Among the favourites for this year's Netball Super League title are Loughborough Lightning, who got their campaign underway at the weekend with a 75-60 victory over LexisNexis Dragons. The three-time champions laid down an early marker in February, lifting the pre-season Super Cup after defeating London Pulse in the final. 

But if you've spotted the vibrant purple and pink of Loughborough Lightning beyond the netball court, you're not mistaken. The team sits within an elite women's sport franchise at Loughborough University, designed to harness shared expertise, research and commercial partnerships to best support its female athletes. 

The Loughborough Lightning brand also extends to Premiership Women's Rugby, while their women's football team compete in the third tier of the pyramid. Wheelchair basketball and cycling complete the franchise's current portfolio.  

Loughborough University's move into elite women's sport began with netball. When the Netball Super League was launched in 2005, the university put itself forward as the East Midlands franchise. 

A graduate of the university, Olivia Murphy has been part of that journey from the beginning. She played for and coached Lightning Netball from its inception while building a leadership career within the institution. A former England captain, Murphy is now one of two deputy directors of sport at Loughborough, overseeing performance across its elite programmes. 

Speaking to Women's Sport Insider, Murphy tells us more about the unique elite women's sport set-up at Loughborough University, how the integrated model benefits its female athletes and how performance is enhanced by cutting-edge research. 

Hi Olivia! Please could you tell us about what your role at Loughborough University involves on a day-to-day basis? 

We have about 20 performance sports here at Loughborough, all supported by coaching, sport science and sports medicine staff. My role is to oversee the athletes and their development, ensuring they have everything in place to reach their full potential through a sporting lens.  

If our athletes want to be world-class, if they want to be high performers, they have everything here for them. My role is to facilitate that for them in lots of different ways.   

It might be as simple as wearing the right bra. It might be a GPS vest that fits them properly, so the data is produced properly for a staff member to interpret. Whatever it might be, we're trying to give them the platform for it. 

It's quite unique because we are a university – we're not a sporting club in its traditional sense and we're very proud to have a dual career element. So, we also have to manage the athletes' sporting development alongside their academic commitments. 

You've captained England, coached at the elite level and now lead sport performance at Loughborough University. How have those experiences influenced the way you approach this role? 

A lot! Part of it is knowing what these athletes go through on a daily basis. My sport was not professional at that time, so I was on a dual career pathway all the way through. My ambition was to be an accountant alongside doing my sport, so I studied here at Loughborough and competed internationally at the same time. I've walked a similar path and had many of the same feelings and experiences as the athletes. 

In netball, I've also done many of the roles I now ask staff to do – director of netball, head coach, player-coach, assistant coach. I've been in situations like deselecting athletes, supporting new physios or working with graduate strength and conditioning coaches. There's a strong connection and depth of experience that comes with that. 

Through my experience playing and coaching, I've learned how to lead people, how to work with people, how to help support the ambitions they want to achieve, and to create an environment where people can do their best work. I take the bits where I've made mistakes and where I've done well and try to put that into my day to day. 

Having been involved with Loughborough Lightning from early on, could you tell me how the franchise model has evolved, what it looks like now and how it operates in practice? 

I've been involved with Loughborough Lightning for just over 20 years. We owe a lot to Andy Borrie, the performance director equivalent at that time, who thought it was a good idea to pursue this. We had no idea where it was going to take us, to be honest. 

Now we have multiple sports under the Loughborough Lightning brand. They're all at different stages of growth, both in terms of their sport and their journey within their franchise or league. 

In practice, the model looks at economies of scale across women's sport. Of course, there are multi-club models in sports such as football, but we're doing it a bit differently. Our coaching staff can talk to each other, our practitioners can work together, and the university can research certain areas and then directly apply its findings. 

We recognise the growth of women's sport in recent years and its upward trajectory, so we really want to drive the Lightning brand. We want to build a brand that can be recognised nationally and maybe even globally. 

In terms of how we recruit athletes, we're lucky we get to do that in lots of different ways. We can grow our own talent. In Lightning Netball, as an example, we've had some athletes who have come all the way through our pathway and are now playing in the Netball Super League and winning the Super Cup for us, which is amazing. 

We also get people who are initially here purely to study. Hannah Joseph, for example, is a Lightning Netball player but also an alum of the university. She came here 12 or 13 years ago to study and then stayed on, which is brilliant. Equally, we recruit talent who will add value to our environment, who may or may not study at the same time. 

From an athlete's perspective, what are the benefits of competing and training in this integrated model rather than in a standalone club? 

It's not just the model, but the university. I showed somebody around recently, and they were blown away by the feel and the vibe of the environment. That's created by incredible human beings who come onto campus – the Loughborough Lightning franchises, all the sports delivered on site and our brilliant academics and staff. 

