THIS was just a taste of what many in Ballarat football circles knew was possible.
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AFLW’s inaugural season launch, and this weekend’s highly-anticipated round two stanza, has reinforced women can actually play football – that there is a space for women’s football in elite sporting arenas.
Just wait until the next generation hits.
If you have been to any Ballarat Football League youth girl matches, especially a grand final, you will know what is coming – girls with skills and athleticism, already sharpened in a football environment.
And now they have a goal at the top that most athletes suiting up in AFLW never thought would be a reality when they were growing up.
AFLW makes a statement to the nation that female football is no novelty but the way girls have been picking up the game in Ballarat, we have already started to realise this.
The BFL started with four youth girls team six years ago. The league will field almost 50 teams this season, with two under-12 divisions, two youth girls and likely two open age competitions, even moving outside AFL Goldfields bounds.
In the wake of AFLW round one, reigning BFL youth girls premier Ararat Storm was unveiled to become a key player in a new move west.
AFL Wimmera football development manager Jason Muldoon unveiled a youth girls round robin competition with teams in Ararat, Stawell, Horsham, Portland, Hamilton and Warrnambool.
He said timing was right, partly due to Storm’s dominance and huge squad, and with the booming interest in the game.
It is not as if girls and women have not been keen to play football in the past. This is about offering the right opportunities and breaking down social and cultural barriers to the game.
BFL youth girls has been incredible in doing this for our region. Girls showing each other what was possible and fun and doing it in their own feminine style.
Belief caught on.
Before AFLW’s round one, skeptics – male and female – were still telling this columnist they were unsure whether to tune in. “Sounds great, but footy to men’s a bloke’s game,” they were saying.
Hopefully now, they reconsider.
Women’s football is not about trying to be like the men. These athletes will develop the game in their own different way to play. A little like how women's basketball is a completely different game to the men's game – often more tactical and less of the flashy showmanship, but equally thrilling in its own right.
AFLW puts out a model for strong, fierce athletic women who can take a hard knock.
Sports equality still has a long way to go, especially in the AFL, but at least the league has finally taken a step that, while building the code brand, will ultimately engage more females in sports participation.
Other sports have done this to an extent but AFLW is a whole new level of exposure and, importantly, admiration – especially if it gets more women and girls thinking what could be possible, on and off the field.
And for more males to appreciate this too.
This is just a beginning.
