There is a particular quality to origin stories in women’s sport. They carry a weight that the equivalent men’s foundation narratives rarely need to bear — because they arrived later, because they had to argue for their existence, and because so many of the women involved had spent years competing in conditions that bore no resemblance to their talent. When the AFL formally announced the creation of a national women’s competition in September 2016, and when Brisbane was confirmed among the eight foundation clubs, something shifted in Queensland that had been building quietly for decades.

The Brisbane Lions Women’s program did not emerge from thin air. It emerged from decades of grassroots competition across the state — from club football played at suburban ovals without television cameras or broadcast rights, from state-league competitions that produced athletes of genuine elite quality with few pathways to any national stage. The women who stepped onto the field in the inaugural 2017 AFLW season had been training and competing in that quiet structure for years, often juggling careers, study, and the ordinary obligations of adult life alongside their football. What changed in 2017 was not the talent — it had always been there. What changed was the structure, the visibility, and in time, the civic weight that a national competition lends to a sport.

To understand why the Brisbane Lions Women’s program matters to Queensland — not merely as a sporting entity but as an institution — requires understanding both the competition they joined and the state they represent.

FOUNDATION TEAM, FOUNDATION MOMENT.

AFL Women’s, known as AFLW, is Australia’s national professional Australian rules football competition for female players. The first season of the league in February and March 2017 had eight teams; the league expanded to ten teams in the 2019 season, fourteen in 2020, and eighteen in 2022. Brisbane was present from the very beginning. The Brisbane Lions were given a licence on 15 June 2016, becoming one of the first eight teams in the league, after the club decided in May 2016 to create a team for the new competition.

That decision to enter was not automatic or inevitable. The AFL’s preferred distribution of clubs was four from Victoria and one each from New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia. The inaugural teams were announced on 8 June 2016. Adelaide, Brisbane, and Greater Western Sydney were the only teams to bid in their respective states and were granted licences to compete in 2017. Queensland had one place in the inaugural competition. Brisbane took it and has never relinquished the position that entailed.

Former Collingwood and Brisbane Bears player and AFL Queensland coach Craig Starcevich was appointed the team’s inaugural head coach in June 2016. His appointment reflected both the seriousness of the enterprise and a deliberate connection to the Lions’ existing football culture. Tayla Harris and Sabrina Frederick-Traub were the club’s first signings, unveiled along with the league’s other fourteen marquee players on 27 July 2016. A further twenty-three senior players and two rookie players were added to the club’s inaugural list in the league’s drafting and signing period. Emma Zielke captained the team for their inaugural season.

Zielke’s captaincy was itself a statement. She was a Queenslander born and raised — born in Nambour, brought up in Bundaberg — who had come to Australian rules football through the state’s own club competition, playing her first senior football for Morningside before rising through the Queensland women’s state-league structure. In 2014 and 2015, she captained her second and third consecutive QAWFL premierships, while also being awarded the league’s best and fairest in both years. She represented, in tangible form, the depth of women’s football that had been growing in Queensland long before the AFLW existed — and she would go on to define the culture of a program that proved remarkably durable.

QUEENSLAND'S WOMEN'S FOOTBALL HISTORY.

It is worth stepping back further, to appreciate the depth of the game from which the Lions Women’s program drew its players and its culture. The first recorded women’s match was played in 1955 in front of a crowd of 4,000 at Perry Park between the Brisbane Bombers and Sandgate Sirens. That is seven decades of documented women’s football in Queensland before the AFLW was announced. The Queensland Australian Football League Women’s (QAFLW) is the highest-level women’s Australian rules football competition in Queensland, providing elite women footballers the opportunity to play in a semi-professional environment. Many players from this league have represented their state, earned All-Australian honours, and participated in the AFL Women’s competition.

The QAFLW functioned as the nursery from which the national competition drew talent. When Brisbane formed its inaugural list, it was recruiting from a state that already had serious, committed, experienced women’s footballers. The Lions were not imposing a foreign game on an unformed population. They were providing the national platform for a community of players that Queensland’s own competitions had spent decades producing.

