GEORGIE PARKER: Off-season timing and no reserves comp are stalling growth of the AFLW

I saw that a friend was in Melbourne, which didn’t make much sense - she plays AFLW for a non-Melbourne club. I texted her to ask what she was doing here.

“Scrimmage. Again,” she replied, with an emoji that told me exactly how thrilled she was.

I knew she’d been injured, but I hadn’t really thought about what coming back into the main side actually looked like. So I called her. And honestly, it’s just another huge reason why this timing of the season simply doesn’t work - It’s just not footy season.

“There are players on AFLW lists who haven’t played a real game in a year or two,” she told me. Sorry, what?

Let me break it down. Because there isn’t a reserves competition (or any state league comps running at the same time) and list sizes aren’t big enough to run full intra-club matches, if you’re not selected and you want match practice, your only option is to play in AFL-organised scrimmages in Melbourne. At midday. On a Saturday.

That’s sort of manageable if you’re based in Melbourne. You might play out of position, and the game time is varied, but at least you can drive home afterwards. If you’re from Perth, though, you’re flying in the day before. From Queensland, Sydney or Adelaide, you’re on a 6am flight - because of course, there’s no accommodation covered - and going straight to the game.

It’s absurd to think that flying in at dawn, sometimes returning from injury, to play in a thrown-together scrimmage with players from half the league, is somehow good for a players development.

A staff member from a WA club told me it’s a constant dilemma: do you send players across for match fitness, or just risk it and bring them straight back into AFLW level without any? She also said most clubs don’t allow their listed players to compete in state leagues during pre-season, because many of those teams operate independently and AFL clubs understandably want control over workloads with AFLW being the priority,

So what happens? Some players don’t play a proper game of footy for over a year - sometimes two.

And that’s where this timing becomes the biggest issue of all. The AFLW season sits awkwardly outside the traditional footy window, wedged between community sport wrapping up and the men’s trade period dominating headlines. Crowds are the second-lowest on record, TV audiences fluctuate, and even the most passionate fans admit to a bit of footy fatigue.

But to me, those things are surface level. The real problem runs much deeper - it’s the players who fall between the cracks. The ones who aren’t in the best 21. The ones working their way back from injury, the ones who just need a few games to rebuild confidence and form. They’re training week after week without the opportunity to actually play football - the one thing you need to do to get better.

You can’t replicate match intensity in training. You can’t simulate the chaos, the pressure, the decision-making that only comes from a real game played within your team’s system. So these players are stuck in limbo; training hard, ticking boxes, but not truly improving. And if players can’t develop, how can the league as a whole improve?

The AFL has long said it wants AFLW to be the best women’s sporting competition in the country. But elite sport doesn’t grow without a pathway. And while there’s now a pathway from Auskick to AFLW, the pathway within the AFLW is messy and disjointed. You can’t expect a world-class product if you don’t give players a structure that lets them get better - and having nowhere to play is a recipe for stagnation.

A rising tide lifts all ships, but right now, the tide’s barely coming in.

Imagine the difference if there were a true reserves competition running alongside the AFLW season. It would keep match fitness high, give developing players a chance to push for selection, and create a genuine sense of competition for spots. No player should be away from a true match for longer than absolutely necessary.

Until the season aligns with a secondary competition, though, there doesn’t seem to be a solution. State leagues can’t run outside the traditional AFL season because local grounds are now being used for summer sports, so the only fix is to have the women’s season align with the men’s, something the AFL seems determined to avoid.

So until anything changes, we’ll keep seeing players fly across the country for 12pm scrimmages that barely resemble the real thing, just to get some touch on the footy.

If the AFL truly wants the women’s competition to stand alongside the men’s, it needs to stop making them play catch-up in every sense of the word, because the better the weakest player in the league is, the better the entire competition becomes. But how do they get better, when there’s nothing there to lift them?