There are nearly 50 Irish players signed up for the coming AFLW season and with a greater overlap between the two codes due to an earlier start date in Australia, as well as the county season finishing more than a month earlier since the split season was introduced, Rowe is rightly concerned.
“It is going to have an impact on our game and that is where my worry is with it, because their season is now encroaching on our season,” Rowe said at yesterday’s Lidl National Football League launch.
“It was fine when it was county season and Australia had their season, but now the AFL have the numbers and the backing, they can now move the season, which they have done. And that will make our players make choices, and that is not nice for players.
“We have Jen Dunne over there and we will wait and give time but you don’t want someone to make a choice, they don’t want to make a choice but that is what it is coming down to. You would be foolish to say that you are not worried.
“At this point, they have so many players and so much backing, and it is the top players on every single team that are going over. And we just don’t want that, don’t want it in senior, don’t want it in intermediate or in junior.
“I don’t know what the solution is to that challenge but maybe it is something we need to have a conversation around to lessen the impact, because we don’t want that, we don’t want the standard [of ladies football] after so many years of work, dropping.”
Rowe was offered a two-week trial in 2019 but “it wasn’t for me” with football her priority, although she “can see why people are being pulled into it” while All-Ireland champions Kerry could be without Kayleigh Cronin at the business end of the season after she signed for the Adelaide Crows before Christmas.
Cronin is currently training with Kerry but teammate Síofra O’Shea is concerned the expansion of the AFLW and clashing calendars will be “a threat if players start to choose AFL over LGFA.”
Last year’s beaten All-Ireland finalists Galway are one of the few top teams not badly hit by AFLW departures and 2024 Player of the Year Nicola Ward reckons “there’s unfinished business there before they think of doing anything else”.
The Tribe star admits that she would be “disappointed” if the did lose one of their top players to the oval ball, although there is no doubting the attraction of playing in a professional/semi-professional environment.
“I know I’d be disappointed if a top player was taken from my team, but I think it’s a great opportunity for the girls over in the AFLW to get a different perspective. But I know from my own perspective, if a top player was taken from my team, I wouldn’t be happy,” Ward said.
Rowe, meanwhile, believes the memory of losing last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final to Galway will drive them for the year ahead, starting with their Lidl Division 1 League opener against Mayo on Saturday week.
“Last year was probably the most hurt I have been and it now makes me the most motivated,” added Rowe.
“And a lot of girls in the dressing room are the same, we just feel that we didn’t do ourselves justice. You can go out and hold your head high if you perform.
“But we feel like we didn’t perform against Galway and that is what hurts the most. We are really, really hungry to get going, but you can’t look ahead to championship because that is what knocks you out. If you are one step ahead of yourself, you’ll get knocked out.
“It is really painful and prolonging it makes it hurt more. I always try to flip it for the positives, that is just who I am. But those weeks are tough, I was blocking things on social media, so you are not looking at it every day, it is so painful but if it doesn’t hurt, how badly did you want it? It really hurt us all.”
That defeat also signalled the end of Mick Bohan’s eight-year reign in the capital and having led the Jackies to five All-Ireland titles during that time, Rowe paid tribute to how her former manager “changed the face of Dublin ladies”.
“Legacy is what I think should follow him around. When he came in, he came in from the men’s side, but there was no step in between the men and the women. What the men had, that was the expectation for the ladies,” she said.
“In my eyes, it was one of the first set-ups to have that, there was no reason for us not to have what our counterparts had. That was a huge thing. Then, obviously in terms of the game and personally what he has done for me as a player and off the field and everything, you couldn’t ask for anything more.”
There will be continuity for Rowe and Co with Paul Casey and Derek Murray stepping up from coaching roles to joint-managers this season while the Clann Mhuire attacker reckons that any team would be lucky to have Bohan.
“He absolutely could [manage the Dublin men’s team],” Rowe said. “His CV does more than enough to get him any job across the country. Whether that’s for Mick or not, I don’t know – I think he might want a bit of downtime.”
New research from Lidl Ireland has put a spotlight on the need for visibility of women’s sport with 43pc of LGFA county players not considering themselves to be role models. Rowe has seen huge progress in terms of coverage over the last decade but the Balbriggan Community College biology and science teacher wants to see that figure increase.
“That’s probably something that we need to try and shift and I know I’m guilty of that,” Rowe said. “There’s moments where you go, ‘Wow, this is amazing, look at all the kids that have come to here or all the kids at Cúl Camps that want me to sign their jersey’.
“But we probably need to build that confidence that people feel that they can step outside their comfort zone a bit and that will elevate the sport and bring more people to the sport, and bring more female sporting events to light.
“There’s young girls in schools now and they can name off multiple female sports models whereas when I was in school I was one of the 2pc who said Sonia O’Sullivan was my role model.
“There’s so many different role models across different sports and that’s what you want. You want someone that’s rowing to have a role model in rowing, same with someone that’s doing athletics so that all of the sports are being included.”
