DARCY VESCIO
From speaking out on the woeful gender pay gap in Australian sport to combating casual racism and campaigning for gay rights, the champion of the AFLW is making her rocketpropelled public profile count
It was never going to be netball for Darcy Vescio. “I got told off for punching the ball,” says the 24-year-old, describing her brief, not-so-successful spell as wing defence for the Wangaratta High School U15s. “You’re not allowed to do that, but I was pretty rough!”
The so-called girls’ sport was second choice anyway. First was football. With natural talent and no other option in her tiny Victorian home town, Vescio played in a boys’ AFL league until age 14, at which point she was invited to stop. “At the time, I remember just accepting it,” she recalls. “It was like that for every other girl I knew – footy was awesome, but you could only play it for so long. If you’ve only known things to be a certain way, you don’t challenge it. I didn’t know there were girls’ competitions [in the city].”
But things would eventually change: in 2017, she played her first match for Carlton in the newly formed AFLW at Princes Park in front of a capacity crowd of 25,000 fans (with thousands more left outside). She was also one of 16 marquee players, goalkicker of the season, winner of the Mark of the Year award and is newly sponsored by Nike. “It all happened so quickly – you’re doing your own thing with a small group of people watching, and then it explodes overnight,” says Vescio, who picked up the sport again when she moved to Melbourne after high school and discovered there actually was such a thing as a female football league. But there was no premier division, nothing on par with the men’s AFL and, up until a year before it launched, the idea of an elite women’s competition remained unimaginable to Vescio, who is now hailed as one of its pioneers.
Advancing the cause of women in sport is not a mantle she shies away from – in the caption accompanying a photo of her piggy-backing a little girl in a matching guernsey, posted before her first match, Vescio wrote, “Wen you laugh togetha cos you know ur gonna smash the patriarchy.” But she doesn’t take the acclaim either. “The pioneer thing is something that, externally, people label me as,” she says. “But I feel like there were so many women before us doing this because they loved it, fighting for women’s rights when everything in the paper [about women’s football] was really critical. To me, they were the real pioneers who passed the baton onto us so that we could get to this level. We have to keep pushing to do justice to them.”
Right now, that push is towards pay equality. Although the gender pay gap persists in so many fields of professional endeavour, nowhere is the disparity so extreme as in sport. Men in AFL earn between $300,000 and $1 million a year and train fulltime. Women in the AFLW earn between $10,500 and $20,000, meaning many have day jobs while training three nights a week after work. “Everyone is juggling two or three other things and it’s a really hard balancing act,” says Vescio, who works as a graphic designer. “Girls get criticised for [their football] skills and we want to be so much better than we are, but to perform at a similar level as the elite men, we need to be able to put in the time and have financial backing. Ultimately, I hope women will have the choice to pursue sport as a full-time career.”
Meanwhile, Vescio is applying herself to issues beyond sport, feeling the responsibility of becoming a sudden role model. “Once everything exploded, it felt like everything I said or did had a lot more weight than it did before,” she says. “As much as I love football, I’m also drawn to the game because of the change you can make through it. If you’ve got the opportunity to help, as someone with a profile, then you should.”
The daughter of an Italian father and Chinese mother, Vescio says casual racism was such a feature of her growing up that she considered it normal. “Because people hadn’t had all that much life experience or been exposed to much diversity, [my brother and I] were ‘the Asians’ at school.” It was only much later that she engaged with issues of race in a conscious way, and stepped into her current role as a Multicultural Ambassador for the AFL. “I had to change my own views and see that it’s not normal behaviour,” she says. “But until you open your eyes, you don’t realise the damage the jokes and stereotypes are doing.”
Last year, she also emerged as a major voice in the same-sex marriage campaign, although, for her, equality for the LGBTQI community is such a commonsense issue that becoming an advocate wasn’t so much an easy decision, as no decision at all. “The fact that someone could feel like they have a right to decide if someone else should get married seems ridiculous,” she says. “I find it quite easy to talk about because it makes total sense to me.”
Hearing her describe her stance so matter-of-factly, it can be easy to overlook how much personal exposure sportspeople take on by becoming public voices. If Lebron James, one of the most successful players in the NBA, can be told to “shut up and dribble” by a television commentator after speaking out on race issues, up-and-comers can expect as much. Vescio’s Twitter was hacked, and flooded with pornography, before that first match, and her Instagram frequently attracts the vilest kind of sexist and homophobic comments, yet she appears outwardly unfazed. “A lot of people criticise athletes for dipping into politics, but the fact is we all have beliefs and it’s impossible to separate ourselves from that while we’re kicking a ball,” she explains. “The stuff I post about is only what I feel comfortable with and there’s still a lot of stuff people don’t know about me.”
Besides, Vescio says, pressure is a privilege. “As stressful and taxing as it can be, it’s also awesome and wonderful.” And away from all the noise, she’s focused on the game, grateful for where she is now, indebted to the women before her and ambitious for the girls coming next. “The best part for me is after the final siren, when you walk around the boundary, thanking people, and you see little girls in their Carlton jumpers and they’re just so excited,” she says. “If they can watch a women’s game on TV... that’s so powerful. Imagine if I could have seen that.”
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