By Caitlin Sloan
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Even before the Matildas’ triumph at the opening match of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, excitement for the tournament had reached fever pitch.
It’s the first time a soccer World Cup has been hosted in Australia and New Zealand, and old and new fans of the Beautiful Game have been flocking to stadiums in both countries.
Stadiums aren’t the only places alive with World Cup fever. Many local soccer clubhouses, like that of the Helensburgh Thistles, are hosting viewing parties for their junior girls’ sides. Young players are keen to cheer on our women’s national football team, named the Matildas in 1994 after a viewer competition run by SBS and the Australian Women’s Soccer Association.
Gill Lehn, president of Helensburgh Thistles Junior Executive Committee, has spent months tensely waiting for the first whistle blow. Gill plays in the Thistles’ women’s over-30s side. Her four sons are fanatical about soccer, as is her husband, David. She lives and breathes the sport – sometimes too much.
“There’s way too much conversation about soccer at our dinner table,” Gill said.
“We have always followed the Matildas and the Socceroos. We’ll just watch whatever they’re doing.
“There’s at least a two- to three-day debrief after a weekend.”
In 2018, Gill became the first woman to lead the junior committee since the club was founded in 1895. Today, there are more than 200 women and girls playing for the Thistles.
Gill said a gender-balanced committee better represents the club and has been instrumental in getting new initiatives off the ground, including $80,000 worth of renovations to the clubhouse’s outdated women’s amenities, thanks to the state government’s NSW Football Legacy Fund.
“It’s good to have a female voice in that executive,” Gill said. “It’s not just all blokes.”
Over the past few years, more women have stepped up to leadership roles. “I think that having me and our secretary, Deb Loveday, in that executive really balances,” Gill says.
“It’s a very good balance of people that we have, we’re all intelligent people… and it really shows in how we’ve made so many changes.”
Of their recent achievements, Gill is most elated about the rising number of junior girls playing soccer. This has allowed the club to move away from the previous under-6 and under-7s mixed competition and instead allow the girls to compete against each other.
“From under-6s, we’ve got an all-female team in every age group that we can have,” Gill said.
“It’s the first time our club has actually had an all-girls team in every age group, so that’s been exciting for us, and we just want to keep building on that.
“It’s our first year we’ve had three full under-6 girls’ teams and three full under-7 girls’ teams… and what it meant was that we could combine the under-6 and under-7 girls into a competition, so they play each other each week.
“[Girls] playing at that age, we found that often if they’re in a mixed team, the girls might not get the ball so much… but they always get plenty of ball at their feet when they’re in their own team.
“Then they stay together up through the grades, and we found that we get far better retention of female players by putting them in all-girl teams.”
The enthusiasm for the Women’s World Cup is contagious and Gill suspects the Matilda Effect will come into play in a big way.
“It’s so exciting,” Gill said. “I reckon we will get a huge increase in numbers next year, particularly in some of those younger age groups.
“Some of those girls that have left to go to other sports will come back. I was speaking to one girl… who used to play in the under-6s team, and I said, ‘So, you are still playing netball?’, and she goes, ‘Yeah, but I think I might come back to soccer next year’, and I think that sort of attitude will be there around young girls.”
Football South Coast chief executive officer Ann-Marie Balliana agrees. The organisation has already seen a 10 percent increase in junior girls’ sign-ups over the past decade, and girls and women now make up 25 percent of all soccer players in the Illawarra.
“It’s huge for the sport,” Ann-Marie said. “It’s going to create even more interest, and I think we’ll find that especially the young ones will just get so caught up in one of the biggest sporting events that we’re going to see probably for a long time.
“I think it will increase participation at a grassroots level, but I also think that it may inspire more girls to get more involved in some of these representative pathways to get better, to see how far they can progress in the game.
“Look at players like Caitlin Foord who’s come from the Illawarra and has done so well and has created this magnificent career for herself…
“It will just inspire, I think, a lot of young girls who may have thought of playing football or are not playing football to get involved with the game and take it to any level that they want to take it to.”
In July, over 120 soccer players from clubs across the Illawarra took part in Football South Coast’s Girls Mini World Cup winter clinic. It was the first time they’d had enough interest to be able to hold an all-girls school holiday program.
“The teams had a really good, really fun day out,” Ann-Marie said.
There’s more soccer action to come, with the 2023 National Youth Championships set to be held across Wollongong in October, so Illawarra clubs are sure to receive a boost.
Ann-Marie said: “We want to see 50 percent of our players being female, as is the case in the United States, so we’d love to see more girls saying, ‘Hey, this is a great game. Let’s give it a go’, and hopefully fall in love with it and want to play it for many years to come.