AFLW veteran Courtney Cramey on retirement from the Crows, concussion, and why Unley Oval means so much to her
Retiring Adelaide Crows premiership star Courtney Cramey was a pioneer in womens’ footy. Now she has revealed why she plans to donate her brain to concussion research.
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There are certain places, for certain people, that will always be special, that will always have an emotional pull. One spot that represents a coming-home. Where, despite everything else changing around you, this one place is always there.
For Courtney Cramey, that’s Unley Oval, the suburban ground where the future Crows AFLW star learnt to love Aussie Rules football.
It was here in the early 1990s where Cramey would follow her father, Warwick, who was coaching her brother in the Sturt Football Club’s under-15s side.
Barely aged 10, Cramey would insist on coming along, even though it was a time that girls didn’t play footy.
Girls can’t kick. Tackling isn’t ladylike. This is a boys’ game.
Those stereotypes didn’t bother her: she’d drag a bin full of training footballs out to the boundary and while her brother and his teammates were put through their paces, she’d kick ball after ball into the bin and when she was out of balls, she’d empty the bin and start all over again.
Back then as an eight year old – while imitating her Crows idol Tony Modra by taking high-leaping marks over her brother’s shoulder – Cramey could never have imagined what lay ahead for her in the game: triple premierships in the South Australian Women’s League, SA captaincy, playing in Melbourne and Western Bulldogs colours at exhibition women’s matches on the MCG, becoming a priority signing with Adelaide for the inaugural season of the AFLW in 2017, dual Crows premierships.
Back in the early ’90s, football was something that girls could play during their primary school years, but beyond that were shut-out from the sport.
“I fondly remember cold Saturday mornings playing for Highgate Primary School up at the Coromandel Valley Football Club where the oval was boggy, and it was wintry and wet and my parents would drag me up there, the only girl in the team.
“There’d be sly comments and looks from other parents, but bless my mum and dad for taking me up there because it’s something that I loved doing and they allowed me to do it.
“I don’t think they thought twice about letting me play football, they were committed to every sport I wanted to have a go at.
“Being the only girl in a boys’ footy team when you’re seven or eight years old, no one wanted to tackle a girl and it was different in those times, so that just allowed me to be good because no one wanted to tackle me.”
But like so many others, Cramey – known as CJ – gave up football as soon as she started at Unley High School because there were no games for girls, so she stayed involved in the game by boundary umpiring the school boys’ games on weekends.
“When I was in Year 9, they came up with a nine-a-side competition where Unley would play a carnival at Urrbrae and the schools around the area would be involved,” she recalls. “It was a scrap to get nine girls to play and now I think there are girls that age playing on full-size ovals with 18-a-side. It’s brilliant.”
A sports-lover, Cramey needed another athletic avenue and that’s where basketball came in and she played district basketball for Norwood from under-10s.
“My claim to fame with basketball is that I played against Erin Phillips, when we were in the under-12s and she played for the West Adelaide Bearcats,” Cramey says. “Erin doesn’t remember it, but I do, so I can say I’ve played against an Olympic basketballer.”
While Phillips went on to an international basketball career, Cramey found a way back into football after giving away sport altogether to concentrate on Year 12.
It was 2004 – Cramey’s first year out of school – when her mum, Peta, came to her with an idea: What about giving football another crack?
“Mum was probably more worried about what path I was taking in terms of turning 18 and starting to go out and I’d always been such an active kid and involved in sport. So she looked up ‘women’s football’ on the internet and found out there was a South Australian Women’s Footy League (SAWFL),” Cramey says.
“There were four teams, and amazingly, Sturt was one of them. Mum said to me: ‘Unley Oval’s not far from us, why don’t you just go out to a training and see how you go?’
“So I did. I didn’t know one other person and there were probably 20 girls there and they were all quite older. Back in those times in the SAWFL it was mainly 30 to 40 year olds playing, I was the youngest.
“At that stage, the SAWFL had been in existence for about 15 years. Not many people knew about it, but across the four teams there would have been about 100 girls playing. However it got no publicity.”
