Hutchy's A Hit

With nearly a thousand women playing in the Victorian Women's Football League in 2009, there are so many talented players running around each week that you'd be hard pressed to choose your favourite. Whilst I don't have a favourite player, each week there are always opposition players that you admire for their talent and respect for the manner in which they play the game.

East Burwood's Meg Hutchins (pictured below left with Penny Cula-Reid) has to be one of the most talented players I've played with or against. A former VWFL best first year player and Helen Lambert medallist, she has represented Victoria for a number of years now.

'Hutchy' as she is known around the football circle, reads the game really well to be able to find the football. Once the ball is in her hands, her finishing skills are outstanding. Having a long kick with a beautiful action ensures that if she is anywhere within reach of goals, she'll kick accurately nine times out of ten. Hutchy works incredibly hard on her fitness throughout the year to have the strength to hold down the all important positions of Centre Half Back and Centre Half Forward. She has the engine to switch on the ball and the mindset to adapt to such positional moves with ease.

Off field she is well respected for her commitment to the game and for her work ethic. Hutchy speaks positively about both her team mates and opposition players and shows great leadership around newer and younger players in representative teams by ensuring they feel welcome and included.

When AFL Victoria established the Female Football program in 2004, one of the program's key initiatives was to establish a school based clinics scheme for girls. Hutchy jumped at the chance to be involved in the program, coordinating the clinics and placement of coaches to run them for the next four years. It was only when she was appointed as Director of Rowing at Methodist Ladies' College, that she relinquished the role.

Hutchy continues to support the growth of female participation through her voluntary involvement in East Burwood's Youth Girls team, that was established in 2009. She's never too far from the sidelines on a Saturday morning whilst her mini-Devils are playing. Young up and coming players at East Burwood, such as Sarah Perkins, are lucky to have the opportunity to train alongside and play in front of someone who genuinely cares about them and their football.

If Michelle Dench was in fact named Michael...

If Michelle Dench was in fact named Michael, much would be written in the coming weeks about her contribution to our game. The standard double page spread incorporating an interview with one of Melbourne’s most renowned journalists, giving readers and worshippers of the game a candid and intimate insight into the heart and soul of a champion, would be a must read. The cheer squad would busily prepare a banner acknowledging her champion status, complete with a two storey high caricature of Dench in typical fashion, of her in full flight, in an all too familiar pose that the thousands of supporters who had watched and adored her play had come to know as simply Dench-like. Footage from her early days in the AFL showing her gawky and awkward adolescence combined with obvious promise and talent would provide us with moments of nostalgia and be accompanied with a soundtrack to inspire us to laud her further.

Much would be made about her pedigree, as the off spring of North Melbourne full back of the century, David Dench. There would be questions not about whether she would go on to achieve AFL Hall of Fame status like her father, but rather simply ‘how long’ before the AFL would to allow her to join her father and others who had gone before in dazzling the football community with such grace, talent and flair. The Ablett-like photographs of a young Dench kicking the football around Arden Street would tell the beginning of the story that was now coming to a close. Her pathway through to the football’s elite ranks would have begun sometime around her birth, when recruiters and scouts tracked her progress and talent from her Auskick debut. North Melbourne would have been thrilled with the prospect of snaring such brilliance via a father-son pick in the national draft that every piece of advice would have been offered to her as she traversed the talented player pathway from junior football through to the TAC Cup. Her part in history as a likely member of the Pagan-Carey led Kangaroos that were so dominant and captured two premierships in the nineties would be well told. Perhaps she would have snared herself a Norm Smith medal along the way, so influential was her impact in grand finals.

Instead the real-life female version of Dench has spent the last eight years playing for Melbourne University, which ironically, is just down the road from her beloved North Melbourne Kangaroos. The veteran has carried her father’s number 23 on her back in over one hundred Victorian Women’s Football League games as she toiled furiously to follow his footsteps.

Words synonymous with the older Dench’s playing style, such as dash and polish, were used to describe his daughter from the moment she swapped her elite basketball hi-tops for football boots. Her ability to keep the ball at her finger tips as she evaded, ducked and weaved her way through packs to find the space to send the ball into the arms of a waiting forward or set of goal posts was game changing.

Her career in the Victorian Women’s Football League is decorated in a similar manner to the elder Dench, including the coveted VWFL Best First Year player award in her debut season, four club Best and Fairest awards, a Runner Up in the Helen Lambert medal (VWFL Brownlow), three All-Australian honours, four Victorian caps, and selection in the VWFL’s Silver Jubilee Team on her favoured wing. Whilst the 2006 Victorian Captain never got to take her place alongside Archer, Carey and Stevens in the premierships of ‘96 and ‘99, she did go one better in winning three with Melbourne University from a record eight consecutive grand final appearances. Appointed Melbourne University captain in 2006 following a premiership season, it looked as though she would emulate her father’s efforts in captaining a premiership, but it was not to be. The club fell at the final hurdle on three consecutive occasions under Dench’s reign, but it was not from a lack of trying. Renowned as a big game player, Dench was acknowledged as Melbourne University’s Player of the Finals on four occasions.

So whilst the football public has continued to enjoy the unique exploits of former champions thanks to their offspring, missing from the list of football family dynasties that includes the Fletchers, Silvagnis, Clokes and Shaws, are the Denches. Our failure to adequately acknowledge the female game means that careers such as Michelle Dench’s will never be enjoyed how it might have been should she have inherited a Y chromosome as well as some fine football genetics from her father. For those of us to have played alongside her, it has been impossible to separate being her team mate from being one of her fans. Her amazing work ethic has ensured that she has been one of the hardest working women to ever pull on the boots, allowing her to achieve heights that demand documentation. When the status of the women’s game is such that they are inducted into a Hall of Fame, Michelle Dench will continue to follow in her father’s footsteps in being one of the first women to take their rightful place in it. Until then, it is important that her story is told and celebrated just as it would have been should she have been named Michael.

