by Moana Hope
It soon emerged that each team granted a licence to compete in the inaugural AFL Women’s competition—only eight of the AFL’s eighteen clubs were to be awarded licences for the first season— would be given the opportunity to sign ‘marquee’ players prior to the national draft that would distribute the rest of the talent among the new teams. The marquee players were to receive the highest payments. So that meant everyone wanted to be a marquee player, and everyone wanted to play well in the exhibition matches that were to take place throughout the 2016 season.
I certainly had the ambition to be a marquee player in the back of my mind when I lined up for the Western Bulldogs against Melbourne at Highgate Reserve in Craigieburn on 2 March 2016. I went into the game super fit, after doing a summer program run by a new business called Acceleration, and I did my reputation no harm by giving my opponent the runaround and being named third-best player. ‘Bulldogs forward Hope proved a massive problem for the Demons defence with her marking prowess and strength to hold a position in the contest,’ was how the AFL website’s match report saw my efforts. ‘Hope booted three goals from strong marks in quick succession late in the first quarter to open up what would be a decisive break.’ Those words ‘decisive break’ explain the best thing that came out of the day. At long last, we beat the Demons. The final scores were 6.5 (41) to 3.3 (21), and afterwards we sang our version of the Bulldogs song (‘Girls of the West’ rather than ‘Sons of the West’) with some serious gusto. It was a great relief to get that first victory on the board, and we had a good party to celebrate.
After that I headed back to the St Kilda Sharks for the start of the VWFL season. I was full of confidence following my performance for the Bulldogs. My previous two seasons with the Sharks, in which I had kicked eighty-seven goals in 2014 and another sixty-eight in 2015, also gave me great belief in myself.
I started the season in style. I kicked four goals in our round one win over the Eastern Devils, then I booted ten against Bendigo the following week. But my thoughts were dominated by what was happening with the AFL competition. In early July came another big announcement, when the eight clubs that had been awarded licences were revealed. They were Collingwood, Carlton, the Western Bulldogs, Melbourne, Adelaide, the Brisbane Lions, Greater Western Sydney and Fremantle. ‘Our game is on the cusp of changing forever, and for the better,’ AFL commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick said at the announcement at the MCG. ‘The concept of a national competition has been put together in a short space of time, but this day has been a long time coming. The number of women and girls playing club football has doubled over the past five years. Female participation [has reached] 25 per cent of the total number of Australians playing our Indigenous game.’
It was all so exciting, but for those of us who knew we were in the best twenty or thirty players in Australia, it was a nerve-wracking time as well. I couldn’t stop thinking, Could I be a marquee player? Will the Bulldogs want me? What if a big club like Collingwood or Carlton wants to talk to me? It was all so surreal.
I just assumed that all the clubs, particularly those based in Victoria, would apply for licences to field teams in the women’s competition. So I remember being gutted when I read that Hawthorn was not even going to put in a bid for a licence. The Hawks released a statement with these comments from their chief executive, Stuart Fox: ‘The prospect of a Hawthorn women’s team in the future is an exciting one. However, at this time we believe that our most sustainable contribution will be made by investing in women’s football at a grassroots level. We have some core programs and relationships in place that we can leverage to deliver ongoing investment into women’s football.’
I had still very much considered myself a Hawthorn supporter, but I totally gave up on them after that happened. I thought to myself, I grew up barracking for you, I bought your jumpers, I went to your games. I fought for you against my family, who were all Essendon, and for no good reason you don’t want to be involved in women’s footy. Like, who do you think you are? There are a lot of women and girls who follow you, and you’re trying to tell me you don’t want them to fulfil their dreams? Or even those men who follow you, they’ve got daughters, what about their dreams? And you didn’t even come out with a decent explanation. There was no way that I could continue to support a club that didn’t support women’s footy.
In a later meeting with Hawthorn, I was relieved to discover that Hawthorn’s approach was to field a VFL team before applying for an AFLW licence to ensure they were appropriately set up. Geelong applied to be part of the AFL Women’s league, then opted to field a team in the VFL because they missed out on getting an AFL licence.
Most of the Melbourne-based clubs who were granted licences to play in the inaugural AFL Women’s league got in touch with me. Richmond and St Kilda had also contacted me, but they both missed out on getting licences. The clubs I spoke to seemed like they were mainly trying to gauge how keen I was to play at the highest level. I told them that I was dead keen to get a chance to prove myself.
Below the surface, however, I felt deeply insecure for the same old reasons. I worried that all the progress I had made was somehow going to come to nothing. By now I had my own manager, James Pitcher from Precision Sports Entertainment Group, who had approached me about joining his team, and he was starting to come to grips with my wavering self-confidence. When I had first signed with his management group, I had said to him, ‘Mate, I need to be upfront with you. The AFL are not going to use me for anything.’
He asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because of how I look. They will want the girls who are the most feminine looking, and that’s it. So don’t be upset when I don’t get any gigs, because I’ve dealt with it and I’ve moved on. I just want to play footy.’
James was a bit taken aback by my attitude.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he said. ‘You’re the most marketable player in the game right now because you’re different. That’s how we see it.’