That lack of publicity meant the competition stayed at four teams and often those teams struggled to even find a homebase.
“Women’s teams tended to go from club to club trying to find a home and people who would take them in.
“I won a premiership with Sturt in my first year in 2004, and then one of the girls’ boyfriends at the time, who was playing for Morphettville Park in the Southern Footy League, said why don’t we go from Sturt to Morphies because we’d have better oval access, better changeroom access (there were no girls’ changerooms though and many of the players would rock up to games in full kit because they felt uncomfortable in men’s changerooms).”
They did, but finding enough players week-to-week required creative thinking. Cramey recalls offering to pay people’s meals at the Morphettville Arms after games if they played for Morphies, and even paid people’s fees on occasions rather than be forced into forfeiting.
In 2009, Cramey was selected to represent South Australia in a national championships competition in Perth and by 2012 was state captain when the championships were hosted in Adelaide and the footballers were forced into doing flash mobs down Rundle Mall for publicity.
“Doesn’t that just say something about trying to get attention? It was horrible,” Cramey says.
Momentum continued to grow and in 2013 the AFL announced it would play the first-ever televised women’s exhibition game between Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs using the players from across the country. Cramey was picked by the Bulldogs.
“In 2009, we were tipping $1500 into our pockets to be able to put on a state guernsey in the women’s national championships and so we’d do Bunnings sausage sizzles and chocolate drives to raise money. Then suddenly, a couple of years later, we’re being flown to Melbourne, everything put on for us, put up in accommodation, food supplied, uniforms provided and we were in awe of that. To be taken through an AFL club, inducted into their culture, it was a dream come true for giving me a taste of what it was to be an AFL footballer, even though there was no AFL women’s football at that time.”
There was something about that introduction to the culture of a professional team – combined with the murmurs about the AFL establishing a women’s league by 2020 – that switched Cramey’s thinking and she started taking football seriously, getting to the gym in the off-season, setting pre-season fitness programs.
So, in 2016 when the AFL announced it would fast-track the creation of the AFLW and its inaugural season would be the following year, Cramey was ready to go and was duly selected as a priority pick for Adelaide.
The momentum around women’s football was phenomenal – she’d gone from flash mobs in Rundle Mall to drum up support, to walking into the inner sanctum of the club she grew up supporting – in the space of five years.
Her career at the Crows speaks for itself: she’s played 20 games across four seasons, was named an All-Australian defender in 2017 and appointed vice-captain for the past three years. She won an AFLW premiership in 2017 and two years later did it again, in front of a history-making crowd for a women’s footy game – 53,034 – at Adelaide Oval on March 31, 2019.
But in July, she announced her retirement, becoming the first of the inaugural women’s Crows to retire. The 34-year-old came into the 2020 season with a niggling feeling in the back of her mind: that it could well be her last.
Having battled a series of soft-tissue injuries for several years, Cramey looked over the Crows 2020 AFLW fixture and circled one game – Round: 8. Opponent: Richmond. Venue: Unley Oval.
“Coming into 2020, I played two pre-season games and got an abductor strain, so I knew it was probably time for me to retire. The game at Unley Oval was going to be my last and I’d already lined up my niece and nephew to run out through the banner with me and the girls as our team mascots.
“It was going to be quite fitting given my childhood memories.”
However the COVID-19 global pandemic wreaked all those best-laid-plans. The AFL cancelled the season after Round 6 with no premier declared.
“But that’s OK,” she muses, “because people died in a pandemic so I’ve got to put it into perspective.”
Cramey managed just one game in 2020.
“I think the amount of soft tissue injuries I’ve had in the last four years, it actually comes back to how I treated my body back playing for Morphies,” she says.
“Back then, I would probably do a significant Grade 2 hammy and would keep playing and then have a beer in the clubrooms after the game while icing it, and then I might not get through the Wednesday night training, but would be back playing the next week.
“Sure, we had trainers during that time, but it was someone’s mum or dad and we didn’t really look after our bodies.
