Amy Clucas was 30 years old the first time she ever put on footy boots. The now-nurse grew up in Perth alongside her two sisters in a netball-oriented household, with a Sherrin nowhere in sight – a common tale for girls her age back then.

Later in her adult years, she found herself spending a lot of time at Melville Rams Football Club due to her partner playing there, where interest in a women’s team was growing. Then last year, to help with numbers for the first female team that was emerging, she put on her trainers for a run around and “basically just fell in love”. Now, she’s the vice president of the club.

Two of her main sources of motivation, she says, are Collingwood’s AFLW star Ash Brazill and former player Sharni Norder who, like her, both come from netball backgrounds. “Those two are definitely my two inspiring women in the AFLW,” she says.

Clucas’s story is not wholly uncommon. The AFLW is often praised for inspiring the next generation of girls coming through the Australian rules football ranks, and is credited for the increasing rates of female kids taking up the sport. But it is not just the young ones the league is inspiring.

Across Australia, the AFLW has spurred on vast amounts of women aged 20 and above to lace up footy boots for the first time and give what so many of them were denied as youngsters – because of their gender – a crack.

Take Kelly Ford, 47, who grew up swimming, playing touch footy and tennis in Lakes Entrance, as Australian rules football was not an option for her. Two years ago, at the age of 45 and after having twins, she thought ‘why not?’ and joined her local footy club, Elsternwick Amateurs to learn the skills from scratch.

She says the introduction of the AFLW “most definitely” has increased the participation rates of her club’s division, which feature mostly women in their late 20s to early 30s. “You see these women [AFLW players] and you go ‘Wow, look at these women…they’re doing what we all kind of always wanted to do’,” says Ford.

“The girls, the culture down there, it’s just fantastic. And it just sort of gave me a bit of confidence – not that I was going to be any star player, because I wasn’t. But just give me a little bit more confidence in myself”.

Then, there’s Kel Rowe, 34, who grew up in Brisbane dabbling in Aussie rules as a kid during high school, but gave it up after graduating because there weren’t any available options for her to continue.

So, she joined her local club, the Footscray Roosters, where she’s now also on the committee and helps out with social media. In that latter roles, she says that enquires from women aged 20 and above spike every year with the beginning of the AFLW season.

At Queensland’s Sherwood Football Club, every year the women’s senior playing list sees a growth of around 20-30%, with players ranging from sixteen-year-olds through to women in their late 40s.

Club president Andrew Thomson notes that before the advent of the AFLW, they had a women’s team as early as 1972, and from 2004 to 2014, but getting enough players and support made it difficult to maintain. “The introduction of the AFLW changed this completely,” he says, attributing increased support from local governing bodies, including funding and strategic planning.

Women’s football director Lahnie Cooper agrees, saying the AFLW has had a flow-on effect where “local football teams are expanding”. Notably, this includes also putting the idea of playing footy themselves on the radar for a lot of women, who now have somewhere to sign up.

“One thing a lot of new participants to the game that have come to us later in life have said is: ‘Now our daughters have been able to play the game and now I can play it as well’,” says Dr Adrian Raftery, general manager of AFL Masters, the division for players 35 years and over. “Age is just a number. We’re all five-year-olds. We’re just different sizes and shapes and maybe have a few more wrinkles.”

He says that off the coattails of the AFLW’s inaugural season, AFL Masters developed a women’s division, which had three teams the first year, and has now grown to 12.

The AFLW and all its players are making massive inroads when it comes to developing the sport in Australia, from grassroots up. And this includes motivating women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and above to take the sport up socially or competitively at their local clubs.

“It’s the people who have never ever picked up a football, have wanted to, but have never had the confidence to do it… those are the ones that to me are the success stories,” says Cooper.

Original article published here in The Guardian on 12 March 2022.