Elite club culls CEO contenders as a big name remains in play

November 10, 2026 — 5:00am

It’s getting to the pointy end of deliberations for the appointment of a new boss to run to one of Melbourne’s most elite sporting institutions, the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club.

President Steve Wood has been acting in the chief executive role since respected sports administrator and former Hawthorn boss Ian Robson exited the club in May, with the search for a new boss under way for more than two months.

CBD can reveal that former Australian Grand Prix Corporation chief and now Bulldogs director Andrew Westacott has thrown his hat into the ring. Former professional tennis player and one-time state Liberal MP Sam Groth also made the shortlist but was recently told he’d missed out on the gig.

Whoever lands the CEO job, it might be a case of careful what you wish for. Kooyong recorded a bottom-line loss last year of almost $1 million and is being investigated by the Fair Work Ombudsman for historical underpayment of kitchen staff, while in 2023 an independent auditor found poor financial management and reporting were to blame for multimillion-dollar losses in the club’s dining arm.

Wood and his team of selectors have whittled CEO candidates down to just a few, with the pressure on to name an appointee by the time the club holds its annual meeting at the end of the month.

Other candidates are believed to include former Tennis Australia executive Karen Clydesdale, who left her role as head of customer experience in September, and former Kooyong board member Peter Gome, who is a former boss of the Football Federation of Victoria (now Football Victoria). Clydesdale is said to be the favoured candidate of president Wood.

Kooyong and Groth declined to comment while Westacott did not return calls.

As the CEO search unfolds, nominations have now also closed for three vacancies on the club’s board, with a record field of 15 members raising their hands for a slot.

Two board incumbents, treasurer Fiona Hansen and director Michael Richards, have renominated for their slots, but in a messy boardroom twist two of their continuing board colleagues, club vice president Brian Cooney and director Trevor Dohnt, are not backing them and instead are supporting alternative candidates.

Cooney has nominated Andrew Hume, the former husband of Victorian senator Jane Hume, while Dohnt has nominated 30-year member Deborah Price.

Awkward.

Copping flak

Wannabe Liberal premier Jess Wilson and her shadow for police and corrections, Brad Battin, had the campaign gods on their side on Monday when they turned up in Mernda to talk law and order.

The pair, along with shadow attorney-general James Newbury, were in Melbourne’s outer north-east to lament the closure of 40 cop shops in Victoria under the Labor government.

The backdrop for the trio’s press conference was the Mernda police station, which began life in 2017 as a 24-hour facility that cost $15 million to build. The public counter is now open only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Cue, stage left, Wollert dad Ahsan Siddikui, who amid the media event happened to turn up at the station to have a statutory declaration signed by an authorised witness, only to discover the doors locked.

With a clutch of journos standing by, Siddikui revealed he’d already sunk 3½ hours of Monday morning into trying to get his document signed, having already tried another – also closed – local police station. Understanding the power of pictures, he even banged on the glass door of the station calling out to see if anyone would let him in.

Smelling blood and leaning right into the moment, Battin swooped to the rescue and signed Siddikui’s paperwork in the member for Berwick’s capacity as an MP. Apparently, he’s done it twice before at other closed police stations. Behind the scenes, the Libs couldn’t believe their luck, chuckling that they couldn’t have asked for a better, or more perfectly executed, case study.

Meanwhile, Premier Ben Carroll was spruiking a $70 million plan to hire 200 reservists to reopen some of Victoria’s unmanned stations.

Alas, Siddikui had already stolen the show.

Diplomacy, Canberra style

Tension over a decision by the Women’s International Club in Canberra to admit as a member Irina Petrakova, the wife of Russia’s ambassador to Australia, has escalated.

Ukraine’s ambassador, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, went public on Monday to say he was appalled by comments made by the club’s president, Sandie Kaine, calling his wife and the spouses of two other ambassadors to Australia “bigots” after they resigned over the club’s admission of Petrakova.

The club may be a private enterprise, but Myroshnychenko told CBD that didn’t stop him raising the matter in a previously scheduled meeting with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade last week.

“This situation is appalling,” he told us. “It doesn’t correspond to the overwhelming support I’ve felt from Australia.”

The club’s decision to admit Petrakova triggered the resignations of Myroshnychenko’s wife, Liana, along with the spouses of the Italian and Estonian ambassadors to Australia last week, first reported by Politico last Tuesday.

In a letter the following day, another of the club’s members, Marta Stachurski, also resigned in response to the club’s decision to admit the Russian ambassador’s spouse. In it, Stachurski said her disappointment was compounded at the club’s October 28 AGM, when the club’s president referred to members who’d resigned on similar grounds as “bigots”.

“To characterise principled objections to the diplomatic representation of a government engaged in an illegal war as bigotry is deeply inappropriate. Such remarks dismiss legitimate moral concerns and demonstrate a troubling lack of sensitivity towards those directly affected by this conflict,” Stachurski wrote in the letter, seen by CBD.

“Political neutrality should not be confused with moral indifference, nor should principled disagreement be mistaken for prejudice.”

We tried asking Kaine for a response to the ambassador’s comments, but didn’t hear back by deadline.

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