When I Grow Up I Want To...

For a sport as old as Australian football, it seems we've been a little bit slow in finding female role models for our up and coming female footballers.

I remember attending a school clinic at Melton South Primary School when I was in grade four. I was the only girl to participate in the clinic, but I was always the only girl doing most things related to football back then.

As a Richmond supporter, you could imagine my delight when one of my two favourite players, Dale Weightman (the other was Kevin Bartlett) arrived alongside western suburbs legend, Doug Hawkins to spend ninety minutes teaching us to kick, mark and handpass.

Being the only girl I was chosen, alongside my best friend and next door neighbour, Jeffrey Roberts, to have my picture taken with Hawkins for the local paper. My parents managed to track down an A4 sized print of the photo from the paper, and it remains, one of my most treasured possessions. It is a reminder of the day that I got to rub shoulders with someone that I adored, who inspired me and who I wanted to play like.

For those you not old enough to remember Dale Weightman, his nickname was - and still is - the Flea. He was a tiny but tough midfielder, unstoppable and was all over the ground. I imagine he was a bit of a pest to his opponents, so his nickname was rather apt. That day, he talked about the importance of understanding how the football operates and moves; to be able to judge its bounce and trajectory; to be able to predict where it will move and when. Even though I never owned a football when I was child, whenever I could find one, I had it in my hands. I practised the little ball handling drills that he showed me in that hour and half as often as I could. I taught my fingertips to read the play and see the ball for me.

I finally began playing community football when I was 21 - quite a bit later than most girls now. (Before that, Jeff and I, and all of our primary school mates spent as many hours a day as we could chasing around a football. We'd kick the ball all day, every weekend, and until it was dark and we could no longer see the ball. Sometimes we'd go inside and find a pair of Dad's thick socks and kick that around in a modified, indoor version of football).

In the 150 or so games that I've played in the Victorian Women's Football League since I made my debut under lights against Albion in 1997, I've warmed up using the exact same ball handling drills that the Flea showed me back in 1985. Why? I looked up to him and wanted to play like him. So I simply followed his lead.

At the time I don't think I ever really thought about the fact that I couldn't grow up to play for my beloved Tigers because I was a girl. I didn't realise how important it would have been for me to have an elite female player visit me and teach me about the game. Perhaps if a female footballer had have visited me that day, I would have been encouraged to join a junior team. I might have learnt that girls were playing junior football and that I could do so also.

In this year's Youth Girls survey, AFL Victoria asked Youth Girls which players in the Youth Girls and VWFL competitions were their favourites. The reason for this was to find out which female footballers our girls are inspired by and aspire to be like.

The results are still being collated, but what I can tell you is that there isn't a wide range of names presented. Around half of the respondents haven't answered the question, which suggests they don't have a favourite player at either level. At a senior level, some girls have said they don't know of anyone, or they've nominated the only player they know and said as much.

Something I am really trying to work on is providing Youth Girls, and all of the other young footballers growing up, with female role models. Victorian players Shannon McFerran (St Albans; pictured left) and Phoebe McWilliams (St Kilda; pictured right) are the Youth Girls Academy Ambassadors, and this year the Academy trained with the VWFL State Squad.

Over the coming weeks, we're going to profile some senior footballers here. They are all tremendous footballers and deserve to have their stories told. They all bring something to the game and are people from which we can learn from. So...read, learn, be inspired and aspire!

Youth Girls Goes Live...Almost!

With the Youth Girls program now bigger and better (we hope) than ever, the demand by the growing list of players and followers of the competitions for access to more information continues to the do the same.

Following the first ever Victorian U18 Youth Girls team tour to Brisbane in 2007, team member Jen Plumb (pictured right) decided to set up a MySpace page for the team, which also included a touring party of three umpires. It appeared to be a hit, with the girls uploading photos, songs and comments reminiscing of the good old days of the week before when they conquered all before them in Interstate Challenge I. There wasn't much interest in Facebook by the Youth Girls crew back then, and so, MySpace endured. In 2008, when Interstate Challenge II was held in Melbourne, the Victorian Youth Girls team's MySpace page was updated to include the new players that had joined the squad.

In the meantime, we continued to update the Youth Girls website with new photos and articles of news and other female football miscellany to keep the interested world interested, engaged and informed.

Then something happened to me in 2009 - I stopping checking my personal email account hourly, I forgot my MySpace password and I stopped calling my friends regularly on the telephone for an update. Instead I began checking their Facebook status to check that they were still alive and that they were emotionally okay. I did have a crack at Twitter but there just wasn't enough interest. It seems that if celebrity Tweeter, Ashton Kutcher played in the Youth Girls competition, I would have had an audience. Besides, it seemed like such a waste of time checking Twitter to get status updates, when I could get that very thing, and more, on Facebook.

Facebook appears to have everything. Photos, stories, games, videos, music - all in very linear and orderly manner...just how I like things to be.

And so now, Youth Girls is on Facebook...as well as MySpace and Twitter but they don't really get a look in.

It seems like the Youth Girls community has come along for the ride as well. There are hundreds of Youth Girls and their families on Facebook...and well, if the mountain won't come to Muhammed then... you get my drift.