward and say, ‘Hey, I want to do this’ or approaching a coach who may be difficult to work with, or speaking to an athlete who’s just missed out on selection. Some of those conversations are quite hard if you don’t understand yourself as a leader,” Kelly says.
“Understanding who I was contributed to me becoming a better leader, because it became more natural to me and authentic to who I was. I came across as me – Māmā Kells – rather than running away from an issue.”
Kelly brought a different kind of leadership to weightlifting – but there were growing pains. As a truly volunteer sport, she was the first person to work fulltime for Weightlifting NZ. A pivot point in Kelly’s residency was when she broke down the job description and began leading in the areas she was responsible for.
Preparing the high performance plan for investment was where Kelly took the lead.
“When weightlifting’s leaders met on how we would present the plan, I challenged the thinking to start from scratch, rather than use a strategy from yesteryear,” she says.
The planning process provided an opportunity for Weightlifting NZ to link all the work they were doing to identify pre-high performance athletes, and where they’re headed over the next four years.
“That was a challenge, but Weightlifting NZ’s High Performance Strategy is now very definitive on the direction the sport is heading in,” Kelly says.
Another focal moment for Kelly came when she travelled with the New Zealand junior weightlifters to Europe – spending a week at the training base of the Italian Olympic team, before the IWF World Junior Championships in Spain.
“The Italians were training on site with us, and I got to witness how other federations train and coach at a high performance level. And I preferred our way,” Kelly says.
But Kelly’s leadership was tested when two of the young New Zealand lifters failed to reach their expectations at the world championships.
“When a couple of our athletes bombed out in the competition, I had to basically pull on every strength I could possibly think of, in order not to fall into a trap of feeling like that person I was at the beginning,” she says. “It was difficult – I’d never been in such a high-pressured situation – and I needed to be the leader who was sympathetic, but also realistic. This is the athlete’s job, they’re here to perform and compete, but as a group, how do we wrap support around them, and explain to them it’s okay to sit in disappointment and failure?”
Kelly learned from her roommate on that trip, Olympic and Commonwealth Games athlete Megan Signal, who now runs the Papatoetoe Olympic Weightlifting Club and manages projects for Weightlifting NZ.
“When we had two young girls struggle, Kelly saw very quickly how even after a great build-up, things can suddenly flip. And if you don’t nip it in the bud then and there, you’re going to have the continuum of a downward spiral,” Megan says. “One night we all sat down and had an open conversation. Kelly walked away from that with her eyes opened – it was a big learning space for her.”
Kelly was then able to take what she’d learned in Europe and apply it to the weightlifting community in New Zealand.
“Implementing those learnings made me a better leader, and I took that back home for other athletes who didn’t perform to expectations at nationals. And I even used it for myself, when I bombed in competition!” she says.
“Being there physically and being a part of it, it all became real. It wasn’t me trying to lead – it was just me leading. I was authentically myself.”
Megan has seen Kelly grow personally during her tenure at Weightlifting NZ, but the sport also benefitted from the skills Kelly already had – athlete experience, logistics and people skills.
“Aside from Kelly’s ability to put structures and policy in place, she’s got a real warmth when it comes to building relationships with athletes, coaches and officials. So many of our high performance and pre-high performance athletes are under the age of 20, and trying to understand a document or a qualification process can be really intimidating,” Megan says. “And Kelly’s warmth just makes that so much easier. Being a woman, and a mum, and having the life experience she has, it’s been very good for our sport.”
Neroli King agrees. Neroli is Clean Sport Officer for Weightlifting NZ and has known Kelly as a fellow Masters weightlifting competitor.
“We went away as joint team managers to an event, and we worked really well together, because she works so well with people. She has a more community-minded, personal approach with the athletes and she’s a great communicator,” Neroli says. “The sport has made huge strides forward during her time there because she’s been able to create those connections. Being fulltime, she could concentrate on that.”
Having a woman leading the sport’s high performance space is a “no-brainer” for Neroli.
“Weightlifting in New Zealand now has more females than males and we strongly promote women in weightlifting,” says Neroli, who’s been part of the IWF Women’s Commission. “Having female leaders in this space is important.
“High performance is not a male-only space. And we’re a sport that constantly breaks boundaries. And if that includes having Kelly in a high performance role, when other sports don’t, then, yes, we’ll own it. But she’s also great at what she does.”
Simon Kent says changes are afoot in high performance environments that have so long been a male domain.
“Women have only been competing in weightlifting at the Olympics since Sydney 2000, so we’re now at a point, 24 years on, where we’re starting to see shifts, including more female coaches,” he says.
“Kelly brings something quite different – the empathy, the relationship-building – where a male in the role might have said ‘No this is what HP needs to look like’. New Zealand was a little ahead of the curve with the upsurge of female lifters we have coming through, so we had to change our approach. And I think Kelly has really added to that.”
As an athlete, Kelly is well aware the end goal in weightlifting is always the same – everyone gets three lifts of snatch, and clean and jerk; everyone wants to better their last lift. But it’s what goes on in the background that can make a world of difference to a lifter’s performance.
“It’s about the things we can do on a day-to-day basis – the planning, and the strategies. It’s about how can we actually make this better? What environment can we create for the athletes, so they get exposure to high performance? How can our coaches lead better?” she says.
“Our sport is growing exponentially, so we have to be better. We want Kiwis to choose weightlifting, and we’ll also go out to the community and find them.”
On a personal level, Kelly’s development through the Women in High Performance Sport residency experience has been exponential, too.
“I’ve had huge personal growth. I’m not the same person I was when I first arrived. I was happy to stay in freight forwarding until I die; now I want to fight to stay in sport, to continue the work I started for the people in the sport, the relationships that have been forged, and what we’re building for the next generation.
“There’s a lot of good mahi happening within our sport – we’re on the right path.”
