AFL celebrates women

By Sam Mostyn

I was appointed to the commission in 2005 after a process of seeking a woman to join the commission which was led by the then-Chairman Ron Evans.

After a very long process of interviews and reference checking, I was the lucky person that Ron and his selection panel chose and I think it was for a combination of legal skills and commercial skills, love of the game and interest in developing the game outside the traditional AFL states.

It was just a great honour. It was completely unexpected when I was first approached and asked whether I would put my name forward as part of that process. I was very surprised; it wasn’t something you get approached about every day.

I was aware of the historic importance of getting a woman on to the commission, and very excited that the then-Chair Ron and his team and the Presidents of the clubs had felt the need to move the discussion on from hoping it would happen one day to actually doing the work to appoint a woman.

I was really proud and excited and very curious about getting to know the game and its management and governance through the eyes of the commission.

The really great thing was the appointment of Linda Dessau, she was appointed at the end of 2007 when two positions came up.

That was the best thing that happened to me after joining the commission, other than getting to know my fellow commissioners and learning lots more about the mechanics of how the game is actually managed nationally and how everything lines up across the game and what the role of the commission is.

I was just delighted that our Chairman then, Mike Fitzpatrick, saw the need to grow the numbers of women at the commission. He, like me, felt that it really wasn’t good just to have one woman and that this was really about bringing true diversity to the commission and Linda’s arrival certainly did that.

She’s recently retired as a Family Court Judge and has a strong legal background and very strong presence around the Essendon Women’s Football Network and her arrival for me was wonderful.

She’s become a very close friend and we don’t approach everything the same just because we’re women but we do bring different qualities to the commission. I think the conversations that do occur at the commission because there’s two of us there, together with very supportive male commissioners, means that we really get to explore the full dynamics of a group of people across the community when we’re dealing with some of the tough issues the commission has to face.

I grew up with the game, so I grew up in the southern states, my father was in the Army and we moved around Adelaide and Melbourne and Canberra quite a bit. My dad was a very strong St Kilda Football Club supporter so I got my love of the game really from going to footy with him, watching a lot of football on television with him and just hearing his delight in the game.

I grew up with the game and as I got older it was the game I stayed with. I moved around the country a bit so when I found myself in NSW living in Sydney it was still my preferred game.

My great love remains Aussie Rules. I love it’s so egalitarian, I think it’s one of the most spectacular games you can watch anywhere in the world just because of the way the game is structured and the sheer athleticism and skills of our players.

It just continues to amaze me and it’s thrilling to go to an AFL game really at any level and it’s inclusive so I really enjoy going to the footy and always have because the crowd of fans at the footy is a group I feel really comfortable in. It’s families and women and men and there’s not a lot of anger and there’s a lot of passion and it just feels like a great community. I think that’s one of the things that helps define the game, that we welcome everybody and it’s a very safe place to come to no matter who you are.

Each year we try to choose a topic that defines why we’re having Women’s Round. This year we’ve said that it’s all about talent this Round and the women’s talent throughout the game. That crosses every kind of commitment and contribution that women are making to the game.

I think it’s important that we do celebrate the fact that women have always been a major part of the game and continue to do that. There are chances now to really develop opportunities for women to take on stronger leadership roles, to become more involved in a career in football whilst also supporting all of our great women volunteers, all the women involved in every level of the game and also paying respect to the women who make this game happen.

So that ranges from the mums who first take their children to an Auskick clinic or want their kids to play the game to the women who support the players – the wives and girlfriends and partners of our players and our administrators.

Football is a very demanding game and a demanding industry and the women that have always supported those that have had the job of playing or administering have always been phenomenal supporters.

We also take the opportunity on a weekend like this to support and thank the women volunteers across the game. Most of the community football clubs, local football clubs and even our big clubs have large numbers of women who are the statisticians, the historians, the people who support the players during training, who are all over the club and often not in formal roles but are part of the architecture of the footy community.

I think on a weekend like this we celebrate contribution and know that without them the game just doesn’t exist. And then for the women that work in the industry so whether they’re inside a club or inside the AFL itself or a journalist or a physiotherapist or whatever those women are doing, we want to say there is a great career in football.

We want to identify talented women, ensure they are supported, promoted and are treated equally in their ambitions to become leaders in their field.

I think we’ve grown in recent years in identifying that we really needed to celebrate and identify the phenomenal role that women play right across the game. I think we’ve just got to keep doing that and ensure that we are respectful and thankful for all those roles. The challenge for us and the opportunities really are to ensure that we’re using the full talent of the women in the industry and that we don’t leave women behind because of their gender.

It’s important that we act as promoters and sponsors of women, not just mentors. That we don’t just talk about this but we build programs that develop our women and give them a very real sense that they can become leaders in their field. That over time it becomes quite natural to think that we could have a woman running a footy club or women rising in the football departments of our clubs or at any level of the industry, for women to know that they are very much welcome.

It is a tough industry, we don’t have huge numbers of women in it in terms of management at the moment so I’d like to see us really put some effort there and just use our full talent right across the industry and continue to ensure that the game is relevant for women in the community.

So women as our fans, our families that come to the game, we’ve got to make sure the game remains relevant, attractive and sticks to its core values that mirror the community’s expectations of inclusion.