By Kath Gannaway
When Sarah D’Arcy pulled on her first football boots with the Healesville Auskick program, she thought that was it.
There was no way, nearly two decades ago that the now 25-year-old left-footer could have envisaged playing for Collingwood in the inaugural AFL Women’s League match.
The experience of playing on Friday night, 3 February, before a crowd of 24,500 people at Princes Park is still sinking in, Sarah told the Mail this week.
The game marked the beginning of the 28-match competition and it was set up by the AFL as a ground-breaker, building on the traditional rivalry of Collingwood and Carlton.
While the final siren saw Collingwood go down to Carlton by 35 points, undoubtedly a huge disappointment for the Magpies, Sarah said it was an unforgettable night.
“Looking out at the crowd was just crazy; we couldn’t even hear our team-mates talking to us on the field,” she said.
“It didn’t feel like they were cheering for one team, it felt like they were cheering for all of us.
“Just cheering for women’s footy.”
Her road to the elite level of women’s football has been a mix of opportunity and relentless pursuit.
Sarah was 14 when she decided to give football a go for a second time, playing a couple of games with Healesville Under 14s before coming up against the cut-off age for girls.
She was playing for Healesville High School at state level when she was spotted and invited to play in the local women’s league.
“I had no idea that this would be a career; I just played for fun,” she said, still slightly breathless after the euphoric Friday night explosion of the AFL Women’s League.
“There was no youth girls (competition) then, so no pathway to make it into the senior level,” she said.
She went straight into the Yarra Valley Cougars as one of their youngest recruits, playing alongside Mount Evelyn’s Lauren Tesoriero.
Both women progressed to the AFL’s Eastern Devils before being drafted to by Collingwood.
As a Cougar and a Devil, Sarah showed the athleticism, skill and grit that prompted commentators on Friday night to brand her a ‘shining light’ of the Magpies’ line-up.
Asked about the trail-blazing role she and her peers were embarking on, she said it was an exciting time to be a girl playing football.
“Looking back, I would kill to be 12 again and have all these role models to look up to,” she said.
“When I think now of how big the youth girls’ league is, the level at which the girls are coming in and the level of coaching, their skills will just be amazing by the time they get to senior level.
“I played football for fun. Now there is somewhere they can go and all that has happened in the past few years.”
It’s early days still for the women making that ground-breaking leap.
Like their male counterparts in the early days of Australian Rules, it’s part of a bigger life.
Sarah juggles university where she is studying to be a teacher with part-time work at Australian Traffic Control and an intense training and match schedule as an AFL footballer.
She said the future of women’s football was still very much an evolving process that she was happy to be part of.
Issues such as development programs, pathways, player payments, different rules and just where women’s football fits in with the traditional AFL game, are all part of that process.
“For me, I’ve never been paid to do something I love like this,” Sarah said.
“I’m just happy to be out there.”
