Saraid Taylor grew up as a little girl who adored AFL and all of its players… until she didn’t. In this personal essay, the WNBL and AFLW athlete reflects on how gender and power have influenced her evolving relationship with the elite sport.
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I met Z when I was seventeen, the year I officially stepped onto the path of becoming a professional basketballer. He was becoming a professional footballer. Selected in the same state team as a couple of my friends, I was introduced to him when I went to watch them play. He was very interested in me and I wasn’t sure I was particularly interested in him but, with a charm that was brash and dominant, it was as if he expected me to be and then I was.
I had supposed, when I was little, that I would marry a footballer. It was part of a larger medley of ambition, descanted among similar assumptions that my future would inevitably include - achieving simultaneous careers as a hybrid veterinarian zoo keeper, actress, human rights lawyer, novelist and international basketball player. It seemed sensible to assume I would also become the wife of a man who played AFL.
I was enamoured by football players: the agility of their bodies, their laughter, their confidence and skill, their care for each other. I liked the way sweat glowed in the contours of their arms. I liked the glint in their eyes when they made jokes with reporters. I liked how hard they tried to win. As a child, I had no understanding of the lifestyle associated with being one of their partners, but on some level I was cognisant of the proximity to power. I could sense the status. AFL players were visible celebrities in a way other athletes, particularly sportswomen, were not. They charmed me: the larrikins, the mavericks, the steady leaders; I was drawn to their unique position in society, the opportunity provided to them to impact the world for the better.
I also loved the sport - its unique, technical intricacies; its offer of identity. I was zealous in my support of Essendon. I promised myself that, unlike many other women I knew, including my mother, even if my husband barracked for a different team, even if he played for another program, I would never succumb to changing colours. I cheered for the red and black, the small mosquito; they were my club and I belonged to them.
It never occurred to me to play football myself. It never occurred to me to find it strange that women did not seem to exist in its universe except as variations of support staff: massage therapists or mothers or wives or fans. It never occurred to me to wonder why my mother, who loved sport, wasn’t all that riveted by the one exalted as our national code.
I was personally content to be a fan until I became a wife, because I had basketball. Women basketball players, with all their talent and dedication, were for being - they were people I could, and logically wanted to, become. Football and its shining, celebrated athletes were for inexplicably supporting. And from the age of about seven, I feverishly supported.
I attended AFL games with my father, learned the names of the male players until I could identify almost anyone around the league, evaluated who was good outside of how many goals they kicked, predicted ladder results, noted rule changes, watched matches - even when neither team playing was Essendon - all the way through to the end of the press conference of both coaches. I consumed as much of the sport as I could; I read articles and studied interviews and analysed trade decisions and observed the Brownlow. I did not play, I could not play, and yet I still felt included by, or at least closely involved with, the league.
By the time I met Z, I had developed an aversion. It crept over me slowly, the further I went into my own sporting career, and then it was sudden: burning and sickly and unavoidable. At first, I lost interest in attending then even watching AFL games, eventually I left the room when any started playing on the television. I turned my face away each time rounds were extensively summarised on the news. I found myself muttering angrily at the copious amount of virtual and physical advertisements, the sponsorships, the saturation.
And I abruptly, absurdly, fell out of love with all of the men—the homogenous entity, the monolith, that was, in my child mind, an AFL player. They were no longer enchanting. They were indulged and complacent. I stopped fantasising about marrying one of them. I instead wanted merely to never again endure witnessing their offseason holidays being broadcasted as the only sports news in the same week professional sportswomen were competing in championships or winning medals in international tournaments or breaking records of number of games played four months after giving birth.
The inequality of it all seemed suddenly farcical, insurmountable. There was a deep, roiling rage in my stomach. It might have been grief, but it hardened into revulsion, and for many years it felt like a part of me had closed bleakly off. But it was not enough to stop me from being attracted to Z. He was talented and confident and relatively handsome and attracted to me. We shook hands when we exchanged names after my friends’ game and the intensity in how he held my eyes made me nervous.
Naturally, as soon as I decided I might be interested, he decided he wasn’t. Our brief contact over a few months ended with a phone call where he put me on loudspeaker at a gathering of the other most propitious draft prospects. I didn’t realise anyone else could hear our conversation until one of his friends, also touted as a guaranteed pick whom I had met at the tournament, grabbed Z’s phone and snarled into it, ‘Get out of here, you wannabe WAG,’ and I heard the other boys cackle with laughter.
This friend of his, this future footballer, wielded the acronym used colloquially to refer to partners of male athletes in such drenching contempt I recoiled, shocked and mortified. My cheeks heated. Then I took a breath and told Z to, firstly, take me off loudspeaker, and secondly and most importantly, remember I was also an athlete. Z said okay okay okay yes yes and he was still laughing and I was unsure whether I wanted to yell very loudly or cry.
AFLW athletes did not exist at the time. The AFL hadn’t yet allowed a professional women’s league. The highest chance a woman had to enter its hallowed world was as a romantic interest.
Z and his friend, moving steadily from the institution of male private school education towards the institution of male professional sport, trusted that women would want to be in relationships with them for no better reason than because they kicked around a strange ball on an oval for a living; that girls already desired them on the mere chance they might be chosen to kick around this strange ball. They were still teenagers, not even properly inside the AFL system, but they had deduced the power they held, the scope they would soon hold. It was all very clear: they were defaulted as player, I was assigned fan.
Both boys were drafted that year. Some of their cohort were not lucky enough to get a professional contract - many received one and across the decade since have been, respectively, delisted - but the two of them are still playing. I am now playing too. With a women’s league established, I became a cross-code athlete at twenty-four. The opportunity has felt like returning, slowly and peculiarly, to something important. It marked the start of retrieving a part of myself I thought lost; the traces of delight that were my early devotion to the sport, to its specific freedoms. And it introduced me to a myriad of male football players, former and current, who are kind and smart and funny.
I still don’t plan to marry one of them, but I no longer flatten them all into an amalgam of entitlement. I rest more neutrally between these two childhood extremes: content to be their colleague and friend. But any time Z and his friend run across my television screen, I find myself wondering how they feel about sharing a club with an AFLW program. I wonder whether having, presumably, increased exposure to athletes with different experiences has created the chance for them to expand their view on women. And I wonder about their partners, and hope if they’re ever referred to by an acronym, it holds all the radiant nuance and depth of their identities.
About the author
Saraid Taylor is a writer and athlete, based on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne. She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree of Fine Arts (Screenwriting). Her debut literary novel is forthcoming with UQP and she is signed to the Melbourne Demons in the AFLW. You can find more of her work at: www.saraidtaylor.com.
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Go girl .. very thoughtful writing..all the best in your future 😊
What's a Brownlow? Is that like a quarterback?