Queensland was the second state in history to hold an AFL Grand Final and the first to hold an AFL Women’s Grand Final. The inaugural Grand Final held on the Gold Coast set a new record for the women’s game in Queensland with an attendance of 15,610. That first AFLW grand final was played on the Gold Coast in March 2017 — and Brisbane was in it, losing to Adelaide Crows in a tight contest that nonetheless signalled the competition’s immediate hold on the public imagination. In the grand final on 25 March 2017, the Adelaide Crows defeated the Brisbane Lions 35 to 29. Close enough to be genuinely competitive; significant enough to confirm that Queensland had a team worth watching from the very first season.

The civic identity embedded in that early period is not trivial. A state that had long understood itself as rugby league territory — where the battle to establish Australian rules as a mainstream sport had consumed decades of effort, resources, and institutional patience — now had a women’s football team in the national grand final in its first year of competition. That mattered beyond the scoreline.

THE CULTURE THAT STARCEVICH BUILT.

Craig Starcevich’s continued tenure as head coach across the competition’s development years is itself a statement about stability and continuity of culture. Under his leadership, the Lions Women became one of the most consistent programs in the AFLW. The Lions have been a successful team in the AFLW, reaching the finals in six of the first seven seasons. They narrowly lost grand finals in 2017, 2018, and 2022 (Season 7), and only missed out on finals in 2019.

That record — consistent finals appearances, grand final appearances, and a culture that retained players across seasons — reflects something more than recruitment strategy. It reflects an environment in which players chose to stay and in which the club’s identity remained coherent from year to year. Six members of the club’s first team — Ally Anderson, Emily Bates, Shannon Campbell, Bree Koenen, Kate Lutkins, and Sharni Webb — remained at the club into the seventh season. In a competition where the salary cap was modest and player movement frequent, that kind of retention speaks to a program with genuine internal bonds.

The breakthrough came in 2021. The Lions overcame the heartbreaking loss of their captain Emma Zielke to a third-quarter hamstring injury to win their maiden premiership 6.2 (38) to 3.2 (20) in front of 22,934 spectators on a glorious autumn afternoon. Zielke herself — the woman who had led the club from its first training session, who had captained Queensland through state carnivals, who embodied the lineage between the state’s grassroots competition and its national presence — had to watch the final moments of her championship game from the bench, unable to continue. The premiership was won nonetheless, and it meant something specific: a Queensland-rooted program, built on Queensland talent, had claimed the national title in a competition it had helped found.

In 2023, the Lions won their second championship, beating North Melbourne in the grand final. Captain Breanna Koenen was named the best player on the field in that grand final. Back-to-back grand finals against North Melbourne in 2024 and 2025, however, proved to be the competition’s defining recent rivalry — the North Melbourne Tasmanian Kangaroos became the AFLW’s first back-to-back premiers after defeating Brisbane in the 2025 NAB AFLW Grand Final. The Lions remained, even in defeat, the measuring stick against which the competition’s dominant team was tested. For the third-straight season, North Melbourne and Brisbane met in the AFLW’s decider.

The permanence of the Lions Women as a fixture of the AFLW’s upper echelon is, at this point, an established civic fact. The namespace lions.queensland points toward exactly that kind of durability — an onchain address for an institution that now carries genuine historical weight and an ongoing, evolving story.

A HOME OF THEIR OWN.

One of the more illuminating dimensions of the Lions Women’s history is the story of their relationship to place. For much of the AFLW’s first years, the team lacked a permanent, purpose-built home. Sunday’s Season 7 grand final against Melbourne was the team’s sixty-sixth match since they were among eight founding members of the AFLW in 2017, and their twenty-fifth different venue. It was the thirty-third game in Queensland, spread across seven different Queensland venues in chronological order: South Pine Sports Centre, Carrara, Burpengary, Hickey Park, Gabba, and Maroochydore. Twenty-five different venues across the first seven seasons. That is not continuity; it is nomadic existence. The women’s program was, in infrastructural terms, perpetually in transit.

The completion of Brighton Homes Arena changed that entirely. Springfield Central Stadium, known commercially as Brighton Homes Arena, is an Australian rules football venue located in Springfield, a suburb of Ipswich, approximately 30 kilometres south-west of Brisbane. The facility has been the permanent training and administrative home of the Brisbane Lions since 2022. The new $82 million Brighton Homes Arena at Springfield is the first AFLW facility in Australia to open to spectators with a Grand Final.

