One winter morning a decade ago, a veteran AFL AusKick co-ordinator named Ivo Havard stood surveying a field full of kids at Point Cook, 25km from the CBD in Melbourne’s west. Havard turned to a helpful parent, Darren Smith, and offered his grand theory on the game’s future: “You watch: in 10 years women’s footy is going to go off, and it’s going to be shown on TV. We need to get as many girls doing this as possible.”
Smith couldn’t quite imagine Havard’s vision, but the words stuck with him. The father of three boys and a lifelong stalwart of football clubs, he took Havard’s ideas on board and in his words, “started singing that song as well”. Four years ago the Smith family moved to Bacchus Marsh, a rural footy stronghold 57 kilometres north-west of the state capital. At present, it is witnessing a grassroots football revolution.
Earlier in the 2017 season, in his role as president of Bacchus Marsh football and netball club’s junior divisions, Darren Smith made the unprecedented move of appointing a female football co-ordinator. He needed to. Following the raging success of the AFLW’s first season, help was needed with the myriad extra administrative responsibilities brought about by the soaring numbers of girls registering to play.
Five years ago the club started its first youth girl’s team for players aged between 15 and 18. A few years after that they added an open-age equivalent. In February, noting the rapturous response to AFLW, Smith wrote a post on a Bacchus Marsh community Facebook page, wondering aloud whether the small town could fill an Under-13 girls team too. He was immediately swamped. Twenty-five registration forms later, the problem was who to leave on the bench.
In past years, Bacchus Marsh’s girls teams tended to be padded out by the friends of a core group of serious players. Now, each of the club’s youngest participants is champing at the bit. “All of these girls want to play football,” Smith says. “They’re really going to be the future of our female footy program. Everyone is riding the wave of momentum that is happening at the highest level. It’s absolutely filtering down to local level, and we’re embracing it.”
Elsewhere in Victoria, the surge of interest in the game among young women is causing one of the most drastic upheavals in the game’s history at amateur level. Having registered 150 new women’s teams in 2016, AFL Victoria predicted it would add around 200 more off the back of the professional league’s inaugural season. At the latest count that number has climbed to 320, presenting administrators and local councils in most country and metropolitan regions with a welcome headache: where to host all the extra games, and how to accommodate female players in clubrooms designed almost exclusively for men?
‘It’s not just a case of slotting the girls in somewhere’
The acute resources strain brought about by the surge in women’s football participation is now the subject of a five-year AFL Victoria facilities development strategy. This problem will be echoed throughout the country, and there are serious concerns at the executive levels of the game that momentum will be lost if the influx of female players cannot be immediately accommodated.
“It’s definitely a challenge,” AFL Victoria CEO Steven Reaper tells Guardian Australia. “We’re working very closely with Sport and Recreation Victoria, identifying some packages to put to boards – improving existing facilities that were predominately available to males only, and making them as unisex as possible in a short timeframe.”
For now, AFL Victoria must also work with schools, scouring every corner of the state for grounds sitting idle in off-peak holiday periods and on Sundays. At present, the metropolitan areas are coping with demand, helped in no small part by a relatively dry winter. “We’re coping,” says Reaper. “But to cater for all 320 new teams in female football there is going to be a strain.”
The key expenditure required at most existing grounds is light towers, which enable clubs to be more flexible in their fixturing, and upgrading changerooms. Gone are the days of communal showers and urinals.
The temporary solution so far has been to spread games from Friday night through Sunday. Mid-week competitions are cropping up as well. “What we’re trying to promote is that it’s not just a case of slotting the girls in somewhere,” Reaper says. “We want them put in some of the prime time slots too, and allow them to see a healthy pathway. There are ongoing challenges in tight metro confines where you don’t have too many vacant green spaces to build ovals. It’s really about quickly enhancing existing ovals to make them unisex.”
Out in the country a reverse of the same problem exists; there is plenty of space to build new grounds and clubrooms, but so far, a shortfall in the funding available to do it. AFL Victoria’s ideal scenario is that no single ground is used for more than seven games in a given round, but at Gisborne’s Gardiner Reserve, for example, that number has climbed to 23 on some weekends.
Gardiner Reserve and other grounds like it are among a number of issues that have administrators like AFL goldfields regional general manager Rod Ward sweating. The women’s football boom has forced AFL Victoria to conduct a statewide facilities audit, and looming are development projects that will require hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Five years ago, Rod Ward administered four women’s teams. Last year that number rose to 20. This year he’s got 42, and expects that within five years it’ll be more like 75-90. In January, Goldfields became the first country region in Victoria to employ a full-time female football manager in order to cope with rapid increases in participation, and to give women’s football the attention it now requires.
