New era In an AFL first women lead both this years grand finalists

Kate Roffey is from Narrabri in northern New South Wales. It’s a small cotton town that sits at the fork of the Namoi River, as far from Brisbane as it is from Sydney.

She fell in love with football and the Melbourne Football Club, in that order, when she went to study sport science at university in Canberra and began playing footy with the men’s team. She moved to Melbourne for work and adopted the Demons as her team. They were at the bottom of the ladder, then.

Roffey is the president of Melbourne. She is emblematic of the gradual change and modernisation over more than a decade at the league’s establishment club. For the traditionally fusty club that was as much Melbourne Club as Melbourne Football Club, to have a woman as president would have once been remarkable. It is not now.

Melbourne president Kate Roffey.Credit:Getty Images

What is remarkable is that Roffey is part of a broader, more fundamental shift in leadership in the AFL. Whichever team wins the grand final, its president will be a woman. This is the first year that has been possible, for it is the first year there has been more than one club with a woman as president. This year there are three.

Roffey leads Melbourne. Kylie Watson-Wheeler is the president of the Western Bulldogs. Peggy O’Neal, the competition’s first female president, has overseen Richmond’s era of dominance in winning three of the last four premierships, including the last two flags.

“Supporters, when I took over, were scared or whatever of a woman as president and I would say ‘stop this! We have to stop. We are not the Melbourne Football Club of 1952, or 1968 or 1976, we are the Melbourne Football Club of 2021 and this different. We are setting ourselves up to be the best club,’” Roffey said.

“It is a change, and it is a new era, and I think people are noticing it. It does reflect a new progressive, modern era.

“It’s interesting to say we are not the Melbourne Club, we are the Melbourne Football Club. And again there’s the image of Range Rovers and the snow [the stereotype about Melbourne supporters]. I grew up in a small country town in New South Wales and went to my public school, so I am the absolute antithesis of that.

“We have plenty of members like me. Charlie, a friend of mine, is a high country cattleman his family have been Melbourne supporters for 100 years â€" he does know the snow, but he rides his horse through it, not a Range Rover.”

What is as remarkable about Roffey’s leadership of Melbourne is that she took over as president when the board moved against her predecessor Glenn Bartlett a month into the season â€" when the team was undefeated. That is not ordinarily the time for leadership change at a club.

“You never actually think you are going to be president until the day they say ‘we need a person to step up’ ... we always had a succession plan, I talk about a succession plan for me now,” Roffey said.

“I am of the opinion, do you do it at the end of the season just because that is the time and place? I would say no, you do it because that is the right time and place. I am sure you saw Glenn’s farewell message; he was, in his own words, ‘cooked’.

“I know it seems unusual, it is what it is. I am the president now ... Could I have ever dreamed I would be president of the Melbourne Football Club? Absolutely not, but stranger things have happened, I guess.”

Bulldogs president Kylie Watson-Wheeler.Credit:Darrian Traynor

By comparison, Watson-Wheeler’s rise to the presidency of the Bulldogs was part of a long-planned succession from Peter Gordon. The elevation of the Disney executive and lifelong Bulldogs fan to the leadership of the club was notable in that she is the first woman to lead the club. But she said other than that it was unremarkable that a board that is 50 per cent female should have a female president.

“I think it speaks a lot to the progress and where we are heading [to have female presidents of both grand finalists] and I think it reinforces the perspective you don’t have to be male to be a strong, collaborative, decisive leader and in the selection of the president, gender really has nothing to do with it,” Watson-Wheeler said.

“Our board is 50 per cent female and that is organic, they have all achieved their positions on the board based on their merit and their expertise, it’s never been about filling [female] quotas. When your mind is open to just finding the best people for the role, that naturally happens.”

O’Neal is the trailblazer for female AFL presidents inasmuch as she was the first woman to do so, but in the Bulldogs’ case it was a trail they were already blazing and would likely have arrived with Watson-Wheeler as president even if O’Neal had not blazed a trail first.

“My road to being president of this club was also organic, and I think that would have happened within our club with or without Peggy leading the way,” Watson-Wheeler said.

“Peggy is an enormous inspiration not only because she was the first female president, but she has weathered success and challenges with enormous grace.”

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