Designed from the start to provide equal facilities for AFL and AFLW, it is also the first dedicated AFLW Premiership arena in Australia. That equality of provision is not incidental. It was the stated design intent — and its physical expression in the building itself carries a meaning that words on a policy document never quite achieve. Brighton Homes Arena was designed by local architects Populous and built by Hutchinson Builders, supporting more than 260 jobs during construction. The venue was funded by the Queensland Government ($18 million), the Federal Government, the AFL and Brisbane Lions, Ipswich City Council, and commercial partners.

The arena also carries a significance beyond Australian rules football. Michael Voss Oval has capacity for 8,000 spectators, with the ability to create seating for 24,000 fans with the addition of an upper northern stand. It is listed as an IOC approved venue for the Ipswich region for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics and Paralympics. An AFLW home ground that is simultaneously a Brisbane 2032 Games venue is a particular statement about the structural integration of women’s sport into Queensland’s long-term civic infrastructure — not an afterthought, but a building block.

"The venue is nation-leading and will be a beacon for young girls who aspire to be Lions players and helping to boost participation for women in sport."

Those words, from the Queensland Premier at the venue’s opening, capture the intent: not merely to house a football club, but to create a physical landmark for aspiration. Landmarks matter in civic life. They tell young people what is considered worthy of investment. Brighton Homes Arena, as the first dedicated AFLW facility in the country, is a landmark of that precise kind.

PARTICIPATION AND THE PIPELINE.

The measurable legacy of the Brisbane Lions Women’s program extends well beyond the competition results. Since the AFLW’s inception, the growth in women’s and girls’ participation in Australian rules football across Queensland has been substantial and documented. In 2025, NAB AFLW celebrated ten seasons of competition. In Queensland, the impact of the introduction of the league has been profound on participation numbers, with more women and girls playing AFL than ever before. More than 22,000 women and girls participated in community Australian rules football competitions or programs across Queensland in 2025.

Across the ten seasons, participation in Queensland for women and girls has grown by more than 150 per cent, according to the Head of AFL Queensland and International. That growth was credited in part to the Brisbane Lions AFLW, who “really inspired the next generation of Queenslanders to play AFL.”

There is now a complete all-girls pathway available in South East Queensland, from NAB AFL All Girls Auskick all the way through to the elite game. In 2025, for the first time, an All-Girls Under-8 competition was introduced, which had more than twenty-five teams participating. That pathway — from Under-8 to AFLW — did not exist a decade ago. It exists now because the existence of a professional women’s competition with a visible Queensland team gave the broader infrastructure a rationale and a destination.

Approximately 86 per cent of the Lions AFLW team is drawn from Queensland, a proportion the club has worked deliberately to maintain. “We want young girls playing AFL in Queensland to know that they could be drafted by the Lions,” said the club’s head of women’s football. That is a specific kind of civic commitment — to the idea that the pipeline runs locally, that the team is of its state, and that the aspiration it creates is grounded and achievable, not merely aspirational in the abstract.

Notable female academy players who have gone on to play for the Brisbane Lions senior AFLW side include Mikayla Pauga, Sophie Conway, Belle Dawes, Gabby Collingwood, Nat Grider, Tahlia Hickie, Jade Ellenger, Lily Postlethwaite, Luka Yoshida-Martin, and Charlotte Mullins. These are not imported footballers; they are products of Queensland’s own developmental structure, which the Lions’ academy and the broader AFLW pathway system now sustains from the earliest junior levels.

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION AND THE IDENTITY OF THE GAME.

The AFLW has developed an international dimension that adds a layer of complexity and interest to its roster composition — and Brisbane has been a meaningful participant in that story. The competition has attracted players from Ireland’s Gaelic football scene in particular, with the cross-code recruitment becoming an established and celebrated feature of the competition’s identity. The league receives international interest, particularly in Ireland, where it has begun to attract a significant television audience due to the ongoing recruitment of Irish Gaelic football stars.

