Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 27 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
The inaugural season of the AFL National Women’s League saw some brutal contests, some soaring speckies and hundreds of eager fans turned away at the gates. Within a matter of weeks, a cohort of superb Australian athletes rocketed from relative unknowns to household names. The season spurred a revolution in girl’s and women’s participation in amateur Australian Rules competitions across the country.
For the AFLW 2018 season, the talent pool has deepened, competition has intensified and the stakes are higher, following the league’s first trade and draft period. The women’s game is evolving rapidly, trialling new rules and refining playing standards.
On Saturday March 24 the top AFLW teams will face off for the 2018 premiership. The following Tuesday, this lineup of experienced Australian Rules journalists (and fans) will unpack the highs and lows of the year in women’s footy. They’ll share their insights and predictions on the future of the game ... and possibly their club songs, depending on the outcome of the Grand Final.
This event will be Auslan interpreted.
Readings will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Sam Lane
An award winning journalist for the Age newspaper who specialises in AFL, Olympic and cycling, Samantha Lane joined Channel Seven’s AFL broadcast team in 2013.
The move followed her ten seasons with Channel 10’s much-loved AFL panel show, Before the Game, where Sam worked with some of Australia’s best known comics.
Now part of the top-rating Saturday night AFL coverage, Sam sits alongside Matthew Richardson, Cameron Ling, Luke Darcy, Mick Molloy and Brian Taylor on the weekly pre-match show. Through the match broadcasts she brings news, views and in- field interviews.
Sam is a two-time Quill award winner from the Melbourne Press Club. In 2010, she won the prize for best sport story of the year. In 2013, her work on the AFL and NRL doping scandals formed part of the Age’s group entry that won the best coverage of an issue or event. Sam’s work on the same topic – again in a team entry with Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Caroline Wilson and Jake Niall – won a Walkley award in 2013.
In 2012 Sam was made Olympics Reporter for the Age, and the London games were the second Olympics she has covered for Fairfax Media. She was also part of the Fairfax team that worked in Beijing, in 2008. After London, Sam was recognised twice at the Australian Sports Commission awards.
Sam was in Paris to report on the finales of the 2012 and 2013 Tours de France, and filed extensively on Cadel Evans’ historic Tour win. She also reported from the 2011 Giro d’Italia for Fairfax.
Sam covered track and road cycling competition at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, and was part of Fairfax’s team for the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
On ABC television’s Agony Aunts, Agony of Life and Agony of Manners series, Sam stood out for her honest reflections on love, loss and life. She regularly appears on Channel 7’s Sunrise program, has contributed to Channel 10’s The Project and co-hosted The Circle.
Her radio experience includes having been a weekly fixture with Gerard Whateley on ABC 774’s Sunday Inquisition. She was also a regular on the When Saturday Comes Program, hosted by Francis Leach, and cut her teeth in radio on 3RRR.
Sam is an ambassador for the Basil Sellers Art Prize and has sat on the advisory committee to the Melbourne Vixens’ board. Whether addressing corporates or kids as a keynote speaker or MC, Sam is a natural and engaging presenter who brings a fresh take to any topic. With a knack of balancing the serious and irreverent, on any given day Sam is as likely to be writing hard-hitting front page news as an insightful feature story.
Sam won the AFL Coaches Association’s media prize (in 2011), and was voted journalist of the year by the AFL Players Association’s in 2007. For her groundbreaking reporting on concussion in the AFL she has won the VicSport media award twice.
Karen Lyon
For more than two decades, Karen Lyon has covered Melbourne and its sports-obsessed culture. She was a political reporter before crossing the boundary line to sport in 1999, and has been covering the world of sport ever since.
Karen has witnessed some of the world’s biggest sporting events for the Age newspaper, and has been a regular contributor the ABC’s sports coverage over the journey. Football, netball, tennis and cricket are her main sporting loves, but she will watch any contest that brings people together.
As well as continuing to freelance as a journalist, Karen teaches Sport Education and Media at the University of Melbourne – a subject that looks at the influences of commerce and media on sport, and asks: does sport drive equality in our society?
Angela Pippos
Angela is an award-winning journalist, presenter, documentary-maker, author and MC.
Her most recent documentary, The Record, follows Australia’s dramatic Women’s T20 World Cup campaign and the audacious bid to fill the MCG for the final on International Women’s Day 2020. The two-part documentary premiered globally on Amazon Prime in March 2021, and had a secondary release on ABC TV. Angela co-wrote and co-produced the film. Her next documentary idea is bubbling away.
Angela is a co-host on Broad Radio - a live-streamed radio show by and for women.
She also writes regular columns about sport and culture for a number of publications and is a tireless campaigner for gender equality in sport and society. In fact, her most recent book, Breaking The Mould – Taking a Hammer to Sexism in Sport made the Grattan Institute’s ‘Prime Minister’s Summer Reading list’, The Australia Institute’s ‘Essential Reading List’ and is on its third reprint.
Angela is a proud ambassador of the Adelaide Crows.