Three female umpires have bravely revealed their horror stories after a week where the AFL conceded it should not have buried a damning report made public by the Herald Sun.
Drunken bozos bunched together at suburban football grounds would place vile bets when the Sherrin crossed the boundary line.
“They’d say, ‘What colour are your panties?’” boundary umpire Dr Rosemarie Michetti told the Herald Sun.
“I hear them behind me, they’re taking wagers on it.”
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It gets worse. When the footy needed fetching it was rarely returned on the full.
“They’d drop the ball in certain spots and beg me to bend over,” Michetti said.
“A lot of the time it was reserves teams, who would all be together.
“It’s very intimidating for a girl when you’ve got 10-20 guys drinking.”
Wait. It gets worse again.
“One senior match at Deer Park a group of women saw me step out of my car to umpire,” she said.
“I watched them hurl abuse at me and spit all over my car window, slut shaming me. For no reason other than the pure fact I was umpiring amongst their other halves.”
AFL ANGER
Michetti, 35, has served the Western Region Football League for 20 years.
She was angry at the AFL, for receiving such a powerful report last August and not blowing the whistle on the toxic male-dominated culture she has lived.
Michetti wasn’t alone.
Women’s footy crusader Susan Alberti, AFLW champion Daisy Pearce and every female umpire the Herald Sun has spoken to this week said the 62-page document was upsetting – but not surprising.
Alberti poured close to $100,000 into female umpiring, but terminated her sponsorship about four years ago because they weren’t being treated with respect.
The AFL Commission will soon ratify the Women and Girls Game Development Action Plan, which will invest in important projects such as building more gender-friendly changerooms.
But if the updated infrastructure remains inhabited by misogyny it would still be unsafe.
When the 27 umpires who shared their distressing episodes in that AFL report were finally unmuted it was an easy decision for Michetti to speak.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but there was no reason to,” she said.
“It’s not like there was one incident that made me want to put it public. It’s been a collective and you just go, ‘That’s the way it is’.
“But after I heard about the report being leaked I wanted people to get a better understanding of the depth of it.
“If it can affect me, who always seems optimistic and like nothing is getting to me, then maybe it can make them think.
“Sure enough, it’s made a lot of people rethink.”
NOTHING CHANGED
It was harder for Christine Gent to find her voice.
Tears streamed down her face. But the goal umpire had a point to prove.
“It has to be done, it has to be done,” Gent reassured herself while recounting her own experience.
At the 2018 WRFL grand final appointments function umpire’s coach Paul DiMartino approached Gent and two of her friends.
“He came up to us and said, ‘Congratulations on a good year’,” Gent said.
“I said, ‘How have I had a good year? I’ve broken my wrist and you told me I was going to get a grand final, and I didn’t’.
“And he said, ‘Don’t worry about that, at least you get to sleep with me now’.
“I was absolutely horrified that he had said that in front of my friends.
“Those comments in front of people are not acceptable.”
When Gent asked the league’s umpiring association to investigate they made contact … over Facebook Messenger.
“It was going around in circles and everybody was just telling me things I wanted to hear, like ‘That’s disgusting, it shouldn’t have happened, we’re going to do something about it’.
“But nothing ever eventuated.”
DiMartino’s one-line apology was forwarded to Gent and she said the league closed the case without issuing a sanction.
It made her feel sick.
Standing behind the goals for two hours every Saturday was once Gent’s happy place.
The mother-of-one who owns two race horses first waved the flags in Year 7.
“When I had a very stressful job it was two hours of the day where I didn’t think about life,” the 43-year-old said.
But when Gent was told her sexual encounters had been discussed on an umpire’s trip to Queensland in 2019 she waved the white flag herself.
A celebrated WRFL career spanning 31 years ended, as well as many friendships.
“I had anxiety, it was affecting my everyday life. I just couldn’t deal with it,” Gent said.
“For my own mental health I had to drop it. Had I been in a better spot, I would’ve kept fighting it.
“It had absolutely physically and mentally drained me.”
REPORTING TOOLS
Michetti also called for better reporting tools so all incidents can be investigated and resolved with integrity.
A centralised reporting procedure was one of the 11 recommendations tabled in the AFL’s report.
“The WRFL are fabulous, I wouldn’t be umpiring with them for 20 years if it wasn’t,” Michetti said.
“However there’s no protocol, there’s no strategy, there’s no set guidelines on what to do when people are harassed.
“You just have to deal with it. If you ask any executive they’ll say, ‘What do you mean? You know you can come to us’.
“But it doesn’t work that way. There’s no set system, there’s no set person, we didn’t know who to go to and we didn’t know the direct number to any head associations to go above them.
“When the women spat on my car or I hear, ‘What colour are your panties?’ we don’t even know that we can report them to the club. There’s no clear structure.”
When a revolting rumour involving Michetti and her younger sister, Bianca, spread like the Omicron strain they felt helpless.
They drove two AFL umpires from an umpire’s funeral in Footscray to the wake in Maidstone and would become horrified to hear what had been peddling about that trip.
“Nothing happened in the car at all – I was 17 or 18 at the time,” Bianca said.
“But we found out not long later that so and so had told people that we had sex with them and it was pretty much an orgy in the car.”
League powerbrokers were approached. But Rosemarie suspected they weighed up whether to pursue allegations made by two girls or protect the reputation of an established AFL umpire – and decided the latter mattered more to them.
“(Bianca) was worried about her reputation,” Rosemarie said.
“She didn’t know for a while and then she was just like, ‘Gross, what do we do?’
“I said I actually don’t know.”
That saga occurred more than 12 years ago.
Thankfully, Rosemarie stressed the WRFL culture had improved drastically since those disgusting early days.
ON THE IMPROVE
Bianca started umpiring at 15 and quickly peeled off two senior grand finals.
