On Sunday afternoon, Adelaide United striker Fiona Worts equalled the A-League Women's all-time record for most goals scored by a single player in a match, netting five in the Reds' 8-2 thumping of Brisbane Roar.
Not only was it her club's biggest win in the history of the competition, but Worts also rocketed up to second on the league's Golden Boot ladder. And with just three rounds left, Adelaide could qualify for the finals series for the first time.
But the English-born forward, who has been crucial in much of the club's success, wasn't able to celebrate any of it.
Instead, a few hours after the full-time whistle, Worts was on a plane back to Adelaide from Brisbane, preparing for her morning shift at McDonald's the next day.
This is not an uncommon story among A-League Women footballers and, indeed, most women athletes around Australia.
Despite the meteoric rise of women's sport over the past five years, the vast majority of the country's top-flight women's competitions — from the A-League Women's to the AFLW, the WNBL, the NRLW, and the WBBL — remain semi-professional.
This manifests in a number of interlocking ways including through short season formats, insecure yearly contracts, inconsistent travel and medical standards, and salaries often below minimum wage. Taken together, this means the majority of the country's best women athletes must often work additional jobs just to make ends meet.
What the Worts story highlights, though, is the way in which these competitions have begun to reframe and reshape this discussion in order to escape criticism and accountability.
For example, in Adelaide, Channel 10 — the A-League Women's free-to-air broadcaster — ran a 40-second segment about Worts's achievements, including an interview where she was asked what she did during her morning shift.
"I spent quite a lot of time on the drive-through head-set," Worts, a qualified mathematician, told the reporter with a polite grin. "That was what I did today."
"Oh yeah!?" the reporter laughed.
The tone of the segment was light-hearted and fun, and it folded into a growing genre of marketing in Australian women's sport in which the additional life pressures facing women athletes — from juggling multiple jobs to family commitments to long-term study — are used to celebrate the tenacity, fortitude, and hard work of the individual, often at the expense of critiquing the wider structures and cultures that force women to juggle these competing demands in the first place.
One of the most famous examples in Australian women's football is that of former Sydney FC captain and Matilda, Teresa Polias.
Over the course of 10 years, Polias led the Sky Blues to multiple A-League Women's trophies, mentoring the club's next generation of young stars and helping grow the profile of the competition, all the while working full-time as a primary school teacher.
After the 2018/19 A-League Women's grand final, where Sydney defeated Perth Glory 4-2 to win their first Championship in five seasons, one of the people Polias thanked in her acceptance speech was her employer: acknowledging them for the flexibility they showed in allowing her to lead a team to a national trophy. At that point, the minimum wage for an A-League Women player was $12,287.
Polias temporarily stepped away from the club this season in order to start a family, further highlighting the additional challenges that women athletes face when it comes to pregnancy and parenting.
There are examples like this reaching far and wide across Australian sport, similarly taking the various barriers faced by women athletes and turning them into feelgood stories; an illustration of the superior character of the individual rather than a problem of the context within which they work.
Ahead of the 2021/22 AFLW season, the league organised a "Working To Play" photo-shoot in which athletes were shown wearing their club guernseys alongside the uniforms they wear to their other jobs outside the competition, be they nurses, police officers, firefighters, farmers, lifeguards, or members of the Defence Force.
Women athletes like Worts, Polias, and Campbell are often stuck in a no-win situation.
While there is certainly merit in the idea of preparing for life after sport, the fact that women athletes must often use their peak performance years to do so means that, unlike their male counterparts, they cannot commit themselves entirely to the competitions in which they're expected to perform, even when future contracts and sponsorships rest on their on-field output.
The difficulty in planning for the future and finding employment in industries that provide the flexibility required by these growing competitions only adds to that strain.
Finally, by narrowing the public focus onto the personalities and stories of the players themselves, leagues and media organisations also (perhaps unknowingly) contribute to stereotypes that women athletes must negotiate in addition to everything else: the framing of them as idols and inspirations whose job is not just to perform on the field, but to be the positive, optimistic faces of their clubs, leagues, and codes off it.
Such is the insecurity they face that telling the sometimes ugly truth about their circumstances — that it is difficult, exhausting, and unnecessary — can sometimes threaten their sporting careers.
Instead, as Worts and so many other disempowered women in sport and public life are often expected to do, they smile politely and get on with it.
This growing genre of marketing thus creates a further cultural pressure where women athletes must live up to the moral standards being laid out for them by their peers, with the logical end-point being that if you're unable to balance one with the other — or if you give up playing sport altogether — you are somehow less admirable, less strong, less hard-working, or less committed than those who can do both.
It is a layer of expectation that women athletes do not want or need in addition to every other burden they are forced to carry.
Even as women's sport grows at an unprecedented rate, moments like this provide a deeper insight into the many overlapping structural, cultural, and financial challenges women athletes continue to face.
While we can celebrate the stories and personalities of the workers who have made women's sport what it is, we must not separate that from the contexts within which they exist; that the characters and careers of women athletes have been forged by an industry that continues to prevent them from reaching their full potential.
Just imagine how much more they could achieve if the sports currently celebrating them gave them the chance to do so.
