Week 10 – Audio Lesson: Listen & Read

Refer to lesson PDF for transcript with highlighted vocabulary (download here).

Ian: Football started.

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: Australian Rules Football started with the AFLW, the Women’s League…

Pete: Yep. 

Ian: …that started last night. So that’s exciting because we go through this really intense period of sport over the early part of summer with tennis and cricket on. And then once the tennis finishes and the cricket starts to wind down, you end up with this period of nothing, and being a sports fanatic, like I am…

Pete: How is that going? Because back in the day when you were my age or younger, it was obviously a very bloke-orientated sport.

Ian: Completely and utterly.

Pete: There was no significant female cricket or AFL footy…

Ian: Well, certainly, when I was a kid no girls or women played football.

Pete: Was that even recreationally for like small clubs or anything? There was just no… They…?

Ian: Nup. And yeah. Then probably when you were younger, when that sort of Auskick, that little sort of thing, there would have been a few girls running around doing Auskick. 

Pete: Do you want to explain what Auskick is? 

Ian: Yeah, Auskick was this… It’s sort of like a national organisation, where all the sort of local football clubs would have a… one morning on a weekend they’d have little kids come around and they would do basically some skill stuff. 

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: Learn how to kick, learn how to handball, and then they’d have a game which, you know, when you got a bunch of six- and seven-year-olds running around, that’s literally what it is. Everybody just runs around, chasing the ball, but it’s good fun.

Pete: Yep. 

Ian: And so, it was just a way of introducing little kids to the game. And I suppose when you do it, there might have been two or three girls and 200 boys.

Pete: And we all just did it together, right?

Ian: And everybody does it together. 

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: Now, there’d be… It’s probably not a 50/50 split, but I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t sort of one third, two thirds of having a third of the participants being girls. Around that time though, there were also… Around when you were playing, there would have also have been girls playing in junior competitions where up until under 13, girls could play with boys. 

Pete: Yep.

Ian: There was no girl’s competition or boy’s competition. It was just they all played together. And clearly, the girls had to be better to play against, and with, boys because they weren’t playing against just other girls. But it worked. The challenge for that was, though, the really good… The girls who were really good at it, once they got to 13… 

Pete: Had nowhere to go.

Ian: Had nowhere to go. And it was one of those ones where… To some extent you understand, because clubs just simply weren’t, you know, they didn’t… You couldn’t play girls in an under 15 competition because there was no changerooms for girls. And that’s a very… that’s a minor thing. But that was just one of those things. And I use the example of, probably the best Australian… Women’s Australian footballer, Erin Philips, who’s, well, won two of the best players in the country things with the AFLW, which is only in its fourth season15. 

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But she played in Under-13s. She was the best player in her competition, not just her club as a 12-year-old, playing against boys and was then told you can’t play anymore.

Pete: Yep. 

Ian: And her father was a… This is pre-AFL, but her father was a state level footballer, played actually at national level football, and that’s what she wanted to do. You know, she wants to go and play football, but she couldn’t.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: So, she switched over to basketball, played for Australia, won the Commonwealth Games, and got medals in the Olympics, and played in the WNBA in the United States for 10 or 15 years. And then when the AFLW, the women’s AFL competition, our football competition, started, she came back and said, “That’s what I want to do.” And so, she’d spent her life basically playing her second favourite sport because she couldn’t play this sport as a woman.

Pete: Why do you think it is that there seem to be so many women who can do so well across multiple sports compared to men? Do you think that’s… Like, it seems from my view that it’s because there are smaller pools of women competing to play in those sports so that the spread of talent isn’t as wide. So, the women that dominate in one sport tend to be able to dominate in a lot of others compared to the men. If you train really hard to be in the top 1% of men that can play AFL, you’re not going to be able to have the body type to play basketball or to, you know, play cricket probably. And… Nor the time, right. Because training is literally… 

Ian: I think it’s… Yeah, I think there’s an element of that too. But I would suspect that time is probably the one… 

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …because for decades, men’s sport has been more professional in a literal sense, of that they are earning more money out of it. 

Pete: Yep.

Ian: Therefore, I think boys specialise in a sport earlier. There’d be very few boys now, as in junior footballers, for instance, who would still be playing high-level basketball or cricket or so on. They’ll be… up until about the age of 16. They possibly are, but often by the time you’re sixteen…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …you’ve been recognised and rewarded as, “Well we want you in the elite football competition.” 

Pete: “This is where you’re going.”