“We’re coping,” he says warily when asked about the ground shortage. “We’re OK in the short term, but there is no doubt in the faster-growing suburbs like Melton we’re going to need another six to seven grounds in the next 10 years. In Melton, Hume, Macedon Ranges and Mooroobal there is certainly a shortage of grounds. We’re going to be lobbying very hard into the next election to try and address that shortfall.
“In the country we’re quite fortunate. We have a lot of green space in which we can build new facilities. I’d imagine it will be a lot more challenging in the higher density metropolitan areas.”
Working closely with those providing funding has been a forte at AFL Victoria in the past decade. The governing body initiated $210m worth of football facilities projects in the last decade, with only $13m coming from its own coffers. But if the estimates of some individual municipalities are anything to go by, the sport will need to do unprecedented levels of wooing in coming years.
Reaper says the game’s newfound embrace of diversity will help, but he is also aware of the risk the game could miss its greatest wave of participation increases in history if things don’t pan out. “It is opening more doors for us to have discussions [about new facilities], whereas in the past, if it was a male-only facility we would quite often get it done, but this is far easier content to be able to go and sell to our key stakeholders.
“It’s such a positive message for young girls growing up to have that aspiration to play a game that is now being shown on TV. It will continue to grow, we’re just trying to keep pace with it. If we have the influx and the facilities aren’t keeping up, we do fear that we’ll miss that generational opportunity to pick up on what is a really positive thing for getting our game to grow.”
At all levels of the game, there have also been significant increases in the number of women umpiring the game and, significantly, filling administrative roles. “They’re running leagues and regional commissions,” Reaper says. “We’re bringing people back into the game that otherwise would have been lost. It’s just as critical we open up opportunities for female administrators because there are some bloody good ones out there who, in the past, wouldn’t put in for a role because it was a man’s game administered by men.
“We’ve got women in football development roles now – roles that traditionally would have been filled by a 35-year-old white Anglo-Saxon male. We’ve knocked down some of those barriers in a very short period of time. That will continue because people are starting to see role models at AFLW level.”
‘I’m not seeing anything negative’
Back in Bacchus Marsh, Darren Smith says it is not just a sports club reprogramming its thinking, but an entire community. In years gone by it was a typical Victorian country town when it came to sport: on Saturday afternoons in winter the boys played footy like dad used to, while the girls followed mum down to the netball courts. Now it’s the only club in the Goldfields region to have a full compliment of football teams for both men and women (nine junior sides, three seniors, plus open age, youth and junior women’s sides).
“It’s no different to what is going on in mainstream society,” Smith says. “There are people who are a bit behind, but on the whole the footy club is embracing the female program. We had a big crowd to our Under-13s game a couple of Friday nights ago. They’re not just mums and dads. A lot of people have a big interest in what girls footy is offering. I’m not seeing anything negative.”
Some girls now juggle netball and football duties, but for the first time ever, plenty without a brother or father involved in the game are now playing football too. “I think probably 40% of our Under-13 girls have some connection to the footy club, but I reckon there are more girls who had none,” he says.
The thought of Ivo Havard’s prophesy coming true does make Smith wonder about the players lost along the way, but he is also encountering entirely new phenomena as well, and learning much along the way. “There is one girl in our youth girls who could easily win a best and fairest in the Under-14s boys comp,” he says. “She’s got it all. We have no doubt that she can play AFLW. She now has a pathway.
“What’s interesting there is that it’s a girl who, if footy wasn’t available, probably wouldn’t have played netball. She might not have played sport at all. Her approach to sport is to get her head over the ball, rough people up, lay tackles. Netball wouldn’t have offered her that. I watch her and wonder what she would have played if football wasn’t available to her. I don’t think netball would have fit her abilities and instincts. She’ll go straight through a pack and come out with the ball. There is body contact, and she is really suited to this game.”
Having renovated the Bacchus Marsh club rooms, making changing room facilities unisex for the first time in the club’s history, Smith’s priority now is to get funding for one of those elusive sets of lights. Bacchus Marsh have just two grounds, and only one of them is lit. “Our lights are well below standard,” he says. “Getting lights will actually support the growth of women’s footy.”
Rod Ward, meanwhile, says that as he travels his way across country Victoria he’s seeing entirely new developments at the game’s lower levels. “The genuine love and goodwill around women’s football has been quite refreshing,” he says. “They don’t have the traditional rivalries from men’s football, and I’m sure that’ll come, but they’re actually just playing for the love of the game.”
