In her own words: Matildas star Sam Kerr on her first love

Of all the sports I watched and played as a kid, Aussie rules football (also called AFL) was always my first love. I could never retain any of the information or facts and figures that I learned in class (especially anything to do with maths), but I could easily reel off dozens of AFL stats at the drop of a hat.

It was the sport that I remember being on television the most when I was growing up, and from the very first time I ever saw a game on TV, I was obsessed. Mum says that from the moment my hands were big enough to hold one, I always had a football in my hands. I’d spend hours snapping it down our long hallway, trying to get it through my parents’ open bedroom door, which was a Kerr family thing.

The Kerr siblings (clockwise from top): Daniel, Levi, Sam and Maddi.

My brother Levi wasn’t really into sport, and my sister Maddi wasn’t that interested either, so it was my oldest brother Daniel who would always head outside with me for a game of footy or a hit of cricket. One of the games we loved to play was standing about 3 metres or so away from a bucket and seeing who could handball the footy into it. Also, we were always hand-balling the footy back and forth to each other around the house, driving everyone crazy. From the very beginning, sport was a competition between the two of us. It was just who we were and what we did.

Daniel played for an AFL team, the West Coast Eagles, from when I was very young, and growing up with a big brother who played professional AFL was awesome. That is definitely one of the reasons that I wanted to play, too. I wanted to be like him. It makes sense, I guess. When Daniel was playing out on the footy field, he was a hero to me. Then he’d come home afterwards and we’d talk about the game, which is when he was just my big brother.

Ash Sampi flying at Subiaco Oval.

My first sporting hero was an AFL player named Ashley Sampi. He was a young Indigenous guy who played for West Coast Eagles, and he was totally electric out on the field. He used to take these amazing screamers up on people’s backs and it was incredible to watch.

He’d just take off from the back half and run all the way to the forward fifty. He was such a gun and I loved him. I’d spend hours trying to replicate his famous moves. I’d bounce up and off fitness balls in my house and in the backyard to pluck imaginary marks from the air, all to the roar of imaginary fans, all while my mum worried that I was about to break my neck at any moment. It was just footy, footy, footy, all the time for me.

The only sportswoman role model I had when I was growing up was Cathy Freeman. I loved her so much. She was so fast and strong, and she coped so well with the unbelievable pressure that was put on her. I watched her race in the Sydney 2000 Olympics over and over and over again. It was an amazing moment in sporting history. But other than Cathy, all my sporting role models were male. They were all AFL and cricket players, and back then, those were all men. Thank goodness it’s different for young girls today. There are so many fantastic women in sport for girls to look up to and be inspired by now.

Cathy Freeman with her gold medal in 2000.Credit: Rick Stevens

The whole Kerr family barracked for the West Coast Eagles, but no one was more obsessed with the team than me . . . apart from Daniel, of course, who actually played for them. As soon as I was old enough, I became a member of the Eagles cheer squad, and went along to every single game they played in Perth. There I would be, right down the front of the stands, waving my banner in my full kit and face paint, screaming my lungs out and cheering them on. When the Eagles lost the AFL Grand Final to the Sydney Swans in 2005, I cried for three whole days.

Mum and Dad were both stalwarts of the South Fremantle Football Club when I was growing up. Dad also coached the South Fremantle Colts and, for as long as I can remember, he would pick me and my siblings up from school and we’d go straight to the South Freo Club for training. From a young age, spending time at the footy club was as natural to me as sleeping or eating, although in fairness I was a very picky eater when I was a kid . . . it used to drive my poor mum mad.

I basically lived at the footy club. During those weekly training sessions and games, I’d run around the oval picking up the balls to hand back to the older boys, watching and listening to everything my dad told his players, and listening in on the meetings in the club. As a result, I learned a lot about the sport at a very early age. My time spent at the South Freo Footy Club was my football education. I loved it, and I certainly learned a lot more there than anything I learned in the classroom at school.

Early in her childhood, Sam Kerr was passionate about AFL.

When I was five or six, Dad told me that I was finally old enough to start playing in one of the boys’ teams. I was so excited and so very ready. I’d been waiting to get out on the field and play alongside other teammates for what seemed like forever. By that time, I’d been watching the boys play for so long, and had been chomping at the bit to get out there and have a go myself.

I knew I’d be the only girl on the team but that didn’t worry me at all. When I rocked up to that first training session, the coach me put into the forward position because he said I was a strong player with good hand-eye coordination. Everyone on my team just assumed I was a boy because I had short hair and blonde tips, and I was okay with that. I decided to keep my gender a secret because I didn’t want them to treat me any differently just because I was a girl.

I loved playing on that team with the boys, and it took a full three years before anyone figured out that I was actually a girl. I still remember one of the boys crying when he found out. But I always got so frustrated when I started playing Auskick because I was told I had to stay in my area. I didn’t like that and got really angry because I just wanted to run all over the field. Even now, some of the boys I used to play with come up to me and remind me that I used to run rings around them when we were kids, which I think is really funny but nice, too.