She suspected some male umpires lacked social skills because they seldom communicated with women.
“They’re just staring at you, but they don’t realise they shouldn’t be doing that,” she said.
“Over the years you kind of just tolerated it.”
One venue was particularly unsavoury.
“One particular game at Port Colts it was that side on the wing where all those spectators were,” the 31-year-old said.
“You don’t want the ball to go there – because they’re all there checking you out.”
But five years ago Bianca swapped the whistle for a mouthguard, pulling on the boots in Keilor’s midfield.
Rosemarie agreed Port Colts, along with Laverton, used to be among the most unsavoury places to patrol the perimeter.
But she said they have lifted their game by lifting awareness.
Last year AFL Victoria could’ve lifted awareness when a Melton South player yelled sexist abuse at a female umpire. Instead it repeatedly refused to divulge the suspension.
Eight months passed before the Geelong Advertiser reported it was more than 20 weeks.
“He said, ‘You’re a female, why are you umpiring men’s footy?” Ballarat Football League umpire Molly McKenzie said of that incident.
“He was a registered player questioning my gender and why a female would be umpiring.
“It was one metre away. He wasn’t standing there the whole game. He actually came to that distance to abuse me.
“It didn’t affect me at the moment but reflecting on it later was overwhelming.”
AFL Victoria bungled the opportunity to take a stand against such behaviour and make a strong statement that it would not be tolerated.
The traumatic tales kept tumbling.
Gent once required physical security at an under-16 final in North Sunshine.
“A spectator was encouraging his brother, who was playing, to physically assault the other players,” Gent said.
“He was swearing profusely – absolutely disgusting – and I looked at him and said, ‘Come on, mate, we’re at a junior final’.
“And he completely lost it. While I was umpiring he threatened to follow me home.
“I had my back to him, which was frightening in itself. He said, ‘You’re a f---ing c---, I’m going to follow you home’.”
When Gent lodged a report at the next break the gruff teenager was ejected and a Sunshine official was placed between Gent and the fence for the rest of the match.
“They stood behind me for the rest of the game to make sure I felt safe – because I didn’t feel safe, I thought I was going to hit me from behind he was going off his head that much,” she said.
“I was extremely intimidated, and that’s not easy. I was frightened, I was genuinely concerned for my safety during that incident.”
Think about the emotional and physical toll of that afternoon and then consider the going rate for goal umpires in under-16 matches – about $40.
ONE OFFENSIVE WORD
Gent is happily back behind the sticks this year. She feels safe in the Essendon District Football League.
But she’d “bet anything” plenty of other WRFL females umpires have been victims of sexual abuse.
“It’s known as a bit of a rough league so they didn’t attract many female umpires, but when they did they didn’t last long,” she said.
“They’d just come and go. Two weeks, a month – none of them stayed long term.
“There’s talk about your backside or your breasts – all that toxic masculinity stuff – from spectators and, on training nights, other umpires.
“It’s just a disgusting environment to be in. It’s culture.”
When Rosemarie was 15-20 a coach said to her: “You only get games because you’re a female and we feel sorry for you”.
When her friend asked a former coach for constructive criticism on positioning at halftime she was told: “You’re just a girl, you just do what you can”.
When Gent was appointed for her first Division 1 grand final she was told: “You only got that because you’ve got a vagina”.
She remains the only female to stand behind the goals for a top-flight WRFL decider.
Elsewhere in Melbourne, a male player recently threw the Sherrin at a female umpire’s face.
A female umpire instructing junior boys at training had a group of dads standing behind her performing sexual innuendos.
One female umpire received the fright of her life when, at quarter-time, a spectator got close enough to breathe on her and said: “I’m going to bang you after the game”.
In the Northern Football League a 14-year-old field umpire once won a coveted appointment for a final. Soon, she lost her enjoyment because of abuse.
Even feedback at VFL level has frustrated some – one eagle-eyed goal umpire was told she was too short.
It’s also been alleged that two senior umpiring officials in one league bet a bottle of bourbon each season on who will be the first female umpire to have sex with the coach.
And then there’s prehistoric language still echoing around, like this excerpt from an umpires’ newsletter circulated only months ago:
“No greater honour can be bestowed on an umpire than to be entrusted with the handling of a match. His duty is to assess the facts, without prejudice and outside influences.”
‘His duty’. ‘His!’
One word can make people feel like they have no place in umpiring.
The AFL report said it could also cause isolation and humiliation, with one of the recommendations to use gender-neutral language in all correspondence and coaching.
“It’s crucial that leagues begin to consider how interactional language (written and verbal) can produce feelings of humiliation, erasure and marginalisation for umpires,” the report read.
That same newsletter published an even bigger clanger only three lines later.
It read: “The trouble with female umpires is you can’t argue with them or put your arms around them and give them a kiss”.
Sorry, what?
HUGE MOMENT
This whole discussion stemmed from the University of Sydney’s research – 19 hours of audio and a 117,000-word transcript – which was funded by the AFL.
“I want to meet the girls who put this in the spotlight because I applaud them,” Gent said.
Females represent 10.8 per cent of umpires and the AFL wants to grow that to 40 per cent, albeit with no deadline set.
But stopping the sickening stories told in the 62-page document, and over the past week, from recurring appears to be far more urgent than a statistical equation.
Will significant change flow from that leaked report?
Gent said it had already started.
“Some of the guys are sickened by what was in the report,” she said.
“There common response is, ‘If that was my daughter …’ which is great because they’re putting themselves into the reality that others have been suffering.”
Some league executive committees held meetings on Thursday night to brainstorm ideas and protocols for racism, gender inequality and harassment incidents.
“I see a huge moment from this, 100 per cent,” Rosemarie said.
“It’s massive.”
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