‘Mate, it’s not going to happen. People won’t want a bar of me.’
‘Wait and see,’ he told me.
A while later, James and I were chatting and he asked if I was still keen on being a marquee player. His question was well timed, because I was starting to have doubts. I said to him, ‘Can I just be a contracted player and not a marquee?’ I asked about this because I was starting to feel very anxious about the types of appearances that I would have to do if I were a marquee player, and to worry that the club I was recruited by would want me to change the way I looked. I was certain that no club would want a marquee player with tattoos and short hair. And I had heard that each club would have two marquee players and five contracted players, so my hope was I could join a club as a contracted player and then fly under the radar.
‘Marquee players have to do appearances, and people are not going to like me to go to things because I have tattoos, and it’s going to make me feel shit about myself and I won’t play good football because I’m going to be depressed,’ I said to James.
‘That’s silly. You’re amazing,’ he shot back. But I was adamant.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want a contract but I don’t want to be a marquee player.’
‘Well, I don’t think that’s going to be possible,’ James replied. ‘It looks like the idea of having those extra contracted players is off the table. The only players given contracts will be the two marquees.’
This put me in a real quandary. I was hoping to make some money out of football so that I could put it towards buying my mum a house of her own after all these years of living in a housing commission place. But the only way I could be guaranteed a decent pay packet was to secure a place as a marquee player. I was like, Well, I’m fucked now. First of all, nobody’s going to consider me as marquee player because of how I look so I don’t want to put myself in that situation. Second, if I try to get a place as a marquee player anyway and get rejected I’ll be certain that it was because of how I look, and that will make me feel really bad.
So I’m pretty stuffed here. It felt to me like a lose–lose.
Thinking about all this brought me to tears, so I did what I had done so many times before in similar situations: I rang my friend Tegan.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said to her. As always, she knew exactly what to say.
‘Just go for it. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t. No regrets, Mo. No regrets. Whatever happens is meant to happen.’ I put down the phone. I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders and thought, Fuck, I’ll have to have a go at it.
I had really enjoyed my time playing for the Western Bulldogs, and I had such a close connection with Susan Alberti, so I was keen to see if they were interested in me being a marquee player for them.
I had a couple of chats with them but it soon became fairly clear that they were more interested in other girls. I think both the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne were placed in a difficult position as they had strong relationships with all of the existing players.
After speaking with the Bulldogs, I received a call from Meg Hutchins, who is Collingwood’s women’s football operations manager. Meg is a legend of women’s footy. She is a six-time All Australian and a long-time star defender with the Eastern Devils in the VWFL. I was stoked to hear from her, and she was really upbeat about Collingwood’s interest in me. We arranged to meet at the Magpies’ lavish training base at Olympic Park. I decided to take Tegan to the meeting rather than my manager, as she has the knack of keeping me calm at such high-pressure times.
Meg explained how Collingwood was building its women’s squad, and how she was going to be on the list as a player as well as running the operations side of the program. She then took me around the club’s state-of-the art facilities. For some reason, I felt at home at Collingwood straightaway. I think it might have been the way Meg sold the club as being like one big family. I asked her if it would be okay to bring Vinny to training.
‘Not a problem at all,’ she immediately replied. When I got home that evening, I rang my manager and told him that I wanted to play for Collingwood.
I became so set on playing for Collingwood that the thought of them not picking me as one of their marquee players kept me awake at night. In late July, however, came the phone call I had been wishing for. The only problem was that I missed it! The person who made the call was Josh Vanderloo, who is the AFL’s head of female football and junior development. He left a message saying that he would call back the following day. I was sitting at home on my own watching TV when Josh called back.
‘You have been nominated by Collingwood as one of their marquee players,’ he told me. I thanked him, then hung up, and started dancing around my lounge room. I’m sure I looked a bit bonkers because I was just so excited. I grabbed my GoPro video recorder and quickly headed over to Mum’s place. I turned it on and recorded her reaction when I told her, and this footage was later used on Australian Story. Mum was so happy, and we both started crying. When she hugged me I felt like Dad was hugging me as well. It was such an emotional experience. It really felt like both my parents were embracing me at once, just for that moment. When you think of where I have come from in life, it was just breathtaking and mind blowing to have been handed such an opportunity, and I wanted to make the most of it. When she had stopped crying, Mum, in her true Kiwi style, told me the whole thing was ‘choice’.
On 27 July, a function was held at AFL House at Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium, and I was one of the sixteen women revealed as the marquee players for the inaugural season for the new league. I was seriously nervous, but I decided to ease my nerves by bringing a bit of humour to the occasion. While all sixteen of us were out the back of the stage waiting to be called up, AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan came in for a quick chat. Some of the girls were sitting there practising what they were going to say on the stage, but I was just mucking around with Collingwood’s other marquee player, Emma King. We both have fun-loving personalities, so being serious about the whole thing was never going to work for us.
