Not only is a large crowd expected for that match, but just a week later the Magpies will take on the Dockers for the first time at the new Perth Stadium, a game which has reportedly sold more than 30,000 tickets.<\/p>\n
Typically, the mainstream media will continually spurt the line that the AFLW has been a great overnight success, an idea conceived only two years ago.<\/p>\n
Truth be told though, the seeds for the national competition we celebrate today were sown in a meeting at league headquarters this month 15 years ago.<\/p>\n
Founding secretary of the Sydney Women\u2019s Australian Football League (SWAFL), Yvette Andrews, recalled the early talk about state league representatives meeting with the AFL to discuss the future of the women\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a pretty significant conversation with the AFL starting in around 2002, to get them focused on what women\u2019s football could really do,\u201d Andrews explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d like to think our (SWAFL) President at the time, Helen Swan, who had kind of a connection with Wayne Jackson who was CEO at the AFL at the time, had a bit of influence there.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got them to call a meeting of a group of women from different states, to come together as the first representative meeting of women across the country who wanted to see AFL be part of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group that would end up advising the AFL on women\u2019s footy featured a who\u2019s who of the women\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
Along with Yvette Andrews and Helen Swan, women such as Dani Glatz and Nicole Graves were there advocating the need for investment in the game and pathways.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat first meeting, pretty sure it was January 2003, that was the first time that I know of that the AFL themselves said \u2018yeah, we want to invest in this, we want to bring you together and we want to get some ideas about how to move forward\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a really big win for us, and we sat down there in AFL House in the main boardroom, and we pitched our claim to space of the football field basically.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not everything was smooth sailing for these women\u2019s footy pioneers.<\/p>\n
It was a time when women\u2019s competitions were yet to get off the ground in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Tasmania.<\/p>\n
The Sydney competition was barely three years old, and not every league sent a team to the National Championships; it being purely on an \u2018if they can raise the money\u2019 basis.<\/p>\n
Also, Youth Girls football was not existent, with the famous court case of junior female footballers Helen Taylor, Penny Cula-Reid and Emily Stayner versus the Moorabbin Saints Junior Football League still being eleven months away from occurring.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the guys around that table were coming to terms with the fact that women were serious about playing football still,\u201d Andrews said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey really weren\u2019t at a point of visualising the future, they were still coming to terms with the present.<\/p>\n
\u201cWayne Jackson wasn\u2019t necessarily a believer in women\u2019s football.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe famously had been quoted as saying he wasn\u2019t sure that women were even capable of playing football, that the Australian public was ready to see it, but in that meeting surrounded by the leadership of the AFL on the walls, we showed them footage of women playing, [and] they went \u2018gee, you guys are really serious about this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
The women\u2019s football representatives in the meeting were not only serious, but also very ambitious.<\/p>\n
For the first time, they not only wanted to take the game to the Top End, but also use the occasion to help grow the women\u2019s game in the Northern Territory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe told them what we were planning.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to have this week-long competition in Darwin that year \u2013 we needed everyone to be on board for that \u2013 and they listened, and we continued a conversation that I think set some of the main steps in train that led to the AFLW.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had an impact; we were changing hearts and minds at that point.<\/p>\n
The short-term impact of that meeting was a $5,000 grant from the AFL to assist in the costs of running that year\u2019s National Championships.<\/p>\n
It might have been a rather small sum, however, it was an important step when you consider just a couple of years earlier that the Western Australia state team had to look to an \u2018upmarket adult establishment\u2019 for sponsorship money.<\/p>\n
The women in that 2003 meeting making the case for women\u2019s football were not arguing their case alone, with Andrews revealing a key AFL ally they had in their corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to say the other person who was absolutely fantastic in this was Gabrielle Trainor, who was then a commissioner on the New South Wales AFL Commission when they had state bodies.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the very beginning in 1999\/2000 when we went to the AFL and said we were doing this, she had been saying \u2018you\u2019ve got to listen to these women, they know what they\u2019re on about\u2019, and she\u2019s still there.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s still advocating for women\u2019s football and she\u2019s still one of those great women AFL leaders that really got the momentum happening and got the game to where it is today.<\/p>\n
The momentum from that meeting, and resultant communication between the representatives of women\u2019s football and the AFL, help lay down the path to today\u2019s national competition.<\/p>\n
In fact, Andrews would come across a document that would end up foretelling the future of the women\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year before the AFLW kicked off, we had a celebration in Sydney of the history of our (SWAFL) contribution.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went through a lot of my documents, and I discovered this incredible letter that we\u2019d written to David Matthews who was I think the Head of Game Development in around 2003\/2004.<\/p>\n
The letter to Matthews outlined the plan the women had for their game going forward, including the following important points:
\n\u2013 a person for a national development program for women
\n\u2013 have high-profile games that brought the media and captured the imagination of the community
\n\u2013 a mapped out development youth program to have pathways for girls into footy<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did all those things along with I presume a whole lot of other things that have built that momentum, and when Gillon McLachlan made that call [to start in 2017] \u2013 and I think it\u2019s absolutely the right call now \u2013 I was shocked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought \u2018how are you going to do this in a year\u2019, but when the momentum is there, you don\u2019t want to lose it, and it was the right thing to do, and they pulled it off.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Looking back] Those first steps were definitely the path that led us to what we have now, which is fabulous.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
To mark our 100th episode of the Girls Play Footy Podcast, which is due to air on Wednesday, February 28, we\u2019ll be airing a special dedication to the history of women\u2019s football before the AFLW era.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Originally published on the former GirlsPlayFooty.com website on January 18th, 2018. Written by Peter Holden. In a matter of two weeks, the second season of the AFL Women\u2019s competition will kick off at Princes Park in Carlton when the Blues host the Magpies in the season opener. Not only is ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"page-no-sidebar.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6715,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/6715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warfradio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}