Brooke Walker spent that first night watching as much Australian rules football as she could. He did the same the next night, and the night after that. He had a lot of research to do, and not much time to do it. He will be paid to play at its highest level. Maybe it was a good idea, he thought, to find out how it worked.
Walker didn’t grow up playing what is, depending on who you ask, Australia’s most popular sport. He was born in New Zealand, no shortage of rugby territory. His first sporting loves were some of those many kinds of sports.
As a child, he played touch, the minimal-contact version, and rugby league. After his family moved to Australia when he was a teenager, he proved good enough at the small-sided version of the sport, rugby sevens, to travel to the 2016 Olympics with his adopted homeland.
Australian rules, on the other hand, haven’t really been on Walker’s radar. “Even when I was 14 or 15, I would never have seen it,” he said. “I don’t know who’s playing here.” That was until he was 24, when one of the Australian Football League’s most famous, most powerful teams — Carlton, based in the game’s Melbourne heartland — called and asked if he wanted to play here.
What she is about to learn is that her skills, age and gender come at a sporting moment rich in options. With Australian rules, rugby and — with the upcoming World Cup — soccer eager to expand opportunities for women, and all of them fishing in the same small talent pool, it’s suddenly a great time to be a woman Australian athlete.
Code Transfer
The idea that Walker could suddenly take up an elite sport he barely watched didn’t surprise him especially in the unusual. Rivalries among the many forms of Australian football — Australian rules, rugby union, rugby league and soccer — can be deep and intense, but the lines between them, for the players, have always been blurred.
Dozens of athletes have represented the country in both full-size forms of rugby, including some of the most famous figures in the country’s sporting pantheon. Many have competed in Australia’s two most popular domestic sports leagues, the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League, at various points in their careers.
Walker knew that his experience in rugby sevens made him a candidate to become a “cross-coder.” “There are fundamentals that are shifting,” he said. “The speed, the conditioning, the defensive awareness is similar.” She also knows the AFL is in dire need of female prospects. It had a league to build, and he fit the bill.
In 2017, the AFL launched its first national women’s competition, the AFLW, hoping to capitalize on the growing number of women and girls playing Australian rules football. The first iteration consisted of only eight teams. By 2022, this has expanded to 18, meaning every men’s club now has a women’s division.
Not to be outdone, the NRL followed suit, establishing its first women’s league in 2018. It started with four teams in its first season, a number that has now grown to 10. (The NRL men’s tournament is contested by 17 teams from across Australia and New Zealand.) The six-team Super W, the equivalent of rugby union, began the same year. Soccer, by these standards, is a trailblazer: The A-League Women has been running since 2008.
Both the AFLW and the NRLW are currently semiprofessional, and no fees or conditions are the best. The average salary is about $30,000 in women’s rugby league, and less for women in the AFL Like all her teammates, Walker has a full-time job outside her sport, working as a physical education and health teacher in a suburb of Melbourne. He trains at night.
That was not the only complaint. Players in both leagues complained about the lack of games, lack of practice time, access to practice facilities and the scheduling of the season.
However, there is no lack of ambition. Andrew Abdo, the NRL’s chief executive, described the growth of the women’s game as a priority for the sport’s governing body, “from the grassroots to the elite”. Erin Phillips, one of the AFLW’s most high-profile stars, said the “goal for players is to be full-time athletes.” Her league has set itself the target of making its players the highest-paid female athletes in Australia by 2030.
Accomplishing these lofty goals has, to some extent, placed the leagues in direct competition. The AFLW, in particular, casts its nets far and wide to attract talent, recruiting athletes with the raw materials to succeed, regardless of background. The year Walker joined, his fellow new recruits came from sports as diverse as soccer, basketball, netball and tennis.
Walker, then, is in some ways an easy study. After the Olympics, he took some time off from sports, knowing he had to sacrifice “living my normal life” to devote himself to rugby sevens. He accepted the offer to play for Carlton, in a sport he “didn’t quite understand,” because he found the intellectual challenge of learning how to play it “refreshing.”
Even then, the transition was not entirely smooth. Some aspects of the game were easier than others. “The tackle technique in rugby is so precise that in AFLW it’s a real advantage,” Walker said. “But the knowledge of the game, techniques, specific skills and techniques – five years on, I’m still learning some of that.”
There were occasional moments too, when he questioned the wisdom of his choice. “In my first game, my first touch with the ball, I forgot that you have to bounce it after 10 or 15 meters,” he said. “The referee pulled me and penalized me for holding. At that point, I just thought, What have I done? It would be a disaster.”
New Frontier
How the leagues work together could be crucial to their future success. The NRLW, for example, has recruited so heavily from rugby union that even one coach expressed his concerns that the two codes would end up “cannibalizing each other”. Better, said rugby union coach Campbell Aitken, if a talent-sharing agreement could be established.
That, surely, would be Walker’s view. In 2020, intrigued by the idea of playing rugby league again, he registered for an amateur club. He did so well that he was soon selected to play for his state. That led, in turn, to an offer from the Parramatta Eels of the National Rugby League.
He gave Carlton 12 months’ warning, pointing out that the periods did not overlap, and it was necessary to switch codes again. “It was my first love of the sport, and I wanted to go,” he said. “It was another big challenge, understanding the strategies. I had a wonderful time. In the end, he had to miss just one Carlton game, Parramatta’s season was long. “I finished rugby , came back, and played for Carlton on Saturday,” he said.
Walker — since traded to another Australian rules powerhouse, Essendon — reveled in exactly the phase of Australian women’s sports where she spent her career: the mix between the blossoming opportunity of the world to come and the freedom of movement that remains. from what was left.
But he knew it wouldn’t last long. Fully professional leagues wouldn’t allow players to switch codes that easily, and professionalization would probably prevent them from experimenting with too many different disciplines when they were teenagers. His journey may be more difficult to replicate in five or 10 years.
However, Walker is sure that the next one will be better. “Imagine a talented young woman coming in a few years, when all these leagues are professional, who have all the requirements,” he said. “The need for them is huge, whether it’s to play AFL or NRL or sevens or soccer full-time.”
Walker’s talent gave him the choice. Those who follow him, he believes, will finally get the rewards they deserve.
