Legends Football League Australia & The Ladies Gridiron League

Joining Legends Football League Australia

After Visual Entertainment Group and McGuire Media, as the VHS and DVD landscape faded, I moved into Legends Football League Australia (originally the Lingerie Football League). I bought a Canon 6D, ramped up production, and brought a friend on to help. My responsibilities grew to cover all media and marketing for the Victoria Maidens: photo shoots, media appearances, content, and marketing the players as athletes, all while I was still learning the game myself.

LFL Australia ran its first season in 2013, drawing attendances 30 per cent above projections at NRL and AFL stadiums, with the Maidens playing out of AAMI Park. The league's Seven Network deal put full games on 7mate in HD, reaching a national audience of around 300,000 viewers. That was notable at the time: even the AFL wasn't broadcasting in HD yet, and it was a first for a women's sport in Australia.

When the season was pulled

But when Seven didn't renew for a second season, LFL Australia's founder and owner, Mitchell Mortaza, emailed players and coaches on 28 September 2014 to cancel the 2014/15 season outright, just under two weeks before its scheduled 11 October kick-off at Sydney's Pirtek Stadium, and after clubs had already sold tickets.

Working inside the business on video production and social media put me close enough to see the trouble coming before it went public. The Ladies Gridiron League wasn't something we invented from scratch in 2014. The organisation had existed since 2012, originally set up as a planned feeder league for LFL's Australian expansion, a partnership that fell through before LFL's first season and left it dormant. Once it was clear LFL's US owners might not commit to a second season, a group of us built a plan to take the dormant Ladies Gridiron League over as our fallback option, with an April 2015 launch pencilled in. The moment LFL's season was officially called off, we brought that plan forward, took over its leadership, and started signing up the players and teams LFL had left stranded. NSW Surge, one of LFL's founding clubs, re-signed within days as the Sydney Surge. "Our Surge family... were devastated by the cancellation of the 2014 LFL season," head coach Jason Gaffey said at the time. "We can't wait to hit the field against all of our old LFL sister teams in what is shaping up to be an awesome competition."

As LGL's spokesman at launch, I told the Daily Telegraph: "We are not here to be a replacement for the LFL, we are a new league that's here to promote women's football here in Australia and focus on the athleticism of our players." We moved the whole competition forward from its planned April 2015 start to launch before the end of 2014, rebuilding it as a full-contact, 7-a-side competition we owned and ran ourselves, independent of the US organisation.

Building it out

I secured a national broadcast deal with FOXTEL's Aurora Community Channel and negotiated venue deals with QSAC, nib Stadium and Viking Park. The league grew to six teams: the Adelaide Phoenix, Brisbane Blaze, Canberra Mustangs, Melbourne Maidens, Sydney Sirens and West Coast Angels. Along the way I helped take it from that standing start to a stadium event alongside NFL great Terrell Owens and AFL legends including Corey McKernan, Wayne Carey, Jonathan Brown, Brendan Fevola and Nick Maxwell.

In December 2014, just months after launch, the league ran the first women's tackle football Tri-Nations series held in Australia, at the State Netball and Hockey Centre in Parkville, Victoria, with New Zealand, the USA and Australia competing. In February 2016, the West Coast Angels won the league's first Grand Final, defeating the Adelaide Phoenix 36–28 at City Mazda Stadium in Richmond, South Australia.

Gridiron Girl

I also wrote, directed and produced Gridiron Girl, a seven-part web series following the league and its players, released alongside the Aurora broadcasts.

The legacy

The league's history is now documented independently on Wikipedia, and both the LFL collapse and the league that replaced it were covered by Australian sports and news outlets at the time. It remains the project I'm most often asked about, and the one I'm proudest of building out of someone else's collapse.

Read the Ladies Gridiron League on Wikipedia →

The Daily Telegraph on LFL's cancellation and LGL's launch, 3 October 2014 →

The Philippine Times on the Tri-Nations series →

The Roar on LFL Australia's cancellation →

Australasian Leisure Management on what came next →