Ian: You can’t play cricket or basketball. You could do it recreationally, just mucking around. But you can’t play state level cricket, state level basketball, state level football all at the same time.

Pete: Well you’re wasting your time, right? Because imagine all of those hours put into the one sport, focussing on that and where you would be otherwise. 

Ian: Whereas…

Pete: And there’s so much competition that you need to have given it everything, right.

Ian: Exactly. Whereas for women, if you’re… and I don’t think is an inherent difference between men and women from that point of view. If you’re going to be a good footballer, you’re going to be a good basketballer. You’re probably going to be good at a whole lot of other sport.

Pete: Yep. 

Ian: But for women, because of that lack of professionalism in them… 

Pete: Yep. Not in women, but in the areas of the sports.

 Ian: In the sports themselves that women have been able to play multiple sports here longer and therefore can switch between them.

Pete: Yeah. ‘Cause I used to get so jealous of how easy it seemed a lot of the girls at Jiu Jitsu had it36, especially when competing in competitions, because I would show up and I would have 50 guys in my bracket. And so, the chances of me getting to, you know, winning that gold medal was close to zero and a lot of girls would show up and they’d have three people. So, they were guaranteed a medal already. But not even that, because a lot of them were still good, but they just didn’t have the pool to pull from to have to compete and get through.

Ian: Yeah. But…

Pete: But on top of that, they would be able to switch into other sports like judo and wrestling. And because they also had smaller portions of women…

Ian: The transferability of skills works.

Pete: Yeah. They just do a few lessons and they’re already, “Okay. Well, you know, we’ll have you compete at the Commonwealth Games, you know, because we… Australia only has ten women who are even thinking about doing it. You can already get to the Commonwealth Games.” So, you would see these women just be able to switch between sports and then shoot up and take over. So, yeah, if you’re a girl, if you’re a young girl thinking about doing sports, man, now’s the time…

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: …because it’s a saturated market for men it seems. It’s so difficult to get to the top.

Ian: Yeah. Well, I joked with you for a while when you were at high school, when you won a state title in fencing.

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: And, you know, I was proud of that. But you said, “Yeah, but the other guy came second.” You only had to… because you chose a small sport in Australia and you had you also chose the least-favoured weapon it, and therefore there were very few people that you had to compete against.

Pete: Yep. This was for sabre in fencing. Yep. 

Ian: Sabre in fencing. But, you know, I remember saying to you, “If you want to get a scholarship to a United States university.

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: Forget academics, forget mainstream sports, but this fencing.

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: There’ll be a handful of universities in America who would say, “Hey, we got a national champion in sabre. We’ll take him.”

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: And you get the full-ride scholarship. So yeah, it’s… That women’s sport thing is… It’s enviable from a male point of view. 

Pete: Do you think it will catch up?

Ian: It will. It will.

Pete: Because I imagine it will. Eventually, they’ll have the numbers.

Ian: Yeah, there’s no difference in some sports, like swimming, tennis.

Pete: Well, running any of those, yeah.

Ian: Golf, athletics, those sports where they’re… Even the highly professional ones like tennis and golf. There’s no advantage to being a woman playing golf or tennis in comparison with the number of people you’re competing with.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: There’ll be the same number of young girls playing golf and tennis as there’ll be young boys.

Pete: Yep. But it’s a burgeoning market, right?

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: With those sports that are opening up like AFL and…

Ian: Yeah. And the contact sports…

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: …which traditionally girls have been less likely to play because they were considered not to be feminine and so on. And those contact sports have just really opened up.

Pete: Man, even MMA, you know.

Ian: Oh, yeah!

Pete: there are some girls that I was training with who were really, really good. But yeah, they just kept it… kept going for a few years and they’re already in competitions like One, you know, the UFC, stuff like that.

Ian: Yeah. Yeah.

Pete: You’re just like, the path that they had to take to get there was so much shorter. It still required dedication and effort. But… And also, I think those competitions are dying to have more women compete in them.

Ian: They are, they’re much more marketable.

Pete: Yeah. 

Ian: If you’ve got men and women playing a sport, they’re more marketable at the individual level.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: In the sense that you’ve got companies who are going to sponsor women, you know, in a sport more than they are going to sponsor men…

Pete: Yeah, well…

Ian: …because it’s new and it’s different. And the other thing is, from a television rights point of view, as well, if you can sell a sport to both men and women, you’re more likely to get television rights bumping up. So…