Raelene Castle, 44, is an unlikely queen in blokey Belmore, the heartland and home ground of the Canterbury Bulldogs National Rugby League team in Sydney's south-west.

For a start, she's a woman; the first female NRL club CEO in 15 years. Her thick accent immediately reveals she's a Kiwi. She's always dressed immaculately, too, whether she's around the boys in various states of change-room undress or on a dawn walking date with girlfriends.

Castle's last job was running netball in New Zealand - a far cry from the NRL and its sometimes-unpalatable past. And her own sporting prowess is as far away from a scrum as you can imagine: she is a New Zealand national champion of the gentle game of lawn bowls.

But watch Castle in the company of the Canterbury Bulldogs - even the name reeks of male bellicosity - and she's a perfect fit. The boys in the dressing room nod as she walks by, some of them addressing her as "Aunty", a cultural mark of respect for their Kiwi boss.

The boys in the boardroom - who debated until late into the night one Friday in May 2013 before calling her early on a chilly New Zealand morning to offer her the job as CEO - are in awe of what she's been able to achieve.

"She's taken us to a place we haven't been," Bulldogs board chairman Ray Dib says. "Since her appointment, female membership has gone to 38 per cent of new members. Two years ago, it was 23 per cent. She's been a great coup for our club."

"Trust and respect don't come with the title," Castle says. "It comes with actions and what you do over time. Did I have a great relationship [with everyone at the club] on day one? Not at all. Do I think I have a very good relationship now? Yes, I do."

It hasn't been easy: the hothouse of Sydney rugby league burns administrators like firewood. Australian men's football is hardly overflowing with female CEO role models, either: AFL has only had one, Rosie King, who was appointed acting CEO of the Geelong Cats for a month in 2013.

"I knew I wasn't going to walk into a job and it'd all be peachy-keen," Castle says. "Someone said to me, 'How, as a woman, will you deal with all the issues?' and I said, 'No differently than the way a man would.' "

Castle experienced a backlash last year when she canned the traditional Bulldogs' cheerleaders - believing that the club needed a different style of ambassador and that crowd engagement at games was not helped by the girls' scant uniforms - and again this year, when she failed to lure Cronulla's Australian representative forward Andrew Fifita to the club. But the Canterbury Bulldogs this year made the NRL grand final against South Sydney - and the club's board know they've won a premiership of sorts with Castle.

Its November 18 board meeting unfolded like many others. Financials: done. Membership: done. Risk management: done. Community relations: done.

A sense of off-field accomplishment filled the room, too, in the wake of the club's decision to partner with the White Ribbon campaign to stop violence against women. It was another sign that Castle deserved the crown she wore at Belmore. But then, as the meeting was drawing to a close, Castle added another item to the agenda.

"I was nervous," she says now. But none of the men sitting around the table would have picked that up. Castle, a straight-to-the-point woman who abhors fuss of any kind, had kept a secret for a decade and she knew she had to go public with it. And she had to start with the board that had recruited her 18 months earlier.

"Guys, I've got something to tell you," she said. "I've got alopecia areata." Silence. "My hair is falling out."

Dib says the board was surprised, perhaps even shocked. "They were very quiet," he says. Castle, to explain her point, then showed the men the hair extensions, elaborately taped to one side of her head, that had helped her keep her secret for so long. She had a medical condition that caused her to shed her hair - and now she was shedding her secret.

The club's former halfback legend and now director Steve Mortimer jumped in first, breaking the quietude: "Is there anything we can do to help?" he asked.

Castle was unequivocal. "Yes, there is," she said slowly. "Don't. Fuss."

"People don't talk about it," says Rodney Sinclair, a professor of dermatology at the University of Melbourne and Epworth Hospital. "Yet it's the most common autoimmune disease in man - more common than diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis."

He describes alopecia areata as a complex polygenic condition, which means that it's caused by an interplay between many genes, not a single one. In addition to a genetic predisposition, an environmental trigger is also needed to prompt the immune system to attack itself.

"What that environmental trigger is, nobody knows," says Sinclair, noting that viral infections, pregnancy and menopause have all been implicated. A person's hair slowly disappears in patches over a period of time; sometimes the lost hair grows back between flare-ups, sometimes it doesn't. The condition isn't life-threatening, but its fickleness can be maddening.

"The unpredictability of the disease is the thing that chews people up inside," says Chel Campbell, who runs the Australia Alopecia Areata Foundation (AAAF). "It can happen at any age, to any gender or race. It doesn't discriminate. Your lost hair could take five years to grow back and then, within six weeks, you could lose it all over again."

Castle first noticed her hair thinning when she was 34. It happened slowly, over months, and she disguised the few bald patches with a ponytail. Her hair gradually returned, though, and she decided to ignore the fact that her younger brother, Ryan, now 41, had recently been diagnosed with alopecia areata.

