Rhiannon with Nanna May
This year , as she did last year , she will fly to Brisbane for every weekend she isn ’ t required at work to play in the big city AFL competition , hoping to be picked up by the Brisbane Lions for the “ big league ”. Last year , she played for the Zillmere Eagles on the weekends , and , in Townsville , the Hermit Park Tigers in short-form games , often with not enough players to fill all the positions on the field on each side on Wednesday nights . Recognised by Army as an elite sportsperson , she was given dispensation to travel at her own expense to Brisbane each weekend . And the Hermit Park club rallied round and fundraised to help with travel costs . She played six games last year until a tackle went wrong and she broke her finger when it got stuck in an opposition player ’ s armpit . She dismissed it as just another jarred finger and continued playing for three weeks until an Xray plainly showed the break and the damage done subsequently as the pieces of bone healed overlapped , shortening and twisting the finger . It kept her out of footy and any sort of upper-body training requiring any form of gripping for the rest of the year . Back to full fitness she will this year play for Queensland University alongside good friend
and Army AFL coach WO2 Georgia Jones . It ’ s a far cry from the rough and tumble games she played in Darwin , and she hopes it will pay off in October when draft day rolls around again . “ Footy ” in Normanton , Katherine and Cairns where she grew up was always rugby league , Aussie rules was , at best , a curiosity . “ My whole family are big rugby league heads , never even watched AFL ,” Rhiannon said . But she got involved in Auskick when she was 12 or 13 years old and loved it . A real tomboy , she had no difficulty playing Auskick on weekends , and rugby league in the backyard every afternoon . “ I didn ’ t like individual sports much when I was growing up , although I was good at swimming and athletics ,” she said . “ I started getting pretty fair dinkum about footy [ Aussie rules ] when I was about 13-years-old , I think .” She must have been reasonably fair dinkum , because when she was just 14 years old , she was picked in the Northern Territory ’ s squad , the NT Kites , to play in the national women ’ s championship . “ It was pretty overwhelming . A couple of games , I actually got selected to play , it was such a blur ,” she said .
96 | FEBRUARY 2017