The Nettie Thought Leadership Series
Essays by Nic Vovk, Founder of Nettie, on grassroots women's sport, community health, and what it takes to build something that lasts.
I tried to find women's sport near me this weekend. It took forty minutes.
I wanted to find out, properly, what it is actually like to search for women's sport happening near you this weekend. Not as a founder who already knows the answer she wants to find. As someone who simply typed a post…
Read article →We forgot that consistency is a kind of greatness. Grassroots sport never did.
Somewhere in the last decade, we lost the ability to value the middle. A thing is either extraordinary or it is a failure. A post either goes viral or it may as well not have been written. A brand is either disrupting…
Read article →The same volunteers write every grant application. The clubs that need it most never learn how.
Somewhere in every grassroots women's sport club is a volunteer who has become, by accident rather than design, the grant person. They did not train for it. Nobody appointed them officially. At some point they simply…
Read article →You need a new kit, so you organise a raffle. That is not a funding strategy. That is survival.
Every grassroots sports club knows the pattern. You need a new kit, so you organise a raffle. Pitch fees are due, so you run a quiz night. The equipment needs replacing, so someone suggests a car wash. And round and r…
Read article →You can't be what you can't see. That rule does not stop at eighteen.
Every conversation about role models in women's sport is, by default, a conversation about girls. Get more girls watching the Lionesses. Get more girls trying football after the World Cup. Get more girls seeing women…
Read article →Watching your community play sport makes you less lonely. The NHS just needs a way to find it.
Over 3.9 million people in Great Britain — 7% of the population — report feeling lonely often or always, and the figure continues to rise (ONS, 2025). The NHS has built an entire workforce to respond to this. Social p…
Read article →The most powerful role model is the one you can walk to.
Schedule: Post Wednesday 4th June — four to five days after Article 5
Read article →One person benefits. The whole household does.
Schedule: Post Saturday 31st May — four to five days after Article 3
Read article →The hidden cost of getting better. Why affordability is the barrier of social prescribing.
I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. In that time I have watched the NHS invest significantly and sincerely in social prescribing — the idea…
Read article →Build with what already works. Why the best health tech plugs in.
I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. In those twelve years, I have watched many promising health technology products fail not because they d…
Read article →Connection First. Not Intervention.
I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. I also play rugby at Championship 2 level. And for twelve years I watched two completely different worl…
Read article →Why Nettie is Deliberately Simple—and Why That is the Most Important Business Decision We Have Made
There is a temptation, when building a technology platform, to add features. To create an account. To capture a profile. To ask the user for something in return for the value you are giving them.
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