Female sport is the new frontier for Australia’s major codes and organisations with increased media coverage, professional salaries, and massive grassroots growth.
Those at the helm of the leading competitions claim part of the rapid growth of women’s football across all Australia’s four major codes can be put down to the connection between the increasing visibility of the professional game and a growing grassroots base, with the junior talent pool, inspired by current athletes, filtering through to further strengthen elite level competition that they grew up watching.
One traditionally male-dominated sport that has seen massive female participation growth at the grassroots level is rugby league.
New South Wales Rugby League (NSWRL) Women’s Pathways Coordinator Kylie Hilder said the growth of the professional NRLW and representative competitions has fed back into the grassroots as the visibility of women in the game increased its accessibility.
“I think all female sport is growing, and I think that’s off the back of the Matildas’ success, [and] obviously our Jillaroos [rugby league] being successful, [plus] we’ve been creating a great product in the Origin Arena as well,” she said.
“The NRLW being televised I think is what is getting more of our girls onto the football field.
“Last year in New South Wales we had 29,979 girls registered to play; to date at the moment, we’re up 22 percent on that already.
“We’ve only started, we’re just finishing in our junior representative pathway competitions.
“We’re going into the last round this weekend [before] semi finals and then all of our regional and metro competitions will kick off as well, so we’re expecting that to increase again.”
The next hurdle is to convert the broadening junior base into elite level talent, with pathways systems being set up by clubs and institutions across the state to coach and develop players with higher ambitions in sport.
One example of a specific program is UniActive’s Female Athlete High-Performance Program, designed for elite female athletes aged 14 to 18 in the Illawarra region.
The program covers all facets of wellbeing necessary for professional athletes, such as health education, strength and conditioning training, and nutrition guidelines, with a view to give them as close to individualised development as possible.
UniActive Sports Program Manager James Pendrigh said programs of this variety are critical for converting the junior players driving grassroots growth into better athletes at the professional and representative levels of sport.
“I think participation numbers are the key or the starting blocks in terms of if you’ve got high participation numbers at the grassroots level, then the elite ones [are] obviously funneled into different pathways,” he said.
“If those pathways have the right support, aka similar to this program, if you’ve got support around your mental skills, your goal setting, your nutrition, your strength and conditioning, for those athletes that potentially are on those elite professional pathways, then that’s what you need for elite women’s athletes to develop.
“Obviously that starts from the grassroots where you get as many people playing the different sports as possible and you begin to channel the more highly skilled and more elite ones into those professional pathways and then offer them the right support which this program is basically doing.”
With football’s rapid growth in the past few years, especially since the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup was held in Australia, Football South Coast has seen a remarkable rise in its participation figures year-on-year.
As a result of this increase in numbers, pathways are being created for the aspiring Matildas, including as part of the Female Athlete High-Performance Program, through a partnership between UOW, UniActive and the Wollongong Wolves.
Pendrigh said the goal of the partnership was to create a separate football (soccer) pathway, with a view to developing players for the Wolves’ soon to be created Women’s National Second Division team.
“There is a football sort of element of this, with 25 elite female footballers from the Illawarra region [who will be] scholarshipped,” he said.
“The rest of the girls that make up the cohort of athletes will play different sports and they will get the same exact support as the female footballers, but they just won’t get a female football session on a Wednesday morning.”
As the professional game increases in standard across all sports with better coaching of female players from a younger age, Hilder alluded yet again to the symbiotic, self-sustaining relationship between the increasingly visible elite competition and the rapid growth at the junior grassroots level that will benefit the game in the coming years.
“You can’t be what you can’t see,” she said.