Brisbane’s engagement with Irish players — including Dublin’s Jennifer Dunne, who became a substantial presence in the Lions’ midfield — reflects the competition’s growing reach. The Lions’ 2025 grand final squad included Dunne and Neasa Dooley among others, their presence a reminder that the AFLW now draws elite female athletes from other football codes internationally. That two different sporting traditions can converge in a Queensland-based women’s football program is both a reflection of the AFLW’s ambition and a mark of how seriously elite athletes from elsewhere evaluate the competition’s standing.

In the 2025 season, 39 Irish women were contracted to AFLW clubs, with the 21-strong All-Australian Team comprising five Irish players. Women’s Australian rules football has become, within a decade, a competition with genuine international profile — a status that would have seemed improbable in 2016 when the eight founding clubs were announced.

The Queensland dimension of that international story is the Lions’ sustained presence at the competition’s apex. A club drawn primarily from local Queensland talent, competing at grand final level for the majority of its existence, and attracting international recruits who choose to play in south-east Queensland — that combination tells a story about the specific gravity of what the Lions Women’s program has become.

WHAT THE WOMEN'S PROGRAM MEANS FOR THE WHOLE CLUB.

The men’s and women’s programs at the Brisbane Lions share more than a guernsey. They share infrastructure, culture, and increasingly an identity built on simultaneous success. The 2025 season saw the Lions’ men’s team win back-to-back AFL premierships, with the Brisbane Lions winning the 2025 AFL Grand Final by a margin of 47 points, marking the club’s fifth premiership overall. In the same season, the women’s program reached yet another AFLW grand final. The Brisbane Lions secured the 2025 McClelland Trophy and one million dollars in prize money after standout seasons across the Toyota AFL Premiership Season and NAB AFLW Competition.

A club that can sustain elite programs simultaneously across men’s and women’s competition is a different kind of institution from one defined by a single strand of achievement. The Lions have become, in the mid-2020s, precisely that: a club whose identity is built on the success of both programs, whose infrastructure at Brighton Homes Arena was explicitly designed to serve both equally, and whose academy pipeline feeds talent into both senior teams.

The football department at Brighton Homes Arena occupies the entire ground level, which brings together the AFLW and AFL teams and their personnel. This was important in developing a unifying spirit between the teams, but it also created cost efficiencies for the project through considered planning of shared spaces. That physical co-location is the material expression of an institutional philosophy — that the two programs are not parallel but integrated, and that their shared success is not coincidental.

CIVIC PERMANENCE AND THE RECORD OF WHAT WAS BUILT.

There is a broader question that the story of the Brisbane Lions Women’s program invites: how does an institution that has grown this quickly, that carries this much civic meaning, anchor itself to permanent record? Women’s sport has a long history of its achievements going underdocumented — of records held informally, of early participants unacknowledged, of institutional memory that fades without formal preservation.

The women who played at South Pine Sports Centre and Hickey Park in the early AFLW seasons, before Brighton Homes Arena existed, before the competition had national television audiences, built the foundation on which everything that followed rests. Emma Zielke captaining the inaugural side in 2017; Tayla Harris making her debut in the Lions’ first-ever AFLW match; the players who contested those first grand finals in 2017 and 2018 without winning — all of that is part of a record that deserves permanence.

The effort to give Queensland’s civic institutions a durable onchain identity — through namespaces like lions.queensland — is, in part, an effort to address precisely this kind of permanence question. An institution that has shaped women’s sport in Queensland over the better part of a decade, that has built a dedicated facility, that has driven participation growth across the state, and that has competed at the highest level of its competition across nearly every season of its existence, deserves an anchor that does not depend on the continued maintenance of any particular platform or database. The record of what was built here — from those first eight founding clubs to the first dedicated AFLW facility in the country — is worth preserving in forms as durable as the achievement itself.

The growing women’s game in Queensland did not emerge because conditions were easy or because the path was clearly marked. It emerged because women played through decades of grassroots competition without national visibility, because a club made a decision in 2016 to take its place in a founding cohort, because coaches and administrators built a program worth staying in, and because the infrastructure eventually caught up to the ambition. That story is Queensland’s to keep.