The club that had to invent itself twice

The Darebin Falcons began life as the Fairfield Falcons, and very nearly did not survive their first few years. The club ran out of players, ran out of money, and by the end of the decade had effectively stopped.

A group of local women picked it up and restarted it in 1990, not as a revival of something famous, because it was not famous, but because they wanted somewhere to play.

By the mid-nineties they were the only independent women's club left in the Victorian Women's Football League, and had moved to McDonell Park in Northcote with the council's support.

They then did something no club in the country had done. Having established a football side, they added soccer, becoming the first women's sports club in Australia to field teams in both codes. Cricket followed in the early 2000s. Eight-ball came after a move to AH Capp Reserve in West Preston.

Between 2006 and 2011 the Falcons won sixty-five consecutive games. They won five premierships in a row, then did it again. When the AFL held its first women's draft in 2013, ten Falcons were taken, more than from any other club in the country. Daisy Pearce came through Darebin, and went number one in the inaugural AFLW draft. So did Katie Brennan and Darcy Vescio.

And here is the awkward part, which the club is open about: doing all of that has made life harder. Every rival in the VFL Women's competition now has an AFL club behind it. The Falcons are still the only independent side in the league, still volunteers, still competing against organisations that recruit the players they develop.

There are now more than seven hundred and fifty players at the club, across juniors, seniors and masters.