“Could you hold on a second?” A delighted squeal echoes down the phone, followed by laughter and footsteps across the room. A whisper. The giggles and gurgles quickly fade. “Sorry about that,” Jessie Rasschaert says through a grin, the interview briefly interrupted by her son, Tristan, who has just turned two.
The moment perfectly illustrates the topic of the conversation: how to balance motherhood and professional football. In round 9 of the W-League, Rasschaert – a defender for Canberra United – missed her team’s game against Melbourne City because she was supporting her wife, Jen, as she gave birth to their second child.
“Not playing on Thursday [against City], or saying that I’m not available to play… I was pretty nervous telling them that because it’s a job; it’s the W-League, it’s a big deal,” Rasschaert says. “But they were fantastic; they said ‘ultimately, family comes first’. And I think that’s been where their heads have been at the whole time. Family definitely comes before sport.”
“They” are Canberra United head coach Heather Garriock and assistant Scott O’Donnell. “On a personal level, Heather has been – maybe because she herself is a mother – very understanding of my situation. [Coaches without children] might not understand how hard some things can be. I guess juggling work and family and sport as well, it’s really full-on and you do need your support people behind you to be able to do it. So if someone was a coach and didn’t have that family experience, maybe it would be a bit tougher on me.”
Professional football and motherhood have long been difficult to reconcile for female athletes. Compared with many other industries, the window within which female footballers can excel is relatively narrow, peaking around the age of 25 while the vast majority retire before they reach 40. As such, many women find themselves having to choose between their sporting career or starting a family. Choosing both can be almost impossible. “My son likes to rise and shine any time from 5:30 to 6:30am, usually,” Rasschaert says. “I’ll take him to day care about 7:30, and if it’s a work day then I’ll go to work, go to soccer training, go back to work, and pick him up at day care afterwards, bedtime routine – he goes to bed about 7:30pm – and then a bit of adult time before we pass out on the couch … You just figure it out, you manage, and you find that extra gear to do what you need to do.”
Until 2017, the W-League had no official policies or procedures in place to support its mothers; arrangements were always made within clubs themselves or players had to organise childcare on their own, often relying on the help of family and friends. But thanks to the league’s collective bargaining agreement, things have improved: player contracts and match fees are now paid out in full if a player falls pregnant during the season, while the league also covers flights and extra accommodation for a child under the age of three. A more progressive policy, which takes inspiration from other sports such as cricket and netball, is currently being developed.
These principles are a far cry from how the W-League supported its mothers less than a decade ago. Former Matildas captain and current Melbourne City deputy goalkeeper Melissa Barbieri knows how difficult it was for mothers to play professional football in Australia after giving birth to her first child, Holly, in 2013. A veteran of three World Cups, the new mum found herself without a Matildas contract and without a W-League team. She emailed every club in the league asking for a trial but all declined. Similar to Garriock recruiting Rasschaert at Canberra, it was not until former Socceroo Ross Aloisi took over Adelaide’s women’s team that Barbieri found a lifeline.
“He saw that drive and that passion [to return to the national team] would see me be a good goalkeeper for him,” she said. “I was seen as just too hard to handle, first of all because I’d had a baby, but also because I demanded a lot for my teammates and my sport, so it was easier not to have me around … You can say I had a harsh deal in some aspects but certain people definitely made it possible for me to continue.”
Like Barbieri, Garriock has first-hand experience of navigating Australian football’s institutions as a new mother. Her case against Football Federation Australia brought the struggles of football’s mothers into the spotlight and contributed to the reforms now built into W-League and Matildas contracts.
“There were no official policies,” Garriock said of her time with the Matildas. “I did get back from having the baby and doing my own training and sorting everything out myself through the New South Wales Institute. I got selected on a trip to America, and everyone knows what happened then: the wheels fell off.
“Basically FFA said, ‘well, you sort [childcare] out yourself or you can’t come’. The PFA stepped in and basically funded everything and said ‘look, it’s important that we need to put something in place upon your return for not just you, but everyone that follows you’.
“We felt at the time that it was important we change the legislation of how women are treated in sport. We lost the case against FFA, but in saying that, I do know and I’m very proud that other sports in the country have utilised our case against FFA and have got amazing child policies. It’s really pleasing to see that now the PFA have been proactive with the collective bargaining agreement and that won’t ever happen to another footballer again in the future.”
However, these measures can only go so far given the W-League is still a semi-professional competition. All three women agree that a full-time league would provide them, and the mothers who came after them, with the financial stability and security to better balance football and family.
“It’s not an industry I’d encourage mothers to take part in,” Garriock says. “First of all, you don’t have a stable job; you don’t know if you’re coming or going. Second of all, the work that you put in isn’t equivalent from a financial point of view. And from a family point of view, you miss out on a lot of family time. You have to have the option to want to be a mother; a choice. Because at the moment, there’s no option.”
The need for further structural reform in the W-League was made more apparent by what all three mothers were doing at the time of the interviews. Just as Rasschaert was interrupted by Tristan, Barbieri was walking her kids to their grandmother’s house, pausing the conversation briefly to pick up a toy that had been dropped on the sidewalk and almost chewed up by a passing dog. Garriock had just returned from putting her youngest down for a midday sleep after spending the morning with her kids for the first time since Christmas.
It was a reminder that motherhood is as much of a full-time job as football, and that the support offered by football’s institutions is crucial if the game is to retain the talent and experience these mothers provide. So as the women’s game enters a professional era on the field, so too does it need to enter one off it; to ensure that when it comes to football and family, it is a choice that women now and into the future no longer must make.
