Why the AFLW is the ultimate destination on footy pathway for girls
A new AFLW season, the fourth, launches in February with expansion and more women chasing the dream of playing Australian football in a national competition, writes Michelangelo Rucci.
Michelangelo Rucci
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Just how do we define “equal opportunity” in sport today?
On the eve of AFLW Season 4 – Australian football’s growing national women’s competition – the question; “Could a female rise and survive in the men’s AFL?” might be overlooked. But the concept is far from gone, more so when Crows co-captain Chelsea Randall appears capable of outmuscling some men in Australian football’s big league.
One of Kobe Bryant’s final interviews – before the American basketball great’s distressing death this week – put on the agenda the concept of women mixing it with men in the elite NBA.
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A father of four daughters but no son to lift the hopes of a “Mamba” dynasty at the LA Lakers, Bryant declared on CNN: “I think there are a couple of players who could play in the NBA right now honestly. There’s a lot of players with a lot of skill that could do it.”
Bryant put up three players – all from the WNBA – including the so-called “White Mamba”, three-time WNBA champion Diana Taurasi from the Pheonix Mercury.
He also nominated two league MVPs, Maya Moore (Minnesota Lynx) and Elena Della Donne (Washington Mystics).
Had Bryant lived to further his seemingly deliberate attempt to roast an old and overcooked chestnut that has even driven a Hollywood script, Erin Phillips – the AFLW champion with a WNBA resume – might be facing the same theme about the “battle of the sexes” on both sides of the Pacific.
At the end of the inaugural AFLW season in 2017, after proving to be in a league of her own, Phillips stopped the emerging debate whether a woman could make it in the AFL by underlining the critical reasons why AFL boss Gillon McLachlan advanced the AFLW from its original launch date of 2020.
In speaking to Phillips as she collected trophy after trophy, the daughter of Port Adelaide and Collingwood great Greg Phillips declared: “We have a league of our own.”
A league that this season expands by four teams to 14 – and awaits just Port Adelaide, Essendon, Hawthorn and Sydney to mirror the 18-club AFL for size, at least by the number of top-flight teams.
A league that allows every Australian teenage girl (and a few in Ireland) to continue her dream in Australian football from under-15s to a national competition that can draw a full house to Adelaide Oval for a grand final. She no longer needs to step away from the football field at 15, as Phillips did.
There now is “equal opportunity” for every Australian teenager in Australia’s homegrown game. Every boy and girl can live the dream of being a national league champion in Australian football.
As much as Randall’s fearless approach to her football suggests the opposite, Phillips argued in 2017 that a woman in the AFL “is not realistic – and I am not even sure it is flattering. I don’t even like to compare (men and women footballers).”
On the other side of the Pacific – where many WNBA devotees have praised Bryant as a meaningful “advocate of the women’s game” – Taurasi is just as pragmatic as Phillips. She defines a woman succeeding in the NBA as a “long shot”.
“Skill-wise, knowing the game, there’s no difference between men and women,” says Taurasi. “(But) it would be really hard (for a woman to deal with the physical differences). If you could put me in a machine that could make me 6-foot 5 and as strong as (the men are), I could play in the NBA.
“When you talk about how physically superior they are, I can’t help it.”
So “equal opportunity” in sport remains on parallel lines differentiated by sex. But finally with Australian football, the challenge of following a dream to the highest level is no longer determined by an old-fashioned concept that young women should not be playing physically demanding games that are “suited just to men”.
Bryant wanted to see a woman make it in the NBA. Randall could inspire a similar theme in AFL company. And as Phillips and Taurasi say, it might all be unrealistic in both Australian football and basketball.
But at least the opportunity to be the best in a league of their own is now there for every female wanting to make it to the top in Australian football.