We have this ecosystem which includes national governing bodies and partners, who come in and effectively stir it all up in a pot, and then people go out better than when they came in. 

Our athletes are supported by some of the best people in the world who all cross over on a day-to-day basis looking at how to do things better. I love that we've got Emily Scarratt, one of the world's best rugby players, in our Lightning Rugby coaching set-up, and she can sit and have a coffee with Lightning Netball head coach Vic Burgess. 

There's also the opportunity for the athletes to do that. The captains of our teams can get together and talk about what it's like to lead a Lightning team and what their challenges are. They all have the same challenges, they're just in a different sport. So, we can solve some of those problems together too, which is pretty cool. 

Could a similar model work in men's sport?  

If we tried to do this in men's sport right now, we wouldn't be able to afford it. That is the bottom line. We have a men's football programme, but if we wanted to be in the Premier League, can you imagine the cost right now?  

There is a platform right now which allows us to do this within women's sport. I don't know how long we'll be able to do that for – realistically, what does women's sport look like in 10 or 20 years' time?  

In addition, in women's sport at the moment, athletes are really accessible. It's quite hard to conduct research in men's sport, but right now it's much easier to research female athletes because they're here and accessible. It's a moment in time, a window of opportunity. That's not a good or bad thing – it's just the reality. 

Speaking of research, could you tell me about Loughborough University's Women in Sport Research and Innovation Hub and how it supports your female athletes? 

Women's sport is one of our key pillars. It's something we want to champion and lead globally, while feeding our research directly back into practice. The Women in Sport Research and Innovation Hub was set up to facilitate that. 

We're not just running longitudinal studies and postgraduate research into real-world challenges in women's sport, but we're also looking at a living lab concept. How do we translate what our practitioners see on a day-to-day basis into a research opportunity and then quickly feed it back? 

The other exciting thing about the Research and Innovation Hub is that we work with governing bodies who want to answer the same questions. We're working with a couple of NGBs at the moment on finding female coaches. They understand there's a need for the skills that a female coach can bring to an environment, but until now they haven't invested the time, money or effort to train female coaches. 

Another example is breast health. Our Lightning netballers have worked with someone on site who is researching breast health. They've all gone in for bra fittings and come out with different size bras – ones that fit properly and feel right when they are playing netball.  

The idea of the Research and Innovation Hub is to bring these issues together, try and solve them, and then put the outcomes back into the real world. It's a flow of information both in and out. 

From a commercial standpoint, what opportunities come from having a unified Lightning brand across multiple elite women's teams? 

We have another deputy director of sport who deals with the commercial side of it. I just want to spend all the money – that's where I sit in this conversation! 

But the idea is for the Lightning brand to become something people talk about. I have a son – he knows about Lightning Netball because I've taken him to matches. But I want him to know that Lightning is something that goes across multiple sports, and that's the idea behind the brand. It amplifies the reach among women and builds a love for Lightning. 

The brand also reaches different commercial partners who have an interest in women's sport, or in the Women in Sport Research and Innovation Hub, or in products that connect to a female market. 

At the moment, we're going after partners who really believe in what we believe in. Some of the sponsors or partners we've got most recently – Kukri, as an example – believe the kit needs to fit properly, the design needs to be specific and that sustainability is important.  

It's the same with our period pant partners, or Boobydoo as a bra-fitting organisation. It's really important they're not just any old brand, that they sit alongside us as a partner. 

That's where I think our niche is and what the Lightning brand enables us to do. We can really work with people who care about the same things we do, rather than just going out and selling to anyone who wants that brand association.  

The whole university gets the benefit of that as well, not just the Loughborough Lightning athletes. Take our partnership with Boobydoo, for example – we're now offering bra fittings for all our members of staff and to students across every Students' Union club. 

Finally, through the lens of your current role, what is the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge in women's sport right now?

Women's sport has a choice about how it moves forward. It doesn't have to grow at the same pace as men's sport, fall into the same pitfalls or repeat the same mistakes. 

What we need is to think sensibly about the future, while recognising the work being put in by athletes, staff and commercial directors. At the highest level, there are clear challenges in sport, but we don't have to fall into the same traps. That's both an opportunity and a challenge. 

We also have the opportunity, when we're thinking about facilities of the future, to ask what suits women's sport. What we've done previously is just build facilities that are functional, rather than tailored to women. There's an opportunity to do things uniquely, but in a way that's well thought through and not rushed. We don't need to do those things tomorrow. It needs to grow properly. 

Finally, there's an opportunity and the challenge around creating products like Lightning Netball or Lightning Rugby that people want to watch. We've got to think about what that looks like – what does the game of netball evolve into, what does that product look like? 

I think there's a real opportunity there, but we need to put time and effort into researching what people will want to watch over the next 10 years. It's really exciting, but we need some really good people steering it from the front.