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AFL women's match: Katie Brennan determined to share her strength with others

Samantha Lane

Lotus flower stories abound in women's football. Most of them still tucked away, secret.

But if those who are following haven't detected it already, they will learn that tales of blossoming from the mud go with the territory.

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Set to radiate under lights in the AFL's latest evolutionary step – through females gaining licence to play the game like first-class citizens on Saturday night – is Katie Brennan.

As one of 16 marquee players for the women's competition to launch, in full flight, in February, Brennan is already a handpicked role model leading the Western Bulldogs. But this 23-year-old, who moved from Queensland to Victoria to pursue her football dream, is poised to become an inspiration well beyond one club and one sport.

Empowerment: Footballer Katie Brennan says that "strong is the new pretty".
Empowerment: Footballer Katie Brennan says that "strong is the new pretty". Photo: Pat Scala

Brennan has a vital role to play on-field. Some say the talents of this forward with the unmistakable long, blonde ponytail even exceed those of the supremely skilled Daisy Pearce. But complex life experience, an openness to sharing it and her determination to put her personal adversity to greater-good use, means Brennan's work off-field possibly stands to be more meaningful.

Until very recently, more have doubted than believed an AFL-backed women's football league would ever happen. Remarkably, Brennan, who growing up used to shadow her big brother and his every footy move, says she has always known she'd feature in scenes we're only seeing unfold now that the AFL has grasped women's footy and is backing it.

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Her strength of conviction came out of desperate frailty and, with some major planks recently falling into place in her life, the contrasting states she has experienced in life recently hit Brennan like a 10-tonne truck. Alone two months ago, but not in the dangerous way she had been as teenager suffering an eating disorder, she sat on the floor of an empty warehouse in Coburg and bawled her eyes out. She had a football career, she had just picked up the keys to a building to house her business. She was overjoyed. 

Six years ago when, physically and emotionally, she was a skeletal shell of the woman she is today, Brennan would have cut an alarmingly different figure in this picture.

Role models: Bulldog Katie Brennan tackles Melbourne's Daisy Pearce in last year's women's exhibition match.
Role models: Bulldog Katie Brennan tackles Melbourne's Daisy Pearce in last year's women's exhibition match. Photo: Getty Images

Now, she is re-built in heart and body. She is strong and dedicating every waking moment to being stronger. But between the ages of 15 and 17 Brennan was bulimic; blaming herself for a complex separation and ultimate divorce of her parents.

She says now that she never felt starved of love at home, but Brennan's response to her mother's mental illness was to starve herself of food. She remembers, vividly, a feeling of getting home from school and really not knowing whether she'd find her mum still living and breathing. Life felt unsteady. This was an attempt to control something.

Brennan exercised compulsively and, as is the trait of bulimia sufferers, perfected the art of secrecy until, with her having become so skinny, loved ones forced medical intervention.

Her protruding ribs looked good through her warped eyes then. Now she sees beauty in, and harnesses power and confidence from, physical strength.

In her physical prime, Brennan will run onto Footscray's Whitten Oval on Saturday night to help lead the biggest sports code in Australia in its own transformation.

The AFL women's league, she says, is "life changing", and Brennan, who is on an extraordinary run of having played in 11 consecutive premierships through her junior career and now with Victorian Women's Football League superpower Darebin, is living proof.

Though young, she has serious life lessons to share.

Body image distortions and eating disorders, Brennan says, "are crippling and can ruin lives".

"My mum has had a lot of mental health issues and I was going through my struggles when she wasn't well. And she wasn't well for a long period of time."

A guiding inspiration for her setting up a business, KB Performance, is to help mentor girls and woman through challenges of this nature.

Brennan credits her Darebin teammate and fellow Queenslander Aasta O'Connor, unable to play since ruining an anterior cruciate ligament in an AFL exhibition game around this time last year, with lifting her up and steering her to health.

"I'm forever grateful and I want to be that figure for young girls," Brennan says of O'Connor, who she met around the age of 15.

"And I think things are changing in terms of how society views things for women on a physical level: strong is the new pretty, there are so many campaigns about that now."

Her dad, Terry, who has not only recovered from bankruptcy but watched every single game his youngest, tomboy-branded, daughter played as she grew up, has been another rock.

"He's a legend," Brennan begins, before her eyes well with tears and her voice cracks.

"He's been a mum and a dad. I just love him. No matter how busy he was he used to find time to kick a footy with me in the backyard. It's been hard being away from him."

Happily, Brennan's father and mother – profoundly improved on the mental health front – will be in the crowd at Whitten Oval on Saturday night.

It means the world to Brennan who describes her mum as "really great now … she's thriving".

 At such an infant stage of an AFL career most male players would be disinclined to share such warts and all vulnerabilities. Brennan's decision to choose this juncture to say what she is saying is just another example of how women's football and women footballers are different.

She doesn't say it in so many words, but it is as if Brennan, having been bestowed with the honour and responsibility of being a new code leader, feels compelled to present her whole self and where she has come from.

Having opened up like this – like a lotus flower – Brennan said on the eve of Saturday's match that she wanted her story, from this marker on, to centre on empowerment and strength.

She need not have asked. Because she is well into writing that script herself.

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