One teammate cried when he found out Kerr was a girl.

But as good as I was out on the field, and as much as I loved playing the game, the physical differences between the guys and me eventually became too pronounced, and the play was too rough. Once we all turned 11, the boys in my team started growing fast, and soon became much bigger and stronger than me. I was still tiny, so in the first half of that season, they were my size, but by the second half, they were huge. One day, I came home from a game with yet another black eye and bloody lip, and that’s when my dad and brother both said, “Nup, this isn’t happening anymore.”

I was getting battered around so much out on the field that it was getting to be a big problem. Dad and my coach both sat me down then and said it was getting far too dangerous for me to continue to play. They said they were sorry, but that I wasn’t allowed to play football anymore. I understood the reasons why, but I was heartbroken. Back then, there were no girls’ teams in my area for me to join, and to know that I’d never play a sport that I loved so much ever again was devastating.

Around the time I had to give up football, my cousin was playing soccer with a local team. My mum and dad could see how upset I was about not playing AFL anymore, so they told me I could go and play soccer with him instead. I couldn’t have been less interested. I was an AFL girl through and through, and didn’t know a thing about soccer. The rules were strange and completely foreign to me. Also, I didn’t like the idea of not being able to pick the ball up with my hands and kick it. In the end, I went along to a trial session at a local club, the Western Knights in Mosman Park, just to give it a go.

I was 12 when I started training with the Western Knights Junior mixed team, and instantly decided that I did not like or enjoy this new sport at all. You needed completely different skills to play soccer compared to playing AFL and it was also a lot harder. Suddenly, I was expected to use both of my feet to kick the ball instead of just one, and even though I was an ambidextrous girl, I found it much more difficult to use my left foot. From the very beginning, I could see that this new sport was going to be a challenging one for me to play, but I was determined not to give up before I’d become as good as I could be.

Kerr was stubborn and worked hard to hone her football skills.

Unfortunately, I was totally crap in my first season with my new team. I didn’t know anything about rules such as offside and found it really hard to get my head around them. Out on the pitch, I couldn’t understand why none of my teammates would pass me the ball. Looking back now, I can see that it was because they could tell I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and wasn’t across all the rules. Over the course of that first season with the Western Knights, I only scored three goals. To make things worse, our team didn’t win a single game.

It was a huge adjustment for me mentally to go from being the confident, skilled and popular player I had been on my AFL team, to a total newbie who was clueless about the game I was playing. Going from the top of your game, as much as you can be when you’re a kid, to the bottom was hard, and I had to face the fact that when it came to this new sport, I was woeful.

To make matters worse, my family didn’t like soccer. They didn’t understand the rules, and thought it was a boring, low-scoring game. As a result, they weren’t always keen to come and watch me play, which used to frustrate me a lot and definitely contributed to my lack of love for the game of soccer in the beginning.

Kerr began to appreciate the adrenaline rush of scoring a goal.

Clearly, making the transition from Aussie Rules to soccer was going to be a struggle. But I was a stubborn kid, and wasn’t prepared to give up that easily. I kept working on my skills, determined to get the hang of this new sport and all its strange rules. Figuring out how to use both of my feet in the game was definitely the biggest challenge. It got me down at times, but everything changed when I started scoring more and more goals during matches. Getting that ball past the keeper and into the back of the net gave me such a huge rush of joy and adrenaline.

Scoring in soccer is very different from scoring in AFL. In Aussie Rules, goals are scored much more frequently throughout the game, whereas scoring in soccer is much harder because of the keeper. Soccer is a game where everyone can feel the excitement and anticipation building as the match goes on, waiting for that moment when someone scores a goal. When that finally happens, it’s a real celebration and a huge high, especially if you’re the one who kicked it into the net.

I learned so much from my Western Knights coaches and teammates over that time, and feel lucky to have had the chance to play at such a great club. To this day, I’m so grateful for everything they taught me. The boys in my Under 13s team accepted me as one of their own when I joined, and gave me so much advice, support and encouragement, which made me feel comfortable and secure enough to be myself as I tried to learn the rules of soccer, a game I was starting to fall in love with.

After I’d been playing with the Western Knights for a year or so, a talent scout came along to watch a match that I was playing in. He approached me after the game and invited me to come and trial for the Western Australian State team, Perth Glory. I was shocked but also very excited, and so went along to the trials to see if I could make the team. I played well in the trials and soon after that, in 2008, was offered a spot in Perth Glory, who play in Australia’s highest division of professional women’s soccer. I started in all 10 matches during the 2010–2011 season and scored three goals overall. My football journey had officially begun.

This is an edited extract from Sam Kerr: My Journey to the World Cup (Simon & Schuster) out now.