28 August 2024, Glenferrie Hotel, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia
The Hawks Insiders hosted af series of panels at a live event in August including an AFLW panel which featured Lucy Race, Julia Faragher and Hawthorn’s #1 ticket holder Emma Race.
As part of the AFLW panel Emma was asked about the significance of the 2024 season for the team and supporters. Her answer was proud and passionate and evoked rousing applause from the packed audience of predominantly male fans.
As the Hawthorn AFLW team storm up the ladder heading into the mid way point of the season, it presents a great opportunity to revisit Emma’s impassioned message to footy fans, that it is not too late to be early adopters of the women’s game.
I constantly see this beautiful community of Hawthorn supporters who truly are family, band together. We've been tested over times, not necessarily just on the field.
I'm a very competitive person and I see that there is an opportunity for an AFLW team to get the full support of their members in a way that hasn't really been taken up. You know, when we talk about AFLW, the Brisbane Lions have been completely dominant, a lot of the interstate clubs are incredibly dominant in the AFLW. Being a Victorian club and being one of the last to enter the competition has set us back a little bit. We've had some things that have made up the distance, but when we look at the comparison, the Brisbane Lions have been in five Grand Finals and won two of them. For Hawthorn this will be our third season in the competition yet we have about one and a half thousand more AFLW members than the Brisbane Lions.
This season, we've got an opportunity to gather our 86000 members and say, do you love the Hawthorn Football Club, or do you just love the men's team?
We've had so many panels up here celebrating Hawks people who died a very long time ago and our love for them and their commitment to the club. We are about history. We are about legacy. And we're all about loving the brown and gold, whether it's at Box Hill or whether it's at Hawthorn. The opportunity that we have in the present is to make a difference to the story of this club. To stick our flag in the soil and say to every person who loves Australian Rules Football, that this club is different because this club truly values every single person who wears the brown and gold.
We've got the opportunity to support our women's team with as much passion as we support our men's team along with our blind team, our wheelchair team. This season, that might look like getting a membership. It might look like going to your first game. It might just be logging on and watching online. The truth is this, the women's team will not succeed without our support. And the reason for that is because the AFL will hold growth of the AFLW until they see us wanting to support it.
The women only get eleven games in ten weeks to make their mark. So it's kind of like dog years really. Every game counts more than one of the men’s games. We've got to make our mark straight away, come out of the blocks flying and we have to win the first four games or we are probably not playing finals. In the same way that every game counts, every membership- it really counts. Every time you watch it, at the ground or on TV it really counts in the women's game. When you do that, more commercial partners come on board, because they see the numbers, they see the data. When that happens, more money comes into the game, more professionalism comes into game, because we can pay the players more. The people who play AFLW are literally leaving their blood sweat and tears out there and then they're also copping hate online in volumes and in hideous violent rhetoric which no one deserves. So, there's a way that we can actually make a difference.
I believe in this club. I always have.
You know, for 47 years of my life, I was a Hawthorn supporter with no W team. So what I guess I am saying is, if you had the pleasure of watching people who look like you play the game I would love you to throw your support now behind people who are playing the game who look like us.
