Back in 2018, almost all girls and youth wanting to play football in Rotorua played in mixed teams and mixed leagues – there were very few girls only teams, no girls only leagues, and no pathway through to Senior women’s football.

Today, there are multiple all-girls teams across several age groups.

Lakes FC offers a full pathway through to Senior Women’s football, with multiple girls teams in the U11/12 ages, and in the youth space several U14 teams as well as an U19 team (possibly two).

New girls only U8 and U10 leagues are being launched this year.

All this is the result of persistence, hard work and vision by many parents and coaches in the community. 
Catherine Donovan and Scott Downs, both now with Lakes FC, are two of the people who have been instrumental behind the scenes.  

Catherine and Scott share some insights on the process. 

Belonging - Creating spaces where girls can be themselves

Catherine’s involvement was initially motivated by her daughter, who played in mixed teams until she got to grade 9.

"My daughter wasn't engaging with the game as much as she had been," Catherine recalls. "She seemed to like football, but she wasn't as fast as the boys and she didn't have the aggression that some of the girls that go alright in the boys space have."

With Catherine, her husband and two boys already involved with football, they wanted her to have a successful experience. She says they decided to try and modify the environment, rather than taking her out of football and putting her into another sport.

She saw that some girls playing in mixed teams felt left out, even when the boys weren't intentionally excluding them. "Often the boys play all day at school together. They know each other.... sometimes the girls just get isolated in the team."

Early Steps

In 2020 Catherine created an Eastlake U9 girls team, who played in the Grade 9 Mixed competition. 
“They got absolutely demolished in every game." Says Catherine. “Sometimes the coaches would come over at half time and say ‘oh, do you want to mix things up?’ and the girls were like, no, that's our team.”

Catherine says that while the scores were lopsided, the girls still had positive experiences. As she says, "they do everything — they are the goal scorers, they are the goalie, they are the playmakers, the decision makers. They just feel so much more empowered."

That same year she was aware of three other all-girl teams. Two U8 teams, from St Mary’s School and from Otonga Road, and one U11 from Ngongataha AFC, all playing in mixed/boys leagues. 

While they were at different clubs and schools, all of the parents and coaches realised that working together in the girls space was beneficial to everyone. 

Rotorua Girls festival 2024

The growth of Futsal

The last few years has seen a huge growth in Futsal in Rotorua, driven by Adrian and Jeanene Lysaght.

They administrate a school based futsal league in Term 1 and 4 each year. These leagues are operated without points tables, as the focus is on participation and learning.

Catherine and Scott say Futsal has been a gateway for many girls to get a taste of the environment through futsal, which has bought more girls to football. 

Working together

While the girls themselves are often not able to articulate why they enjoyed playing in a girls team, the feedback from the parents was really positive. Catherine says “Parents would tell me, Oh my god, I've never seen my daughter so happy or I've never seen her be so involved in a game”

There were not enough teams to form girls only leagues yet, but Catherine and other parents realised they wanted to create some environments where girls could play other girls teams. 

They started with small steps, initially getting all the girls teams together to practice (across various clubs and schools) after regular Saturday morning games. These girls only practice sessions started to attract attention and more girls joined in.

Catherine and other parents took several teams over to play in the annual Papamoa Girls tournament, and they organised a small Girls Festival Day, where they invited teams over from Taupo and Papamoa. 

The Girls Festival Day stalled during Covid. It was restarted in 2023 with U8 girls only, and then 2024 saw 35 teams across 8th to 14th grade from a range of clubs in the area. 

Some girls do choose to remain playing in mixed teams.

In late 2021, Eastlake Junior Soccer and Otonga Road Football Club amalgamated to form Lakes FC, which bought Catherine and Scott into the same club for the first time, and the creation of a shared vision of a full pathway for girls through to Senior Football.

 
Building teams - every girl matters

One thing Catherine stresses is the importance of ensuring opportunities are offered to all. When they do anything, they do it for all girls, not just a top team, or a single team. 

"You just do it for everyone rather than focusing on one team and one coach and forgetting about everyone else," Catherine explains. "If you lose 3 or 4 players, the risk is then you are going to lose a whole team the following year because you can't put a team together."

