Imagine if number one draft picks Nick Riewoldt, Luke Hodge or Brendon Goddard had been lost to football. It nearly happened to Daisy Pearce. On May 15, the talented midfielder was taken by Melbourne as the number one pick for the inaugural AFL women’s exhibition match against the Western Bulldogs at the MCG on June 29. But go back a decade to when Pearce, who had moved to Melbourne from Bright where she played junior football until the under 15s, gave the sport away for two years.
“It was in 2002 and I wasn’t aware there was a structured women’s competition around,” she says. “So I played volleyball for the next two years.”
It wasn’t until 2005 that she discovered the Victorian Women’s Football League and started playing with the Darebin Falcons.
“It’s like her footy career was over,” says Leesa Catto, vice president of the VWFL, reflecting on how Australia’s most talented woman footballer quit the game for two years.
“That’s the number one draft pick,” she says. “There’s heaps of instances of girls who had played juniors but then, because of league rules, couldn’t play any more. They didn’t know the VWFL existed so they would go off and do something else.”
Pearce, captain of the Melbourne team, and Catto agree that women’s football has come a long way. At the end of 2012 there were 136,000 females playing football across the country, and that number is expected to grow by 20 per cent this year.
“It’s crazy now to think that a few years ago you might not have known there was a women’s league,” says Pearce. “It’s a good sign of how much bigger the profile we’re getting is.”
Women’s football received its biggest profile boost with the announcement of the Melbourne–Western Bulldogs game, a curtain-raiser on Saturday before the AFL. The league hopes a crowd of 15,000 to 20,000 will be there to watch.
The night of the first women’s draft, on May 15 at the MCG, when the Demons and Bulldogs selectors each picked 25 players from the nation’s best 50 women footballers, was an emotional occasion. Pearce was in tears when AFL commissioner Linda Dessau read out her name as the draft’s number one pick.
“I got quite emotional, which doesn’t often happen,” she says. “There was a lot of emotion in the room because it was a build-up of many years of hard work. “It was probably the biggest acknowledgment of women’s footy in terms of the opportunity provided and it was great to get official acknowledgment by some important people. It was a really good night.”
The game is the brainchild of the Melbourne Football Club and its community manager Debbie Lee, a champion footballer in her own right. Supported by Bulldogs vice president Susan Alberti, Lee approached the AFL to secure a home match at the MCG during women’s round – the league’s round dedicated to celebrating female contribution to the game.
“We wanted to host a legitimate and genuine AFL match for women,” says Lee. “It’s another step in the pathway for women’s footy, a step towards a national competition.”
For Lee, Saturday’s game will have special significance. Although she won’t be playing, it is the culmination of a long battle to have female football accepted by the AFL and the general public.
Lee started playing in 1991 for the East Brunswick Scorpions, when Aussie Rules was still very much a bloke’s game.
“I was 17 and I never told anyone I played because there was a stigma attached to women playing football,” she says. “I hid it from my schoolmates because of the type of opinions people had. Back in the early to mid-nineties it wasn’t an inclusive environment.”
But even as a teenager her determination shone through. In 1993, she started her own club, the Sunshine YCW Spurs. It was the first women’s football team in the western suburbs. Now 39, Lee still plays for the Spurs, which relocated to St Albans in 2000. The list of achievements in her 23-year career could fill several pages of this publication. She has won five Helen Lambert Medals – the VWFL’s Brownlow equivalent – has represented Victoria and Australia on countless occasions, was the second female footballer to reach 250 games – after Belinda Bowey – and captained the Spurs to their first premiership in 2004. She is also a former VWFL president, and there are two medals named in her honour – for best-on-ground in the AFL Women’s National Championships and for the best first year player in the VWFL.
Some may also remember her from the 2002 reality television show The Club, which built a men’s football club, the Hammerheads, from scratch. Lee pushed to be part of the team, playing with and against men, which helped raise the profile of women’s football significantly.
Lee’s efforts are driven by her memories of the early 90s. “That was the turning point for me,” she says. “I didn’t want any young person feeling how I felt when I was 17. I couldn’t share what I was so passionate about for fear of what people thought of me. That’s what has driven me ever since; that’s what drives me to continue the lobbying of female footy.”
When the VWFL started in 1981, women’s footy was seen as “bit of a giggle”. Catto says: “It wasn’t taken seriously.”
