Kate O'Halloran

Kate O’Halloran is a sports journalist and broadcaster with the ABC who focuses on women’s sport, athlete welfare and the power structures that shape how games are played and governed. She uses individual athletes’ stories to interrogate wider questions of equity, safety and inclusion across Australian rules football and other major codes.

Women’s football and AFLW

O’Halloran’s core patch is women’s Australian rules football, where she tracks the AFLW competition and the broader landscape for women and girls in the code.

Her coverage follows list changes, expansion and contracts, but is rarely about results alone; she writes about what part-time conditions, short seasons and modest pay packets mean for players’ lives and careers. She often centres fringe and emerging players, as well as veterans, to show how policy decisions from league executives filter down to training loads, second jobs and family responsibilities.

Within AFLW, she returns to themes of visibility and respect.

She highlights scheduling decisions, broadcast arrangements and marketing priorities that influence whether fans can see women’s games and how seriously they are taken. She pays close attention to coaching and leadership pathways for women, charting how former players move – or struggle to move – into coaching, administration and media roles. Her football articles often read as a running account of whether the women’s competition is being built as a genuine professional pathway or treated as an add-on to the men’s game.

Concussion, health and duty of care

Athlete health, especially concussion, is another defining strand of her work. In her reporting on a young footballer named Macy, whose personality and “spark” disappeared after repeated head knocks until a new treatment trial helped her recover, O’Halloran uses one family’s experience to raise questions about medical protocols, research gaps and long-term monitoring in contact sport.

She explains clinical detail in plain language, drawing out how symptoms affect school, work, relationships and identity, not just playing time.

Her concussion coverage pushes beyond headline injury counts to examine duty of care.

She looks at how clubs manage return-to-play decisions, what kind of education players and parents receive, and whether systems designed around male athletes fit the risks faced by women and girls. Across codes, she links brain injury to mental health, financial precarity and life after sport, often quoting medical researchers and legal experts alongside athletes. When she writes about rule changes, protective equipment or class actions, it is framed through the people whose futures are at stake rather than through administrative process alone.

Gender, power and inclusion in sport

Gender and power are through-lines in much of O’Halloran’s reporting. She regularly covers stories of discrimination, harassment and exclusion in sporting environments, giving space to those who have been marginalised by decisions made in boardrooms and change rooms. Her pieces explore how sexism and homophobia shape everything from grassroots club culture to elite selection, and she is attentive to the way these issues intersect with race, class and sexuality.

She often examines how governing bodies respond when problems are exposed: commissioning reviews, issuing apologies, or resisting change. Her work documents not just high-profile controversies but also quieter struggles – for example, players fighting for maternity provisions, safe facilities or basic resourcing. She returns to the question of who holds power in sport and how transparent their decision-making is, contrasting public messaging with the lived experience of athletes and staff.

Feature-driven, athlete-centred reporting

Across beats, O’Halloran’s work is distinguished by a feature-driven, narrative style. She tends to build stories around in-depth interviews, letting athletes and their families describe experiences in their own words before layering in data, research and policy context.

This approach is evident in her health reporting as well as in pieces about career-defining moments, selection shocks or retirement decisions, where she follows subjects over time rather than dropping in for a single news cycle.

She frequently writes long-form articles that move between personal scenes, historical background and sharp analysis of rules, governance and money.

Her questions often probe how decisions will shape not just the next season but the next generation coming through junior pathways. Beyond text, she also brings this lens to ABC Sport audio coverage, hosting and appearing on programs focused on women’s football and women’s sport more broadly. Taken together, her body of work positions her as a specialist in the human impact of sports policy, especially where gender, health and power intersect.