She says the hardest work is when you don’t quite have enough girls for full teams: "The most time consuming stuff is when you don't have the critical mass of players because you just spend your whole time trying to get teams on the field."

This meant for Catherine a lot of time making personal contact with parents, rather than relying on blanket social media posts or club newsletters. It meant picking up the phone, calling parents, checking if players were returning, and identifying gaps early. "Some of them have forgotten to register, some of them weren't too sure and needed to talk through any issues" Catherine notes. "If you know you're going to be four players short, then you need to go out and find four players. Otherwise the whole team misses out."

"You can't afford to have a team fall over in the girls' space because there could be a whole grade group gone." She says.

Scott Downs, who has three daughters playing football, is another parent/coach involved in developing the girls game in Rotorua. In the early days he was with Ngongotaha AFC.

 "I remember going along to the inter school cross country and talking to most of the girls who came in the top 10 about football," he says. 

Starting with five girls in 2019, they built numbers gradually, attracting girls from other clubs as they moved from 5-aside through to 7-aside, 9-aside and now playing 11-aside.

Success means keeping every girl engaged, supported, and wanting to come back next season.
Both Catherine and Scott remind parents all the time that success is a group effort, and everyone needs to be thinking about all girls and not just their own child:

"There is no point in continually pushing if your child's going to get to 16 and she doesn't have a team... what's she going to do then?"

A Lakes FC Girls team at the Papamoa Tournament, 2024

Development - Focus on improvement over winning

The coaching approach can make a huge difference in keeping girls in the game. 

"The coaches have to be enormously patient and positive, especially if they are coaching girls teams playing in the mixed competitions." Catherine explains. "And just focus on the right outcome. So all egos aside, the outcomes are improvement and development... They constantly have to stay focused on looking for the positive”

Catherine shares that it’s important to remember that when you're building numbers, you can be dealing with extremes of ability. She says that some teams had girls who had not only never played football before, but had possibly never even been out in a field and kicked a ball before. 

She says it's not an easy task, and she reminds coaches to think both short and long term in terms of development.

"It's challenging as a coach to manage the differences in ability, but without new players you cant grow." 

Support systems 

Lakes FC has been proactive in creative player support systems, especially as girls get older. They have practical solutions that are communicated directly to players and parents.

For teenage girls with male coaches, they implemented a wellbeing person / player advocate, who players could talk to if they didn’t want to approach the coach. In one U-14 team, it was one of the mums who was the player advocate. Catherine says she was really approachable, and the system worked well for the team.
They also implemented a "black bag" system: "For example, in all the U-14 team bags there is the black bag which is filled with sanitary items and undies and tissues and all that kind of thing... All girls know if you need anything, the black bag is there. You don't have to ask."

Scott Downs coaching Lakes FC Women

Leadership and organisation 

Growing the girls' space has needed people like Catherine and Scott to program to be "the driving force behind it."

Catherine says that they’ve been very lucky to have a large group of supportive parents, who have seen their daughters thriving and been willing to help. 

"A lot of it is just coming up with an idea and then calling on the right people to kind of make it happen," Catherine explains. "You do need someone thinking about co-ordinating which can mean sending a million emails, sending a million messages, and getting stuff in place."

But the co-ordinator doesn't have to do everything: "You need the people willing to deliver it. I’ve found there are people out there willing to deliver, but they get freaked out by the idea of organising stuff. So if you've got one or two people that can sit down and just organise it really makes a diference."
Catherine says that while she has coached in the past, it’s really challenging to do both well. 

"The problem is if you get bogged down coaching, you don't have time to do organising... it’s really, really hard to do both at the same time"

Catherine has been involved mainly in the Junior space for several years, and like many parents, has moved up through the grades as her daughter has. She says it’s really important to have parents at all levels involved, as programmes can fail when the original champions move on without developing the next generation of leaders.

"You need to make sure there's people coming up in the grades below, who can take on organising at each level." 

Looking ahead

This year, there will be two new girls only leagues based in Rotorua at U8 and U10.

The Rotorua girls teams at Grade 11, Grade 12, U14 and U19 all join Western Bay of Plenty leagues, playing many of their games in Tauranga.  

Lakes FC have a Senior Women’s team playing in the W-League (the top competition for Women in the Waikato/Bay of Plenty).

Article added: Monday 24 March 2025