And then five years later, for no apparent reason, it happened again. This time, though, the loss was less ambiguous: every morning, Castle found clumps of hair on her pillow, clumps that left behind smooth patches of bare skin on her head. She had recently undergone bowel surgery; could this, she wondered, just be some freakish by-product of the operation?

But the bald patches continued their march across her scalp and she soon needed a hat to cover them. A visit to her doctor confirmed the diagnosis. "You have alopecia areata," he told her. "And there's nothing you can do."

Castle took up the reins at the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs in July last year, after a sterling performance as Netball New Zealand chief executive. The appointment made headlines. The first woman to run an NRL club in 15 years and the third in its history.

The most influential woman in NZ sport, anointed to write a new chapter in the Bulldogs' checkered history. The daughter of Bruce Castle, who captained the 1967 Kiwi rugby league team, and Marlene Castle, a four-times Commonwealth games lawn bowls representative, she was chosen from 3300 applicants. It was a big gig, with matching odds, but Castle never doubted that it was a perfect fit.

Castle was born in Wagga Wagga, in southern NSW, on September 30, 1970 - rugby league's traditional grand final weekend. Her parents had moved to Australia from Bucklands Beach in Auckland's east two years earlier so that Bruce could take up a post as player-coach for Wagga Wagga's Turvey Park team. When Raelene was six months old, they returned to the same part of Auckland, where Bruce coached the Mt Wellington Warriors in the Auckland Rugby League competition.

"I went to school to play sport and eat my lunch really," Castle says. "Catch. Throw. Pass. Throw a javelin. Run fast. I loved it all." She was driven by competition, representing Auckland in both tennis and netball as a child, and becoming a national title holder in lawn bowls as an adult.

But rugby league held a special place in the Castle household. Weekends were spent watching Bruce's team play and, on Sunday afternoons on TV, the Australian rugby league competition.

The North Sydney Bears, which no longer plays in the NRL competition, were Raelene's team. Meanwhile, the alarm clock would go off in the dead of night so that the family could catch the English rugby league competition.

The 1987 stockmarket crash dented Castle's dream of being a stockbroker, so she tried her hand at accountancy instead. "I failed my two accounting papers in my first year at university," she says.

Changing course, she majored in marketing and production operations management and, on graduating from Auckland University, snapped up a job as a marketing and communications executive in the corporate sector.

That role, at Fuji Xerox NZ, nurtured her competitive flair off-court and led to bigger jobs at several other corporations, including head of business marketing for Telecom NZ. Then, in 2007, Castle was appointed CEO of Netball New Zealand and its national team the Silver Ferns, a post she held for six years until the Canterbury Bulldogs came calling.

It was down to two final candidates and the Bulldogs' board, led by Ray Dib, sat up late into the night, considering which of the two would be best equipped to steer the club away from its past towards a new future. The night grew very long indeed.

Across the Tasman, Castle, who was also being wooed by the New Zealand Rugby Union, was sitting on her lounge willing the phone to ring. It was after 2am when it finally did and it was the offer she wanted to hear. Six weeks later, she and her partner, retail buyer and property investor Greg Jones, were Sydney-bound.

Castle's 18-month reign has been stellar, if not always smooth. Her first test came with the traditional visit by the CEO to the players' dressing room that occurs after each game, but her trepidation was short-lived. The players didn't flinch, and two of the club's Kiwi representatives, Sam Perrett and Greg Eastwood, soon began, as a mark of respect, to call her Aunty.

"They just started quietly among themselves," says Castle, but it soon spread. Other players, such as Frank Pritchard and Tony Williams, joined in. "At first I was horrified," says Castle. "I thought they must be thinking I was 100, but then I realised, actually, I am old enough to be their mother. It's genuine respect."

Castle's call to scrap the role of the scantily clad Belles cheerleaders in December last year wasn't popular with fans. Castle eventually won out there, too, but in her straight-shooting way, she now admits the decision was perhaps a little heavy-handed. "This year, we'll look at bringing them back," she says, "but we need to find a happy medium between dressing that's inappropriate, and [dressing that's] too nana."

It was Cronulla's Andrew Fifita, though, who provided her biggest test, signing a four-year contract in March for more than $800,000 a season to play with the Bulldogs - only for the deal to implode a few weeks later, after both parties couldn't agree on final terms.

"It was a big name. A big signing. A big personality. Big media attention," says Castle, who chalked it down to experience and "just what happens" when you are negotiating with football players.

"The first six months were like drinking out of a fire hydrant," she says. "It comes at you at a million miles an hour and you capture a little bit of it and the rest passes by you. Then all of a sudden, you wake up one morning and realise you're not drinking out of the fire hydrant any more: you're drinking out of a hose and you can manage. The pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place."