“It was just like, ‘Oh these women want to have a kick every Sunday, whatever’. But now there are senior women’s leagues in every state and territory and the standard gets better and better. It won’t go away. It’s going to grow and grow.”
Catto says the turning point for greater respect and recognition came with the explosion of Youth Girls competitions in the late 2000s. Before that, many girls were forced to give up the game they loved because many football leagues prevented girls from playing with boys once they turned 12.
The issue came to national attention in 2003, when Melbourne teenagers Penny Cula-Reid, Emily Stayner and Helen Taylor, who played in the Moorabbin Saints Junior Football League, won a Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal case against AFL Victoria.
The case resulted in the age limit for girls playing footy with boys being raised to 14. An under 17 Youth Girls competition was established by AFL Victoria the next year, providing junior female footballers a pathway to the VWFL.
“Now the numbers are phenomenal in every state,” says Catto. “The demand for the game built and built and all of a sudden girls saw footy as a legitimate sport, whereas previously it wasn’t seen as a game for women to play.”
As a result of the Youth Girls competition and exploding numbers, the standard of women’s football has risen sharply.
“It’s pretty amazing,” says Catto. “Players kick on both sides of the body and the skills are just fantastic because players are coming through from a young age. It has really evolved.”
That comes as no surprise to Beverley O’Connor, a former Demons director and a columnist.
“So many don’t realise that the games have been at a high level for a long time,” she says. “The girls are so talented and I think people will be shocked when they see the game. It’s only going to get better, too, as more of these girls make their way through the ranks, playing at a much higher level.”
In 1999 O’Connor achieved a breakthrough for women in footy when she became the first female director of the Melbourne Football Club, the sport’s oldest. She spent nine years on the board, seven of those as vice-president. The June 29 game, she says, is another watershed moment for women in football.
“I’m really thrilled, and having them play in AFL guernseys indicates how serious the AFL is about women,” she says. “Women are really heavily involved now, from inside the change rooms to administrative roles, all aspects of the game.
“I always knew I loved footy and that women loved it, but it was an oddity to have women in senior representative roles or have any real voice. It took a long while for the doubters to be convinced, but the recognition has been significant over the last 10 years, in particular from the current AFL administration.”
Peta Searle is living proof. Searle, who will coach the Western Bulldogs team for Saturday’s game, is an assistant coach at VFL club Port Melbourne. She works with former Hawthorn player and Geelong and Adelaide coach Gary Ayres, having previously coached Darebin Falcons to five consecutive VWFL premierships. Searle has an impressive pedigree, and the obvious next step is a role at AFL level.
“She is well respected at Port and within VFL,” says Catto. “Ideally she would end up with an AFL job in a development role or something like that. Which club is going to take a chance on employing a woman? They’ll get a good coach, because she’s meticulous and she’s a smart football person.
“She has the same level three coaching accreditation as Kevin Sheedy and she wasn’t just appointed as a token because she is a woman. Gary Ayres and Barry Kidd [Port general manager] thought she was the best person for the job.”
Speaking to these women, it is clear the Melbourne–Western Bulldogs game is intended as a launching pad for the ultimate goal – a national women’s competition. The women agree that ideally it would be AFL clubs fielding women’s teams.
The delivery date frequently cited for that is 2020. AFL national and international development general manager Andrew Dillon, says the organisation has neither a specific date nor concept in mind but that decisions will be guided by the hundreds of thousands of female players across Australia.
“It’s not a specific aim of the AFL and we don’t have a timeline. We just want to make sure we are providing opportunities for females to play. If that ends up being an AFL-aligned competition that’s great. If there is a groundswell of support and that’s what everyone wants, it might happen.
“But it doesn’t have to be the end game. There might be alternative ways to do it that are more suitable. As the participation grows we have to learn from that. We want to listen to the people playing.’’
Dillon says the vision for the next few years is to continue the growth of women’s football and get more AFL clubs involved. Momentum is a big thing in football. Once it starts, it is hard to stop and Lee has a proven track record of getting things done. “This game has provided a platform for a national competition, with a vision for 2020,” she says. “But I think we can get it up and running earlier than that.”
AFL Women’s Exhibition Match, June 29, MCG, 5.10pm. Women and girls who play and/or contribute to women’s football can register for free tickets at melbournefc.com.au.
