Teeing up change: How Sam Squiers found her drive

Words: Kate Allman  

For Fox Sports News journalist and presenter Sam Squiers, the decision to pick up a golf club was initially a business one.  Squiers was a rising star in TV sports news, working as a reporter and presenter for Nine News in Brisbane, having built an impressive portfolio after moving north from WIN News in Wollongong. Yet she was missing important, semi-regular opportunities to grow her network and career.  Those were when colleagues in the sports department were receiving invitations to play golf at media events. The women – who were assumed to not play – missed out.  “Me being me, I would crack the shits,” she laughs, reflecting.   “I thought, bugger this, I’m going to lean into it. You’re not going to exclude me just for the fact I’m female. I am going to get good at this game and make them invite me. So, in a disruptive sort of way, I got into golf … But then I absolutely fell in love with it.”  Squiers had played every sport including softball and cricket as a child. Natural hand-eye coordination put her a swing ahead of most newbies. Defiantly confident, she turned up to the driving range at Golf Central in Brisbane and quickly stunned the locals with her booming drive.   “I just loved power-hitting.

I love that feeling of cracking a ball, of being able to drive it as far as possible like I'm hitting a home run in softball

 When it flies beautifully straight. There’s no greater feeling,” she says.  

Squiers began practicing before and after work, receiving coaching advice from PGA golf professional Murray Lott. She has been receiving invitations to golf media days and Pro-Ams ever since. Most recently in November 2024, she was invited to play at the Australian Open Pro-Am. (She said yes, even the fear of muffing a drive in front of other people still plagues her.) 

Golf has been in Squiers’ life, geographically speaking, since she was very young. She grew up just a stone’s throw away from the renowned 18-hole championship golf course in Orange, Duntryleague. Her grandmother was a huge sports fan and would “watch golf all day” even when she was in her 90s. Yet it was not until Squiers started working as a journalist in local TV news in the Illawarra region of NSW that she noticed there weren’t too many women on the golf course or in sports generally. 

“People would always tell me, ‘Oh girls don’t like sport, women don’t like sport,” she says. 

“I would push for women’s sports stories and would get told, ‘No, our audience doesn’t watch women’s sport.’ I just thought that was ridiculous – plenty of women like me loved sports. I always read the paper from the back page first.

                                                                                                                                                                                                        Photos - Ryan Gillin
I knew AFL memberships were close to 50 percent female. It made no sense.” 


Squiers has made it her mission to showcase more women’s sports stories in the news. At first, she managed this by surreptitiously leaving out gender from her pitches to editors. They would later discover the rugby league player they had green-lighted for the interview was a female player.  

In 2014, Squiers founded her own women in sport think tank, Sportette, and in 2020, she collaborated with ListSTNR to launch a podcast profiling female athletes called “On Her Game”. She has since published two children’s books Princesses Wear Sneakers and Running With Wings, which build visibility for young girls of women in sport and messages of inclusion. Now, as a presenter at Fox Sports News based in Sydney, she celebrates the fact that telling women’s sport stories is a normal part of the job. 

“I do remember the moment years ago when I realised that I didn’t have to fight [for women’s sports coverage] anymore. I went in with another women’s sports story for my editor and news director, and they just said, ‘yep, cool, off you go’,” she says. 

“I was prepared for a fight, I had 10 reasons why we should do the story and all my responses ready to what they might say. But they just said go ahead. I remember thinking how much things were shifting.” 

Squiers reflects that while there is more visibility of women in golf at professional levels, there are still barriers preventing the growth of female participation at a grassroots level. In 2017 she joined the Board of the WPGA Tour and has been working hard to reduce those. She and her Board celebrated when recent numbers from Golf Australia reported an 84 percent jump in the number of women participating in Get Into Golf programs, and a significant rise in women’s golf participation at all levels. 

There are still some tweaks she’d like to make the game more inclusive. Those include addressing longstanding rules about dress codes, perhaps by allowing activewear on courses, and alleviating the cost of equipment with club exchanges or libraries.  

Squiers, who proudly doesn’t have a registered handicap, also wants to change the perception of golf as limited to a strict game played over 18 holes with every shot counted.  

“I think it's a really old school way of thinking, that the only way you can call yourself a golfer is to go out to a golf course. Because that doesn't suit our modern-day lifestyle anymore,” she says. 

“An average person may not have time to play 18 holes, but they can play nine holes and go to the range. We're more likely to kind of be able to grow our community if we have more of an inclusive attitude for all aspects and ways of playing golf.”