INSPIRATIONAL AUSTRALIAN WOMEN
Sara Rohner
–– INTERVIEW ––
Sara Rohner is the US-born founder of Colorado’s AFL Women’s team, Centennial Tigers. Her journey is an example of female achievement and here, Greg speaks with Sara about her life and the benefits of dedication to a cause.
Greg T Ross: Sara Rohner, welcome to The Last Post podcast series, an, of course, inspirational Australian woman without actually being Australian. So, you’re a first. Sara Rohner: Thank you. GTR: Now, the reason for this, of course, is you have started... I guess you’re part of a very important role for American women, too, in being able to play Australian rules football. What led you to this? What’s the backstory of this, Sara? SR: Sure. So, I’ve been playing footy for about... This is my ninth season now, and I have been playing in the US throughout that whole time. I’ve been down to Australia a couple times and played. I played with USA Freedom, which is the women’s rep team that comes down to the International Cup every few years. And then, I came down again and trialled for some AFLW teams and VFLW teams, a couple of years ago. Basically, so when I came back home, I just realized that the competition wasn’t growing fast enough. And where we live, I’m in Denver, Colorado, which is a pretty big city in the nation, and we only had one team, one women’s team. And I had been saying for years, there needed to be multiple teams, just because of the growth of the city. And so, finally I had myself, my sister, my mom, and one other friend, and we said, “Let’s do it.” And then people just started flooding in after that, and sponsors were coming in, and it just was a really great move. And there was a lot of apprehension surrounding us breaking off, because people thought that it would cause the other team in Colorado to collapse or fold. But what it did is it had the opposite effect, where they pushed to do recruiting to keep their numbers up. We pushed to bring our numbers up. And by doing so, the two teams have grown the sport by hundreds and hundreds of percent. So, I think this year for our Centennial team, we have about 50 women who have joined. And so, every practice, every training, we get at least one new person. So, we’ve just been growing the sport by exponential numbers. GTR: Isn’t that incredible? And there’s so much to discuss here. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing. How do you think it has empowered the women of Colorado, and I guess throughout America, too, playing Australian rules? SR: Well, it’s interesting because so many women have never played a contact sport at all. And so, I grew up playing rugby, and when I was a teenager, I was shy and bashful and insecure. But when I started playing rugby, I realized how strong I actually was physically and mentally, and it changed my whole mindset. It made me realize what a strong-willed and physically strong person I was, if I could handle being tackled or doing tackling. And so, I went through that metamorphosis when I was 16 years old. And so, now doing this for Australian rules football, we have women coming in. So, we have some rugby players, so they’re not shy of the tackling and the strength- But, we also have a lot of women who haven’t played sports for a long time, because they’re either moms, or there was no path forward after they left college sports. Some women never played team sports. They were runners or swimmers. And so, they came out to this sport timid and afraid and insecure about their abilities to compete in a contact sport. And once we did the first training with tackling, and they realized it wasn’t that bad, and it was really easy to do, and it wasn’t something you were going to get hurt doing right away, all of a sudden their confidence changed, and their empowerment and their feeling of self-worth, everything just totally changed. It was a whole shift in the entire team.
96 THE LAST POST – 2021 TENTH BIRTHDAY EDITION
GTR: Isn’t that wonderful? And I guess if it can help with that realization of inner strength, and obviously, as you say, a metamorphosis in many ways, too, for a lot of women to discover that about themselves, strength to you and the competition for enabling that. What led you to Australian rules in the first place, Sara? SR: So, I left soccer and I joined rugby, and I had known Australian rules football existed from the time I started playing rugby in the early 2000s. Because on Fox Sports World, the footy was on before the rugby, and so I’d always catch the end of footy games. And so, in like the mid-2000s, I actually wanted to switch sports to Australian rules from rugby. And I looked up the teams, and there were no women’s teams at all at that point in the United States. And so, I was disappointed because I thought it was a really neatlooking sport. It required a lot of athleticism, and there just was no option. And as a 19-year-old girl, I didn’t really feel comfortable going out and training with a bunch of men on a men’s team, and I honestly didn’t know if they would accept me onto their team in the first place. So, I just continued with rugby, but always knew footy was there. And then, I had a friend who played for the Denver women’s team. And this was maybe 10 years after I had first looked up the team, and she kept trying to get me to come out. “Come out, come out, come out, come out.” And I would turn her away. I said, “No”, I’m playing rugby. And then finally, one year I said, “Okay, I’ll come give it a try.” Well, that was almost a decade ago, and I never went back to rugby. My parents used to watch AFL in the ‘80s, when it was on ESPN. So, my parents have known about the sport for decades. GTR: Well, they were pleased when you decided to play Australian rules? SR: My mom was thrilled because she knew all about the sport, and she was really excited that I was going to try this, because she had known about it and watched it years before. GTR: And so, do you or your family have a favourite AFL side? SR: Well, I cheer for the Hawks, Hawthorn. Second from the bottom right now. GTR: So, the Centennial Tigers, the team that you formed, how are the Centennial Tigers going, and what sort of group have you got around you there? SR: Well, we just played in our first match ever as a club. Unfortunately... Well, so we started the team in late 2019, where the USAFL season had already ended. And then we started moving forward in 2020, and then COVID just shut everything down. And so, we kept doing things throughout 2020 here and there, when it was safe to do so. And we were doing trainings, but we never got a game in. And then as 2021 started coming around, we started looking at scheduling, and things were still iffy with COVID, but we’ve finally got our first match, and we actually flew 1,300 miles to San Francisco, California, and we played the four-time reigning national champions. They had two VFLW players on the team. They brought in a couple of hot shots from Seattle and Sacramento, and we played four quarters. In the US we usually just play two halves. And so, the scoreboard showed we got slaughtered 60-1, but if you look at the scoring, by the time we hit the third quarter, we held them to one goal on the third and one goal in the fourth. So, 71% of the women who played in that game, the first game ever for the Tigers, was their first game ever playing footy. Let’s see, about a quarter of the team was experienced, with at least one
