First Friday in February - AFLW audio collection

"On Friday February 3rd, 2017, Aussie Rules Football changed forever.

There were twenty-four and half thousand people packed into the stands at Princes Park in Melbourne that night. And when the siren sounded, and the ball was thrown into the air for the first time, they erupted, their roar an expression of their passion, of their joy, of long-held dreams realised.

Women have been playing football for more than 100 years. The first recorded game was played in Perth in 1915. More games followed, albeit sporadically, until state based leagues began launching from the early 1980s. The first, the Victorian Women’s Football League in 1981.

In 2010, the league commissioned a report into women’s football, a series of exhibition matches starting in 2013 grew from that report.

It was the success of those exhibition matches that encouraged the AFL to bring forward their plans for a national women’s football league and so the AFLW was born.

There are thousands of stories from that inaugural season. Feats of strength and skill and endurance, both on field and off. Tales of resilience and determination, of dreams dashed and rebuilt. But their genesis was that warm Friday night in February when thirty-two women clad in the navy blue of Carlton and the black and white stripes of Collingwood took to the field.

The First Friday in February will take you back to that night, reliving that first AFLW game and all that it meant through the memories of women who were there.

They each have a story, their story, of that First Friday in February."