Except, perhaps, for one. Castle's hair wasn't growing back in the same way it had during her two previous bouts of alopecia areata; in fact, the bald patches on her scalp looked to be gaining ground daily. By the time she was anointed CEO of the Bulldogs in July last year, a glabrous patch on the right side of her skull measured 10 centimetres in diameter. Now it was threatening to extend up towards her hair parting and down towards her neck.

"I'm now just managing [to cover] it with hairpieces, but there's going to be a stage in the next few weeks when I'm not going to be able to do that," she says. "It's hard, to finish drying your hair, and see the bathroom floor covered in it every morning. It's a daily reminder. There are days when it just sucks."

Kate Palmer, the CEO of Netball Australia, remembers hat shopping with her friend after the second outbreak five years ago. "It was surreal," she remembers. "In those quiet moments, when Raelene allowed herself to think about it, it was devastating for her."

Castle's hair loss was a secret she shared with family and close friends alone. On her 40th birthday, in September 2010, she wore a wig and, a month later, headed off to Delhi for the Commonwealth Games.

"I ended up on the front page of The New Zealand Herald in this scalp hat," she says, "and not long after that, somebody asked me whether I'd Googled myself recently. They told me that they thought I should."

A few days later, Castle typed her name into a search engine. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw that her name - on the net - was inextricably linked with another word: cancer.

"Everybody thought I had cancer because I had a hat on, indoors, in Delhi in 40°C heat," she says. "I felt like a fraud. All of these people were thinking I had cancer - which is really serious - and I only had something that made my hair fall out!"

Only New Zealand Prime Minister John Key asked her directly. "Have you got cancer, Raelene?" he inquired, taking her aside at a function after the 2010 Commonwealth Games. She told him she didn't, and he didn't probe: " 'I'm really pleased about that because I've got a couple of friends at the moment with cancer and it sucks,' " was his response, she says.

Castle has had to battle a disinclination to tell the world. "Why am I so upset at this? It's just vanity, but for a female, it's more deep-rooted than that. It's not normal for women to lose their hair."

Associate professor Ngaire Donaghue, from the school of psychology at Perth's Murdoch University, agrees that hair is a prime differentiating feature between males and females and that women who lose their hair often find people staring at them in shock. "Even with all the goodwill in the world, there's still this very basic sense that something must be wrong," she says.

And this is one of the reasons Castle has decided to share her secret. With the baldness edging across her parting line, it's becoming more difficult to camouflage and the inevitable questions will surface again, just as they did in 2010. "It's not life-threatening. It's important to tell people I don't have cancer," she says.

The AAAF's Chel Campbell says sufferers typically go through a cycle of trying everything - cortisone creams, injections, ultraviolet treatments, hair transplants, herbs, special diets, yoga, meditation - in an attempt to stave off the inevitable: "Losing your hair is like losing a family member: it can change your identity," she says.

EVERY SIX WEEKS, Castle visits her hairdresser, Phillip Reno. "As we've watched it grow closer and closer to the parting line, I've felt really sad for her because I can see that it does affect her," Reno says. "I've seen her get angry over it and be really sad over it."

Together, they have opted for carefully crafted hair extensions, dyed to match Castle's real hair, which are then taped to the right side of her head. A glue, like eyelash glue, was considered originally, but double-sided tape has proved more trustworthy.

Hair extensions are now a multi-million-dollar international business, and it's almost impossible to tell the difference between the hair on the left and right sides of her head. Then Castle lifts a few strands and reveals the eight pieces of tape used to fix the extensions in place.

She lists the reasons behind her public disclosure: she doesn't want people to think she's seriously ill and she'd like to provide comfort to other sufferers, some of them school-aged, who battle the physical and psychological challenges that alopecia presents each day in the playground.

The likelihood of having to wear a wig this summer has also been a catalyst. "And I really don't want people to think it's the job and that stress is making my hair fall out," she says. "That's simply not true."

"Everybody blames stress," says dermatology professor Rodney Sinclair, "but stress probably has nothing to do with it. One of the frustrations is that every taxi driver, every bus driver, says 'it must be stress' - and everybody seems to accept that as a home truth. It's a bit like stomach ulcers. Every stomach ulcer was caused by stress - right up to the day when they discovered it's bacteria."

Meanwhile, partner Greg Jones is very clear about his job. "My role is to just give her a hug because, at the end of the day, there's not a lot we can do about it," he says.

The Bulldogs pride themselves on circling the wagons when it has to protect its own, and the club's new CEO has earned her stripes. There will be no fuss, and the game plan here will be exactly as she proposes.

"Could I have done this within a month of my getting the Bulldogs' job? No. It would have been really, really difficult," Castle says. "But 18 months later, because of the friendships, the trust, the respect, people won't see me as different."

Tears threaten, but don't fall.

"I come from a family where we are great believers in just sucking it up. No blood, no sympathy."

Good Weekend