I told Kingy that I wanted to say something silly to Gill. So when he walked up to us, Kingy said, ‘Hey, Gill, Mo wants to ask you a question.’ For a couple of seconds, I felt like a turtle that wants to hide in its shell. I didn’t think Kingy was actually going to say that to the big boss of the AFL. Gill was like, ‘Yeah, what is it, Mo?’ I tried to suppress my nerves and replied, ‘Now, mate, we need to do something funny when we go out there because we’re sick of talking about our journeys. When I walk out, will you dab with me?’ Gill gave me a funny look and said, ‘What?’ Some of the other girls laughed at me, not with me. I’m sure they were thinking, You’re an idiot. But, for once, I didn’t care.
For those who don’t know what the dab is, it’s a dance move that apparently originated in the hip-hop scene in the southern part of the United States. To do the move, you raise one arm then look down and cover your face with your other arm. The dab became famous in the sporting world thanks to Cam Newton, who is the Carolina Panthers’ quarterback in the NFL. It even crept into cricket over the summer, with Aussie batsman Usman Khwaja doing it after scoring a half-century against Pakistan in a Test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground. West Indian all-rounder Carlos Brathwaite did it five times to celebrate wickets he took playing in the Big Bash for the Sydney Thunder against the Sydney Sixers.
Anyway, Gill had no idea what a dab was, but he was really cool about it. ‘Show me,’ he said. So I did it for him, and he said, ‘Yeah, of course I’ll do it.’ He stood with us for a couple of minutes practising the move. His arms were all over the place and he kept laughing and saying, ‘Am I doing it right?’ Just as he was about to walk out of the room, he paused and said, ‘It’s not bad or evil or, you know, stupid enough to get me into trouble, is it?’
‘No way, man!’ I said with a giggle. ‘It’s just a dance move.’
Gill walked off with a chuckle and I glanced around at the other girls. You should have seen some of their faces. They knew I was going to be the star of the show. They had gone from having attitudes like those of high school bullies to being amazed that I was going to dab with the most powerful person in footy.
A couple of the girls even came up to me and said, ‘You’re not really going to do it, are you?’ I shot back at them, ‘I don’t care what you think. I dab at home with my brothers all the time. If I beat them at footy or basketball, I dab them and it’s funny. It’s what we do. Why wouldn’t I do it with him?’
When my name was called, I walked onto the stage with a big grin. Gill, who was standing behind the lectern, was close to laughing too. When I was within a metre or so of him, I started to dab and he copied in a slightly awkward manner. He chuckled and said, ‘Did I get that right?’ He then sort of half did it again and said, ‘I think I came out the back a bit too hard.’ All the journalists and club officials in the crowd were laughing.
Once the formalities had finished, the Collingwood media lady came over to me and said, ‘Mo, we’ve got a problem. Every single media person wants to talk to you and no one else.’ For a minute, I lapsed back into my feelings of anxiety.
‘Do I look weird? Do they want to talk to me because I look funny?’ And straightaway she replied, ‘No, it’s your personality. They love it. Go and chat to them and be yourself.’ I was stoked. ‘Awesome,’ I said and walked across to the media pack.
Suddenly I was just being myself in front of all these journalists and TV cameras. I felt really comfortable. I made a few wisecracks and the journos chuckled. They all thought it was hilarious and they didn’t want to leave. I think some of the other girls were pissed off at me that I had stolen the show, but that didn’t worry me one little bit.
That night I was all over the TV news and the various news websites. The Herald Sun’s Eliza Sewell was one of those who wrote about the day:
When Moana Hope was introduced on stage by AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan as a marquee signing on Wednesday they shared a ‘dab’.
The AFL w
omen’s league hasn’t even started, but Collingwood’s newest tattooed forward already has an aura, the star power the famed athletes who usually perform such a celebration dance—like LeBron James—possess.
A media mob soon surrounded the bleached blonde and the story she had to share was equally as powerful as her introduction.
Australian Associated Press also ran a story:
The inaugural AFL women’s league has its first cult figure, with Moana Hope stealing the show as the league’s marquee players were announced yesterday.
Hope and AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan greeted each other on stage in Melbourne with a ‘dab’ hip-hop dance move as she was confirmed as one of 16 marquee stars for the new league.
She’ll play for Collingwood and, similar to Magpies star Dane Swan, her right arm is covered in tattoos.
The Collingwood media team also did an awesome story on me, which appeared on the Magpies’ website, next to a photo of me wearing the famous black and white stripes.
Underneath the tattoo sleeve, the soft voice and the mercurial skills, Moana Hope is a fine footballer …
In 2017, the 28-year-old will become one of Collingwood’s first marquee players when she runs out for the Pies in the inaugural Women’s AFL competition.
My self-confidence grew enormously after that. I was being applauded for being me, not for trying to be what other people wanted me to be. I was also rapt that by being signed as a marquee player I was guaranteed to receive $25,000 for my first season with Collingwood. I wanted as much of that money as possible to go towards my dream of buying a house for my mum.
In the days after I was confirmed as a marquee player, I went and visited Dad’s grave. I wished he could have been part of all these amazing developments, but I knew he would have been so proud of me. I sat next to his grave and had a chat to him in my head, and I felt really at ease with the world.
