The 2024 AFLW season , continuing a variety of sports that were once considered only for men.
Authors
Paul Bowell
Lecturer, Swinburne University of Technology
Ekaterina Pechenkina
Research fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
Emma Sherry
Professor and Dean, RMIT University
Paul Scifleet
Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, Swinburne University of Technology
This growth has resulted in more women athletes entering elite sporting structures for the first time.
However, these environments are often designed for men.
AFLW footballers, for example, are asked to train and prepare like their AFL peers, including tracking their physical activities through digital performance monitoring.
This can be problematic, because most women athletes are still , balancing their sporting commitments with work or caregiving responsibilities.
This prompted us to AFLW players’ comfort with digital performance tracking.
We found many were uncomfortable with some or many aspects of clubs’ digital performance monitoring programs, which can impact tracking effectiveness while adversely affecting the players.
Technology and elite sport
Digital performance monitoring, like GPS tracking, is now .
GPS tracking can monitor athletes’ during training and in games.
Sporting teams use this data to compare and contrast athlete performances while managing workloads in the hope of preventing injury.
GPS tracking guides training schedules, is used for performance measuring and is used for to manage or prevent injuries.
In the AFLW, all players wear a GPS monitor during training sessions and games.
These data are then shared among the team – a sport scientist or coach will often display the data in the changerooms or share it through collective messaging groups.
They will then often rank the footballers’ metrics from fastest to slowest or the most to the fewest kilometres run.
This can create a highly competitive atmosphere that can be confronting for athletes who are new to elite sporting environments.
The data are also seen as objective and unquestionable – no asterisks are attached to a player, for example, who had worked a 12-hour shift before training, which affected their outputs.
AFLW: emerging history and semi-professionalism
The AFLW is the elite women’s Australian rules football competition.
Founded in 2017 with eight clubs, .
There is a mix of athletes playing in the AFLW.
Most come from junior development pathways. Some, though, are elite athletes from other sports, like Fremantle’s , who represented Australia in netball.
Most AFLW footballers are considered semi-professional. This means they need to balance work, study, caregiving or other responsibilities with their sporting careers.
In 2023, the average AFLW footballer’s wage was around , well below .
So most AFLW players need to continue working while playing football.
Another complexity is that most AFLW footballers receive short half-year contracts and have few job prospects within the sport beyond their playing careers.
While AFLW clubs operate in conjunction with the men’s program, and the players have access to similar elite facilities, there is a lack of infrastructural support for the players, such as full-time access to coaches, their clubs, sport scientists, or dietitians.
The footballers are expected to perform as elite athletes, such as limited access, support and compensation.
These conditions led us to see if this affected how AFLW footballers used and experienced digital performance monitoring and whether being semi-professional athletes affected their willingness to engage in digital performance monitoring and the data produced.
What our research revealed
We discovered many AFLW footballers find digital performance monitoring a that reminds them they are outsiders to the game of Australian rules.
Several factors affect a player’s tracking data. These include personal situations such as caregiving or working responsibilities, lack of sleep, menstruation, and how the wearable device fits – a particular issue when devices .
However, when the athlete reads these data, it is void of these subjectivities and presented objectively – “you just didn’t run fast enough” – often negatively impacting the athlete’s sporting experiences.
This highlights ongoing issues for women athletes entering emerging sporting environments like the AFLW.
In short, the players are expected to perform as elite athletes, but their realities as semi-professional athletes are not considered.
A guide for teams
Our study has underscored a critical reality: semi-professional women athletes’ engagement with digital performance monitoring is inherently subjective and complex.
Player-centred policies for digital performance monitoring are crucial.
We suggest clubs look to improve in this area with five key focuses:
communication of purpose, with encouraged, open two-way dialogue, allowing athletes to receive and seek timely feedback
offer a clear understanding of what is tracked, why, and how that data is used and not used
performance monitoring should be proportional, meeting the club’s, and player’s, needs
transparent data-sharing practices, which consider and include the subjective factors unique to semi-professional athletes
increased wearability: ensuring gender-appropriate wearables that fit a variety of body shapes are available to all athletes.
A player-centred framework can help AFLW clubs maximise their sizeable investment in digital performance monitoring by offering each footballer the best possible chance of reaching their full physical potential.
More importantly, semi-professional women athletes will be empowered to not only participate but thrive in elite sporting competitions.
