Siren 02: AFLW practice matches, Tess Coady, Ash Barty & more.
A Women in Sport Collective
The AFLW is only a few days away. It’s less than a month to the T20 World Cup kicks off and there’s been hockey and ice hockey and soccer and tennis.
Of course, you wouldn’t know that if you followed the mainstream sports media.
Each week, we’ll aim to collate data from the Australian mainstream media to keep tabs on the coverage of women’s sport. Thanks to Noely who does this incredible work for us. We’ll keep sharing this data and we’ll continue pushing for change.
In the meantime, we’re excited to bring you some exclusive content this week as well as continue our regular segments that we introduced last week. Plus we’ve added a new one!
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and celebrated our first issue with us last week, it was wonderful to connect with you, our supporters and readers, and learn more about what you want from women’s sports coverage and what sports you love.
In this issue
In this issue, Gemma Bastiani analyses the AFLW preseason with the first edition of The Roundup (look out for this across the AFLW season) and Kasey Symons interviews West Coast Eagles forward line coach Michelle Cowan about her decision to leave Fremantle, the opportunities available to women coaches and her hopes for a more equitable future. Our feature piece is an essay by Kirby Fenwick about the deep and rich history of women’s sport and why telling the stories of that history is so important.
Collective member Kate O’Halloran is back on the airwaves Monday, 3rd February with her show Kick Like a Girl. Her first guest is our own stats queen, Gemma! The show is running an AFLW tipping comp so be sure to sign up and join the fun by entering the code: VDTR2LUD.
Alison Smirnoff also announced her new project this week, a women’s football documentary, Kicking Against the Pricks and she’s on the hunt for any video/audio from women’s footy clubs. If you’ve got something you’d like to share, hit her up!
We also want to send love to Jess Wuetschner who is recovering from being struck by lightning last weekend. A terrifying experience and we hope to see her back to her best for the AFLW season. Recover well Woosh!
Still we play on: why the stories we tell about women’s sport matter
By Kirby Fenwick
The history of women’s sport is as fascinating as it is frustrating. An extensive and sometimes complex and often beautiful history that illustrates the deep foundations of women’s sport. In this feature, Kirby Fenwick delves into a little of that history and explores why telling the stories of women’s sport is so important.
The Lucas Girls
AFLW: Looking at 2020 by the numbers
By Gemma Bastiani
As we count down the days to AFLW4, Play On Radio has looked into who’s leading key statistical areas and, yes, Erin Phillips features quite heavily.
Feature Interview: Michelle Cowan
By Kasey Symons
Michelle Cowan is not only a household name for AFLW fans, she’s also a revered icon for women in football. Cowan was the inaugural coach of Fremantle in the first season of the AFLW in 2017 and is now a forward line coach at the West Coast Eagles as they prepare for their first AFLW season. Kasey Symons caught up with her while the Eagles were in town for a practice match against the Tigers to chat about her new role at the club, coaching and how West Coast are looking for their inaugural season.
By Gemma Bastiani
With the opening round only days away, AFLW teams were out in force this weekend playing practice matches around the country. We’ve pulled together the highlights and the must know details for you in The Roundup. Keep an eye out for this regular feature throughout the season as we recap every game in every round.
It was difficult to process the news yesterday of Kobe and Gianna Bryant's death along with seven others in a horrific helicopter accident. It brought up many complicated feelings, especially for us in the #womeninsport community, but it’s a terrible tragedy. This piece from Molly Knight is a beautiful tribute to Gianna who we loved following on her basketball journey.
A big congratulations to Steffanie Vogel who became the first woman in the 33-year history of the Rich River Trainee Classic to hold the lead into the final round of the golf tournament. Big congratulations too to Tess Coady for claiming Australia’s first-ever World Cup slopestyle gold medal and to Ash Barty who was named Young Australian of the Year.
In the UK, The Telegraph’s first women’s sports supplement came out last week with a beautiful cover and a lot of great features including this piece by Molly McElwee on policing women’s bodies in sport. It’s infuriating but important reading. For those interested in research and women in sport academia in this space, Associate Professor Kim Toffoletti and Professor Holly Thorpe have just published a research paper ‘Bodies, gender, and digital affect in fitspiration media’ that has a few free downloads available.
Tennis Australia’s navigation of celebrating LGBTIQ+ inclusion and honouring Margaret Court’s Grand Slam anniversary is difficult and hurtful to many in our #WomenInSport community. This article in The Conversation by Dr Katherine Raw and Dr Ryan Storr details the complexities of the issue.
We are in the business of elevating women’s voices in sport but we also embrace our allies in this space. Anne Cahill Lambert writes of one such ally, John Cain, who passed away in December last lear. Cain challenged one of the oldest sports clubs in the world, the MCC, to finally admit women as members in 1983 and Cahill Lambert honours him in her piece.
A new book coming out of Canada caught our eye this week. Lyndsay Doyle’s work looks to address the inadequate coverage of female athletes in Canada and share stories from some amazing women.
AFLW is having an impact in rural Australian and Barb Kelly writes about watching women’s footy in north-west Victoria.
Continuing on from last week’s historic WNBA CBA announcement, Kelsey Trainor goes through all you need to know about the deal and what it means for the athletes.
We also loved this feature on a Milwaukee high school girls basketball team who are challenging how people see Muslim women playing sport. Thanks to sports journalist Shireen Ahmed for tweeting this important story. Be sure to follow her!
This video posted by the ICC T20 World Cup featuring WACA coach Zoë Goss’s incredible story had us all reaching for the tissues. An amazing woman who achieved so much but acknowledges the hard work and sacrifice of so many in the name of equality in sport. Zoë, we salute you!
Runner up:
We were beyond moved by this tribute to sports reporter and cancer survivor Holly Rowe - one of our fave #womeninsport (who also has an awesome twitter handle that we love!) at the recent Coaches vs. Cancer college basketball game in the US.
Introducing our new section: Community Corner!
We want to provide a platform for people in our community to share events that support or give opportunities for women. If you know of or are planning a women in sport event that you would like us to promote, send the details through to contact@sirensport.com.au.
We’ll feature events such as forums, conferences, panels, networking opportunities, fan meet ups and ‘come and try events’ that are based in Australia.
We can’t guarantee that we will feature your event but we’ll try our best. We will not be posting player recruiting advertisements for teams and clubs due to the capacity of the newsletter.
Support us
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For $5 a month, you can become a Siren Supporter where you’ll receive access to our exclusive AFLW stats database and our Australian women’s sport calendar.
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