Jacqui Hurley recalls childhood in Australia, where sport and an always-open home shaped her path into sports journalism—plus the family mindset she wants for her kids.
When Jacqui Hurley thinks back to the earliest years of her life, she doesn’t start with stadium lights or big interviews. She starts with doors.
Her parents, she says, “ran one of those houses where the door was always open”, and people kept dropping by.. It sounds simple, but for a family of three kids under four—her mother hadn’t even been on a plane before the move—it was also a strategy.. In Hurley’s telling, Australia was the plan, at first, as a few-year detour for something better.. They ended up staying seven, in a household where neighbours felt like extended family and sport was the social glue.
That openness extended into how Hurley learned to connect.. Her parents played and watched sports constantly, and the children followed naturally.. Hurley remembers a sociable rhythm: playing as a family, then mixing with other kids, and finding friends through the same games everyone else was already playing.. In her cul-de-sac, there was a “massive green” where neighbourhood children gathered for cricket—an everyday scene that, later, reads like the foundation of her confidence..
She was also, by her own account, a performing child.. One story is almost too vivid to be forgotten: cutting holes in cardboard boxes and putting them on her head so she could pretend to read the sports news to everyone around her.. It’s the kind of memory that doesn’t feel rehearsed; it feels like proof that her “stage” started long before any formal career planning.
Of course, family life wasn’t all harmony.. Hurley describes being the middle child, close to her siblings, but also caught in the familiar squeeze of having too many personalities in too small a space.. “Any two of us together was fine but as soon as the third was thrown into the mix,” she says, there would be fights.. Her brother Seán, in particular, remains part of her story in a way that is heavy and lasting.. She references his death in a car accident when he was 24—one of those life events that quietly changes how a person measures time and opportunity.
When the family returned to Ireland, Hurley was 10 and the change was more than geographic.. The Australian accents brought teasing at school, and moving schools at that age can be destabilising even without added cultural friction.. Still, two things helped her settle in: one was pop culture, and the other was sport.. “Home and Away” was “all the rage in 1990s Ireland,” she says, and because the Australian storylines were ahead, she and her siblings became an informal source of gossip—almost like a local “Mystic Meg” for what was coming next.. Then sport took over again, giving her another route to belonging.
At her primary school in Ballinhassig, Cork, she played football, camogie, and basketball.. Eventually she was also part of the Irish basketball set-up and played camogie for Cork.. Those years, she says, felt “busy but happy”, with sport shaping daily life.. But there was a pivot brewing beneath the training and matches: the idea that sports weren’t only something to take part in—they were something to talk about.
The path toward sports journalism didn’t happen in a straight line.. Hurley describes how her mother once believed she would become a concert pianist after being told she’d be a performer by a clairvoyant.. Hurley says she didn’t share that interest.. Her own performance, instead, was closer to that childhood cardboard-box “sports news” act—public, playful, and tied to the subject she already loved.
School guidance initially tried to redirect her, suggesting PE teaching instead.. Hurley believes it was partly because there were few women in sports journalism at the time.. She doesn’t portray the moment as conflict so much as a test: a chance to see whether she would fold or hold her ground.. She did the second.. She applied to Mary Immaculate College in Limerick for media and English, and her parents backed her decision.
That support mattered because Hurley’s family story is, at its core, about moving toward possibilities.. She says her parents repeatedly insisted that all of the children could choose what they wanted to do.. Her siblings’ careers reflect that belief: one became a pilot with British Airways, while Seán had been on a trajectory toward semi-professional motorbike racing before his death.. Hurley, now a TV presenter, positions her own career as part of the same pattern—less a single “luck” moment and more a sustained effort to keep doors open, even when the route isn’t the conventional one.
Her family’s move to Australia, she suggests, became an example she still tries to live by.. Leaving home at 18 for college brought “mixed emotions”, especially with one sister already living at home in Cork.. But the course she wanted wasn’t available there.. So she went for it—an echo of the earlier family gamble, made again with adult intention.
Now based in Dublin with her husband Shane McMahon and their two children, Luke (12) and Lily (8), Hurley says she’s trying to pass on that same mindset.. The world may feel smaller to her kids than it did to her family when they headed to Australia in the 1980s, but she still sees it as “full of possibilities.” For Hurley, the lesson isn’t just about geography or career choices.. It’s about permission—permission to imagine a future beyond the immediate surroundings.
And that, ultimately, circles back to the door she started with.. An always-open home, sports as a meeting point, and a belief that a person can carve out a life that fits their interests—those are the threads Hurley keeps pulling through the years.. Her memories may be rooted in childhood, but the meaning is present tense.