Our Ball, Our Ground, Our Dream

Romaney Pinnock & Leone Slabber, South Africa

Badgers Football Academy was created 5 years ago, and is Cape Town’s first women run, women focused football club. Badgers started in September 2017 with 10 women playing together and now have over one hundred members, ranging from 13 to 41 years old. Goal Click spoke to its founder and some of its members about their hopes for the future of women’s football in South Africa.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your football life?

Romaney: I am originally from Grahamstown in South Africa. I studied Genetics and Medical Science and I have been a Management Consultant in Cape Town for the last 10 years, working mainly on public sector and local government projects. I was never a very sporty person when I was young. Outdoorsy yes, but not really part of team sports, mostly because the school I went to did not offer many options for girls. I also never really had female sporting heroes that I looked up to, so I guess never had a moment of "I want to do that too!"

Five years ago I decided that I wanted to learn how to play football but I could not find a club for women, and specifically absolute beginners. In frustration I made a chat group with every woman I knew in Cape Town and asked them if they would like to join a club. When we had 10 confirmed women, we booked a 5v5 pitch and asked the venue to help us out with a coach to teach us the basics. That was the start of Badgers - we ended up meeting weekly, then multiple times a week, and the coach who helped us on the first day ended up being our coach for the next year. We grew by word of mouth, and never expected it to become what it is today.

Leone: I grew up in Cape Town and I had a love of football from a young age. No one in my family played the sport and there were no girls teams that I could join, so my only option was to join the boys team. Although it was great fun, I often felt a bit lonely because I was the only girl and I had to prove why I should be on the team. This also meant that I was often not chosen for match days or I would be the first substitution option even though I was quite a talented player. It was only when I got to university that I had the option of joining a girls team and this finally meant I could play without second guessing myself.

I do not regret where I started with football though, regardless of being called a 'tomboy' or kept on the bench by the school coach, because the particular boys I played with included me and always helped me to play better, which I am very grateful for.

After I finished university I wanted to continue playing team sports and Badgers was the only club offering social football for adult women. I am now the Operations Manager and coach the U16s team, and have also become a qualified referee.

What did you try to show with the photos? Was there any wider meaning with the photos?

These photographs are taken at our Badger home in Cape Town, known as The Burrow.  We tried to capture what it means to be a Badger - being part of a warm and caring sporting community where you will get professional training and play competitive games, but also have fun, play socially and can be the best version of yourself.

Badgers is all about people coming together for the love of football. We win together, we lose together, we sweat together, we laugh together. There is a photo with one football that shows what we were before we came together. We started with nobody, just an idea and a need to be a part of something. This photo carries that emptiness - not in a sad way, just in a way that speaks of the space that needed to be filled. It speaks of a tiny dream, five years ago, that is coming true day by day.

A ball and a piece of ground have made such dramatic changes to so many of our lives. That ball and that piece of ground have been there for eternity, but we were not welcome to make it our own, for various reasons. Yet here we are, that is OUR ball now, OUR grounds, and OUR fulfilled dream.

But we are not finished, the dream has grown, and there is always more work to be done, but it started like this, an emptiness, an opportunity.

What are the opportunities for women’s grassroots footballers in Cape Town and in South Africa?

At a grassroots sporting level, there is not much available to girls in South Africa. Most public schools have minimal resources for sports and arts. What is available in sports is often being used for the boys. Community clubs with girl-specific offerings are rare and very often it is culturally frowned upon for girls to partake in activities that are historically for boys, like football.

Despite earmarked funds at a political level, it is often near impossible to trace the distribution and track impact. Furthermore, the professionalisation of women's football in South Africa is way behind that of the men’s ecosystem. Despite this, many nonprofits are doing incredible work to create safe spaces for girls and women across the country.

What does football mean to you?

Romaney: I fell in love late in life with football. Playing football is like meditation for me. Nothing else matters apart from what is happening right there, right then. The only things that are important are my lungs, my legs and the other people on the field. There is something truly magical about liberating ourselves from everything else for a few moments.

I also found that the more I played, the more I learnt to love my body. And I love watching that journey of self appreciation in other Badgers. There is so much out there telling girls and women that they are not enough, but when you are making magic on a field, you get to really feel your own power and beauty, and that of those around you.

What impact has Badgers FC made on you and others in your local community?

We like to believe that our members have found a space in which they can learn to appreciate the strength and beauty of their bodies, have gained confidence, felt a sense of belonging and grown as football players. We are the first football club in our province run by women, for women and the only club registered in our Local Football Association that only enters female teams.

Hopefully we can inspire other clubs to include women's teams into their business models and other women to start similar journeys. Although we feel that we have made significant ripples in the traditionally male dominated football ecosystem, we are only at the start of a very long journey and hope to find many allies along the way.

What barriers has Badgers FC faced since creating the club?

Initially it was hard to create a more formalised structure out of something that was created to be purely social.  We are still a young organisation, so large-scale fundraising is our next hurdle, up until now we have relied on crowd-funding and membership fees. We know what we do has impact, now we want to grow it.

A more strategic struggle is that the current landscape for women's football in South Africa does not yet do enough towards professionalisation. It often feels like federations love to say "we support women's football" without actually getting their hands dirty at an implementation level.

We want to see more action, more long term planning, more of the right people being hired in the right places to make effective change. We are tired of hearing how much people are doing for women's football without actually seeing anything that is being done.

Team sports have the power to change lives and strengthen communities. Sport empowers, and empowered girls and women make for stronger societies. But it does not feel like the government and the federations in South Africa embody what they say. Each year that goes past without tangible impact accounts for thousands of girls that cannot access the benefits of team sports.

What is the future for women's football in South Africa?

Being involved in women's football in South Africa feels like being in a startup. We are afforded the opportunity to be disruptive, to push the boundaries of the existing system and to redefine what success means.

The future of women's football in South Africa is more women around decision making tables, more female coaches, more focus on the journey a young girl takes to play and succeed at the sport!

It is having more transparency around government and federation funds that are meant to be directly allocated to women's sports and community development projects.

It is growing the number of women involved in football on and off the field.

It is Badger hubs all over the country, safe transport routes, school programmes. It is more focus on sexual and menstrual health.

The future of women's football in South Africa reaches far wider than the sport itself, it is around community upliftment, more funding for early childhood development, more support for new mothers, getting a grip on the violence in our communities, giving boys the love they need to prevent the violence they can and do wield towards women on a daily basis here. To succeed in women's football in an equitable and holistic manner, we need to address many societal issues along the way.

We have the ambition, we have the talent, we see it in our members. We have future Megan Rapinoes, Mia Hamms and Martas within our borders, we just need to make sure they can get to a field, to a coach, to a club that recognises them.

What are your ambitions for the future?

We would like to see Badgers growing in size and being able to open localised hubs in communities that need sporting offerings for their girls. We hope that we continue to grow our name as a welcoming and inclusive space, in which girls and women can be the best version of themselves. 

We would also like to see girls leaving our club to take up professional roles not only as players, but as professionals within the sporting ecosystem, locally and internationally, and then of course returning, to be mentors to new Badgers. In ten years we would like to find empowered and resilient Badgers all across the world, living the values of kindness, courage and determination.

Obviously, there are the more operational things to cover too, such as security, infrastructural maintenance, ground staff and sporting equipment. We know we are offering a unique, professionally managed and life changing environment to many girls and women who would ordinarily not have access to a sporting community - we now want to grow even larger and affect more change across South Africa's sporting ecosystem.