Celebrating Sal Rees, Footy Legend

This is a dispatch from Kasey Symons,Global Ambassador for Project: Wander Bra, based in Australia. Our ambassadors provide global perspectives on the impact of sports, in partnership with the Women’s Sports Foundation. Follow Kasey’s adventures @kasey_writes

The Australian women’s Aussie rules football community lost a legend just before Christmas. 

Sal Rees, a trailblazer of the game, suffered a brain aneurysm and passed away surrounded by her loved ones, including her wife Barb.

https://x.com/aflwomens/status/1871313655180267865 

Now of course many won’t know Sal’s name in the United States. And as it goes in women’s sports sadly, many still don’t know her name in Australia outside of the women’s footy community. But let me tell you a little something about this most incredible woman. 

Sal was a powerhouse and known to many in women’s footy as well as in the many other sports she played and volunteered in, including cricket, soccer and eight-ball. She was the first President of the Darebin Falcons, a significant sporting club in the development of women’s sport in the state of Victoria. Sal, with a small group of women, essentially founded and saved that club. 

Their former club, the Fairfield Falcons are on the verge of folding after three seasons in the Victorian Women’s Football League (VWFL), after first forming in 1987. A group of local women resurrected the Fairfield team and played the 1990 VWFL season affiliated with the men’s club. Then the women of the Fairfield Falcons struck out on their own and became the only standalone women’s club in the VWFL. The Darebin Falcons were born.

In the current landscape of women’s Australian rules football, the national competition (The AFLW) will play its tenth season in 2025. That would not have been possible without clubs like Darebin leading the way for decades in amateur competitions, supporting women’s sport, skill development and creating safe and inclusive communities. Women like Sal built the AFLW. We need to remember and treasure that.

Sal was the first player to reach 200 games in the VFLW (formally VWFL), and was awarded life membership. She took on many volunteer roles and was still a very active part of community sport, supporting women’s footy and giving her time and energy to the game she loved right up until the end.

An absolutely wild story about Sal that made waves in the 90s was when in 1995 she nominated for the men's AFL national draft. This. Was. Huge. 

Sal saw an opportunity to make some noise for women’s footy. She put her name in for Australia’s national football league draft because, at the time, there were no rules about women not entering as, of course, it was assumed the competition only served men.

“Back then women’s football looked totally different to how it does now, we really struggled to get any kind of publicity,” Sal said on the Cutting Oranges podcast back in 2021. “There were a lot of articles in the media that were quite negative and generally people’s concept was that women shouldn’t be playing football. We loved playing, we worked hard on our skills and fitness, and with the draft coming up I thought I’m going to nominate for this just to put it out there.”

The media went crazy for this story and Sal’s face was everywhere. It was an incredibly brave thing to do as the response to this move was not always kind and it put Sal in a vulnerable position. But she knew it was something worth doing to get more people to talk about women in sport.

“The message was that women do play football and we needed to be heard and taken seriously. It started a huge discussion around women and what their role is in football.”

Sal drew attention to the limited opportunities for women in football and started a bigger conversation. This was an incredibly brave step to take and we will be forever grateful to Sal for being an amazing leader and champion for women in sport.

Of course, this prompted the AFL to amend its draft rules to ensure no women could make a similar stunt in, but we all remember what Sal did to pave the way for women’s football to grow and become what it is today.

If you want to learn more about Sal I can’t recommend this episode of “Cutting Oranges” with Darcy Vescio enough. It is a beautiful chat between Darcy, who was a former Darebin Falcons player who went on to become one of the AFLW’s biggest stars, and Sal.

People like Sal are the lifeblood of women’s sport. While some women’s sports are experiencing exciting growth, sponsorship and media attention, many more rely on the trailblazers doing things as volunteers at grassroots level to grow the game. And even our biggest sports only exist because of the people who kept pushing when it wasn’t popular.

Sal will be greatly missed here in our women’s sporting community, but her legacy will live on in so many ways. At her funeral service, the crowd spilled out of the room and into the courtyard with many watching outside on screens. Such is the impact she had on so many lives.

I’m sure there are many women like Sal in the States who have done or are doing similar things. These are the legacies and stories we need to cherish and celebrate. So many are lost to history because women’s sport wasn’t valued at the time and their stories weren’t recorded. 

It’s our responsibility to not only enjoy the fruits of their labour by watching and attending the amazing array of women’s sports we have available to us now, but to also honour them and remember all that was done to get us where we are today by people pushing boundaries and never backing down. People like the amazing Sal Rees.

Header image by Simon O'Dwyer, via The Age