Brooke Walker spent the first evening watching as much Australian Rules Football as she could. She did the same the next night and the night after. She had to do a lot of research and didn’t have much time for it. She should be paid to play the game at the highest level. It was probably a good idea to figure out how it worked, she thought.
Walker hadn’t grown up playing Australia’s most popular sport, depending on who you ask. She was born in New Zealand, intrepid rugby territory. Her first sporting passion was some of the many varieties of this sport.
As a child she had played touch, the minimal contact version and rugby. After her family moved to Australia as a teenager, she proved herself good enough at the small-sided version of the sport, rugby sevens, to travel with her adopted country to the 2016 Olympics.
In contrast, the Australian rules had never really appeared on Walker’s radar. “Even when I was 14 or 15, I would never have seen it,” she said. “I didn’t even know who was in it.” That lasted until she was 24, when one of the Australian Football League’s most popular and strongest sides – Carlton, based in the heart of the game in Melbourne – called to ask if they were playing there want.
What she was about to learn was that her ability, age and gender had arrived in a sporting moment full of options. With Australian rules, rugby and – with the World Cup looming – football all intent on expanding opportunities for women, all targeting the same small pool of talent, suddenly it’s a very good time to become a sportswoman in Australia.
code exchange
The idea of Walker suddenly taking up a top-level sport she’d barely seen didn’t strike her as particularly odd. The rivalries between the different forms of Australian football – Australian Rules, rugby union, rugby league and soccer – may be deep-rooted and intense, but the lines between them have always been a bit blurred for players.
Dozens of athletes have represented the country in both major forms of rugby, including some of the most popular figures in the country’s sporting pantheon. Several of them have played 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 her experience in sevens rugby made her a candidate for the job of what he called “cross coder”. “There’s a base of fundamentals that transcend,” she said. “The speed, the stamina, the defensive awareness are all similar.” She also knew the AFL desperately needed female recruits. A league had to be built and it met the requirements.
In 2017, the AFL had 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 featured only eight teams. By 2022 the number had grown to 18, meaning every men’s club now has a women’s section.
Not to be outdone, the NRL followed suit and launched their first women’s league in 2018. In her first season she started with four teams, now there are ten. (The NRL men’s tournament features 17 teams from across Australia and New Zealand.) The six-team Super W, the rugby union equivalent, started the same year. Football was a pioneer by those standards: the A-League Women has been around since 2008.
Both the AFLW and the NRLW are currently semi-professional and neither the pay nor the conditions are optimal. In women’s rugby league, the average salary is around $30,000, slightly higher in the AFL. Like all of her teammates, Walker has a full-time job outside of her sport, working as a physical education and health teacher in suburban Melbourne. She trains in the evenings.
That’s not the only point of criticism. Players from both leagues have complained about a lack of games, lack of practice time, lack of access to training facilities and the timing of the season.
However, there is no lack of ambition. NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo has described the growth of women’s football as a priority for the sport’s governing body, “from the grassroots to the elite”. Erin Phillips, one of AFLW’s most well-known stars, said that “the goal of players is to become a full-time athlete.” Her league has set a goal of making its players the highest-paid sportswomen in Australia by 2030.
Achieving these lofty goals has, to a certain extent, brought the leagues into direct competition. The AFLW in particular spread its nets wide to attract talent, recruiting athletes with the necessary qualifications to succeed, regardless of their background. The year Walker joined, her new peers came from sports as diverse as soccer, basketball, netball and tennis.
So Walker was, in a way, an easy study. After the Olympics, she had taken a break from the sport, knowing that she had sacrificed “my normal life” to devote herself full-time to rugby sevens. She accepted the offer to play for Carlton in a sport she “didn’t understand at all” because she found the intellectual challenge of learning it “refreshing”.
Even then, the transition did not go entirely smoothly. Some aspects of the game were easier than others. “Tackling technique in rugby is so precise that it’s a real advantage in AFLW,” Walker said. “But game knowledge, strategy, specific skills and techniques – five years later I’m still learning something from it.”
There were also occasional moments when she questioned the wisdom of her choices. “In my first game, the first touch of the ball, I forgot that you have to let it rebound after 10 or 15 meters,” she said. “The referee pulled me up and punished me for holding. At this point I just thought: What have I done? That will be catastrophic.”
new frontier
How the leagues work together can be critical to their future success. NRLW, for example, has recruited so many players from rugby union that at least one coach has expressed concern that the two codes would end up “cannibalizing each other”. It would be better if a talent-sharing agreement could be reached, said rugby union manager Campbell Aitken.
That would certainly be Walker’s view. In 2020, she was intrigued by the idea of playing rugby again and signed up with an amateur club. She performed so well that she was soon selected to play for her state. This in turn led to an offer from the Parramatta Eels of the National Rugby League.
She gave Carlton a 12-month warning, noting that the squadrons did not overlap, and duly switched codes once more. “It was my first love of the sport and I wanted to try it,” she said. “It was another big challenge to understand the strategies. I had a great time.” In the end, she only had to miss a single Carlton game as Parramatta’s season dragged on. “I finished rugby, came back and played for Carlton on Saturday,” she said.
Walker, who has since moved to Essendon, another Australian rulebook, relishes the very spot in Australian women’s sport where she’s spent her career: the blend of the burgeoning opportunities of the world to come and the continued freedom of movement of those left behind .
However, she knows it won’t last. Fully professional leagues will not allow players to switch codes as easily, and professionalization will most likely discourage them from experimenting with so many different disciplines as a teenager. Your journey could be much more difficult to repeat in five or ten years.
However, Walker is certain that what comes next will be even better. “Imagine a talented teenage girl who breaks through in a few years when all these leagues are professional and has all the makings,” she said. “The demand for them will be tremendous, whether they want to play AFL or NRL or sevens or full-time football.”
Walker’s talent gave her a choice. She believes those who follow her will finally get the rewards they deserve.
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