How five local games propelled unheard of Ryleigh Wotherspoon to first-round AFLW draft pick
In the space of five local games, she went from water-runner who hadn’t played the sport since she was 11, to first-round draft pick. Discover the incredible story of AFLW bolter Ryleigh Wotherspoon.
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Being selected in the first round of a national draft requires a lifetime of dedication to the sport for almost everyone.
But AFLW draft bolter Ryleigh Wotherspoon isn’t like almost everyone. She is far from it.
That’s no exaggeration either, for when Melbourne took junior sporting prodigy Wotherspoon at pick 12 in the AFLW draft, she became Queensland’s first woman drafted who hadn’t been in a state league program or talent pathway.
Extraordinarily, the Mackay product only played her first game of Aussie rules since she was 11 years old on July 29, representing Sherwood in its round 15 QFAW Divison 1 game against Broadbeach.
In the space of a week, she had trained with the Brisbane Lions’ AFLW side and had head coach Craig Starcevich come watch her on the weekend.
But what brought Wotherspoon, 19, back to the sport that had been absent from the past eight years of her life?
A chance encounter.
She was roaming her University of Queensland campus and happened to be wearing footy shorts when Sherwood player Millie Kent struck up a conversation, asking if she’d played before.
It led to Wotherspoon - who was wearing a sling following shoulder surgery - being invited to the Magpies’ training and becoming the club’s water runner for the best part of three months.
“It all happened without any fuss,” Sherwood coach Mitch Merritt recalls.
“She came down and asked if she could help out … she was like ‘what do you want me to do, do you want me to run water? I’m happy to help with anything’.
“For 10 rounds of footy Ryleigh turned up to pretty much every training session … She’d run water for the A-grade and the reserves, literally eight quarters of footy in the middle of winter after playing her cricket games, she was pretty remarkable.”
Merritt revealed that due to Wotherspoon’s shoulder injury she hadn’t even planned on playing this year, instead preparing herself for a return next season.
“She started saying ‘I think I can do this’, she got a bit more involved and was sitting in the coaches box,” he said.
“It gets to a point where there’s five games to go and she’s got to play four to qualify for finals, so she had to make a decision.”
Wotherspoon would take to the field against Broadbeach.
“It took about 90 seconds and she burst through the pack and kicked this remarkable goal, everyone was just in awe,” Merritt recalled.
“The opposition actually had a Suns player on their team who went to Ryleigh to try and tag her out of the game, but it just didn’t do anything.”
Wotherspoon’s talent was so abundantly clear upon her return to the sport, that a player agent she was playing against tried to sign her before the final siren had even sounded.
“It was a 50-point margin and (the player agent) kind of shifted herself to play on Ryleigh, then she came up after the game and had a chat with her.”
Merritt recalled Wotherspoon’s performance against Robina, just her third game, as a standout.
“She hit her straps and kicked three goals, all from outside 50m, two on the run and one from a set shot,” he said.
“It was a pretty whirlwind five game journey, every game you’re getting tagged, you’re getting a lot of attention and you’re still trying to learn the game.
“It’s a lot of pressure for someone to deal with.
“People were pumping her tires up left, right and centre, but she just cracked in.”
As foreign a sport as Australian rules football and its elite pathways may have been to Wotherspoon, a hallmark of her upbringing was the many elite sporting environments she found herself in.
Her junior sporting resume is as profound and diverse as they come.
At age 11, she found herself representing Capricornia in five different sports - and Aussie rules wasn’t even one of them.
She would represent Queensland in cricket, softball and football (the round-ball variation), winning a national championship in the latter.
But it was cricket where Wotherspoon really excelled, playing an abundance of the sport at a representative level and captaining Queensland from a young age. Notably, she struck an unbeaten century for an Australian U15 representative side at the U18 national championships.
This year, she has plundered 335 runs in 16 games for Western Suburbs in Women’s Premier First Grade, while also representing South Queensland.
She was twice crowned Mackay District School Sport’s Junior Sportsperson of the Year, had the most dismissals in Women’s Premier Cricket in 2019/20, and won young player of the year in the 2020 season of women’s premier football.
“They’ve uncovered this hidden gem that no one knew about,“ reflected dad Tere Wotherspoon.
“That’s been the most exciting part of the last 48 hours, commentators bring up her name and then they don’t know what to talk about because they’ve got very little information on what this girl’s done.
“She’s just always had that dedication. The difference between her and a lot of kids is she would get up at six in the morning and say dad ‘you’re going to throw cricket balls to me so I can practice my catching’.
“She was self-motivated … this girl really made herself and determined that if she was going to get better she needed to do the practice.”
Merritt believes that pivotal foundation of hard work will hold Wotherspoon in good stead as she looks to advance her new-found AFLW career.
“It’s quite remarkable that someone literally plucked from the clouds, she was in no draft guides, no phantom drafts, no analyst’s calculations, nothing,” Merritt said.
“I don’t want to put too much pressure on her but she does the fundamentals of the game really well, and she also does the things you can’t teach really well.
“The ability to have that 360-degree awareness, time and space, to work hard both offensively and defensively, it’s really hard to find that.
“She’s a wicketkeeper in cricket so her hands are really soft and clean, and she’s tough, she sticks heaps of tackles per game.
“She will make an impact in the next season, she’ll shock some people.”
Lily Tarlinton was Mackay’s second selection of the night, taken by the Adelaide Crows with pick 34.
The 21-year-old arrives at the Crows a tall forward also capable of pinch-hitting in the ruck.
She managed 16 goals from 14 games for Bond University in the QAFLW this season, and represented Queensland in both 2019 and 2021.
Tarlinton and Wotherspoon now join Gold Coast’s Lauren Bella, Alana Gee, and Wallis Randell in Mackay’s AFLW contingent.
Unfortunately, Kaylee Kimber was delisted from the Suns after sustaining a stress fracture in her foot and being placed on this season’s inactive list.
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