“Whereas if you did that injury in AFL, you’d be sent for an MRI straight away and you’d have access to people and equipment around you to rehab it properly.”
This is where the growth in women’s footy over Cramey’s time in the game comes in.
The SAWFL no longer exists, instead it’s merged to be part of the Adelaide Footy League and there are now close to 50 women’s teams playing across six divisions. And then there’s all the country football teams, school girls’ competitions, under-18 talent pathways and academies. Football clubs across the state are being transformed: the old Morphettville Park clubrooms have been renovated and there are now four changerooms – two for the boys, two for the girls.
Each of the SANFL clubs (except the Crows and Port Adelaide) have teams in the SANFLW competition and in 2019 a record 14 players were drafted into teams across the AFLW.
Girls can now grow up knowing that football is a sport of choice for them and if they want to make it to the elite level, they have to work hard and look after their bodies.
But there’s still a lot of inequity in football and it doesn’t escape Cramey that there are men who are paid upwards of $1000 a game to play in the SA country leagues, and yet there are still women footballers playing in the SANFLW who don’t get paid a cent.
And footy has its downsides.
Concussion is a strange thing: it’s as if things are all blurry, there’s something not right but you can’t quite explain why. Cramey has had two significant concussions during her AFLW career, both in the week leading up to the Crows grand final appearances in 2017 and 2019.
“Both have been different, but there’s always moments of cloudiness and frustration,” she explains.
“It’s blurry; real messy. I remember being in bed before we went to the Gold Coast (for the 2017 grand final), it was a couple of days before we flew up, I didn’t attend training, but I just felt there was something wrong with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, which makes it hard.
“It’s a weird experience.”
Which is why she’s a vocal advocate for research into concussion and intends to donate her brain to research when she dies so more can be discovered into its effects.
“I think once you’re gone, it doesn’t really matter, so if I can help people after I’m gone, why not?” she muses.
“There’s obviously some things they can only look at in terms of concussions and the impact that it’s had post-mortem, so I’d be happy to do that if it helps people in the future.
“It’s serious for our sport and I know there’s lots of measures to keep people’s heads safe in our game, but it is a real combat sport. It’s physical, it’s a hard game, and any measures should be considered to keep people’s heads safe and avoid concussions.
“They can happen so innocuously, that’s the hard part. There needs to be some serious research around it and how we can make sure people playing our sport are safe.”
As for what she’ll miss about footy, it’ll be the moments in the changerooms after a win: the singing of the song. The banter. The jokes.
“Just being a larrikin,” she says.
“The jokes and fun you can have with 29 other girls all coming together to do the same thing and that feeling after a game when you’re in the changerooms and you’ve won and you’re singing as loud as you can, I’m not sure there are many other moments when you can come together like that and just sing the same song as loud as you can for any reason.
“I’ll miss those moments after a win where all your hard work has paid off.”
As one of the stalwarts of women’s football – someone who’s seen it grow from four teams in one division, to more than 53,000 people attending the AFLW grand final, it’s her mum who is probably most proud, having first encouraged her daughter into the game.
“She’s always been heavily involved in my sport … she was the secretary at Morphies for a little bit, and always ran the canteen at Morphies on game day and helped out with umpiring when we needed, she was an amazing woman who just enabled me to play sport and she’s always been very proud.”
Cramey will miss teammates too.
“Some of them are having sad moments (over my retirement) and I’m like: ‘I’m not dying! I’m still here!’.”
And still here she is: she’s staying involved in the game through coaching – she’s just finished her first season in charge of the Glenunga Rams’ under 18s girls side – and now sits on the Crows’ Past Players and Officials Board alongside the likes of Rod Jameson and Mark Bickley.
Then there’s her 15-year career as a social worker in the SA Corrections sector and she’ll be trying really hard to bring down her golf handicap on the Mount Osmond course.
But in so many ways, whatever comes next she’ll just always be that young girl who loved kicking footys into bins at Unley Oval.