THE PULSE — 29 May 2026

Celebrating VAFA Women’s Football

The VAFA is enormously proud of its status of being recognised as the largest and best community women’s football competition in Australia. Unlike many leagues around the country that promote both football and netball, we are solely focused on football and providing the best environment for women’s participation. 

The origins of our women’s competition began in 2017 with over 1,900 registered players participating across 40 teams in five sections.

This has now grown to over 2,600 registered women’s players playing across 71 teams in nine sections.

2026 sees the introduction of the Holmesglen U19 Women’s section for the very first time. This age category is an important bridge between junior football and entry into senior ranks, which we are excited to see and secure the player pathway and sustainability of our Women’s teams long into the future.

Whilst the competition went into remission in 2020 due to COVID, next year will mark 10 years of active competition. Accordingly, VAFA will soon be inviting key Club and Association stakeholders who have been involved in our Women’s competition over that journey, to form a working group and plan a year of celebration in 2027 to recognise the decade of VAFA community women’s football participation. Announcements of that working group will be publicised in the coming month.

This weekend, our broadcast team will, for the first time in VAFA history, feature a William Buck Premier Women’s ‘Showcase Round’, where every Premier Women’s match will be streamed live and free on the VAFA website VAFA.com.au. Our Broadcast & Content Manager, Jason Bennett, has worked closely with all the Premier Women’s Clubs to bring this exciting new initiative to fruition. It will no doubt provide great exposure to our Premier Women’s competition, continuing to build our VAFA Women’s brand and attracting more women players to our competition.

Next week, our elite women players selected in the Big V Women’s representative team will travel to South Australia to take on the best of the Adelaide Footy League. In 2017 the inaugural Big V women’s representative team competed against AFL Goldfields team in North Ballarat and ran out 49-point winners. Since then, the Big V Women’s representative team has been undefeated in their five subsequent representative matches. We will head to Adelaide next weekend under the leadership of experienced coach Tom Purcell and captain Taylah Watson, determined to keep that winning record intact.

Off the field, we recently announced that three women from the VAFA ranks were accepted into the AFL’s ‘Lead Your Way’ program, which provides opportunity to develop the skills and network of women volunteers in community football leadership. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming interest in the program over the past two years, there have been many more high quality VAFA candidates who were unsuccessful in their application to join. So VAFA has this year invested in an extension of this program, inviting all our Women volunteers to undertake the VAFA Lead Your Way program. We anticipate around 30 women to take up the opportunity and undertake this four-session leadership course commencing on Sunday, 21 June.

VAFA has also recently received an AFL certificate of recognition, acknowledging our Association’s commitment to the Women & Girls Community Football Charter. This reinforces our focus on advocating and celebrating women in line with our value of inclusivity.

So it is timely to identify and reflect on all the positive things happening in VAFA Women’s football.

We salute all our Women players who take to the field each week in their VAFA home and away games.

We look forward to watching all the William Buck Premier Women action being broadcast over our media channels.

We wish our representative players every success in the upcoming interstate game.

We welcome the continued development of our women leaders of our competition.

We remain committed to our support of Women and our Women’s Community Football Charter

All of which helps continue to build on the growth and reputation of our proud VAFA Women’s competition.

Jason Reddick

VAFA CEO