Dr Sonja Hood is officially the new president of the North Melbourne Football Club. The appointment of the lifelong fan and former club employee continues the positive trend of appointing a true North Melbourne person at the helm to help steer it towards sustained success.

Taking over from former president Ben Buckley, who also played 74 senior games for the club in the 1980s and 90s, Hood’s ascension into the presidency of the club she loves is just the latest step of a lifelong affiliation with the Kangaroos.

"I’ve barracked for this club my whole life. My earliest memories are sitting at Arden Street watching games, leaping the fence and running after players, standing in the car park to get autographs and hoping they didn’t run you over,” Hood told SEN.

"I got involved in the ‘Keep North South’ campaign and worked with some phenomenal people that year to keep the club where it is. I started working for the club in 2011 in The Huddle and was there for five years, then [I] joined the board in 2019.

"I’d have stayed being a fan to be honest if the AFL hadn’t tried relocating us in 2007 … it probably sparked a realisation of how important this connection [with the club] was. 

"People don’t have a hard connection to the AFL, they have a hard connection to their club and clubs are the lifeblood of this. I think we forget that at our peril, just how important that is and that’s much more than win/loss.”

Hood takes over the club as it moves forward into a new era at Arden Street. The on-field success of the women’s program, the on-field growth of the men’s program, and the off-field development of the whole business make it a far more stable organisation than it was 15 years ago.

She says comparing North Melbourne in 2007 to North Melbourne in 2022 is like chalk and cheese.

"When you look back at that year the club was in terrible shape. It had terrible debt, it had no facilities, it had been under-invested in, and what we had was a really superb on-field performance coached by, now, Dani Laidley to get that team to a preliminary final. That gave people time to galvanise, hold on, connect and dig in,” she said.

“If you look at the club now and contrast it to where we were, we have no debt, we have a fantastic facility, we have the best community program in the country, we've connected back in with our supporter base in our local area [and] we had record membership last year.

"If you’re asking the question of, ‘Are we a well-run organisation?’, yes we absolutely are. If you’re asking the question, ‘Do people connect to our club?’, they absolutely do.

"I don’t particularly care if we’re the smallest club in Victoria, someone has to be. I just want to be the best club … [and] we’ve invested in our men’s and our women’s teams in a way that sets us up for sustained success.”