That Wrexham legend Gary Bennett’s first name happens to start with a ‘G’ is arguably mere coincidence.
Even if the former English footballer's parents had opted for something G-less or more syllabic – perhaps Christopher or Timothy – Gemma Owen would still have likely appropriated the surname when she dribbled a football across her school pitches in Wrexham 30-odd years ago. Gary Bennett was her hero. And Owen, like most aspiring footballers, liked to pretend to be her hero, especially the one she watched on her favourite pitch in the world. It wasn't rocket science.
“I idolised him," Owen tells WalesOnline. "I still do. There’s nobody who has really come close to him." As her cheeks flush an iridescent red, she says: "Oh, the kids at school will be laughing if they ever read this! They all knew I called myself Gemma Bennett!"
Owen's cheeks eventually turn to a more manageable pink, but the underlying truth sits between us. “I was trying to emulate a male player," the Wrexham secretary and women's under-19s assistant coach says. "Being able to emulate or be a female player would have been unreal, but that wasn’t available at the time.”
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For 33 years, Owen has called Wrexham her club. This week, she is marking a decade as a staff member. They are numbers Owen must momentarily appraise in her mind as she wrestles with the fact that the years really have stretched that deep. Not that anything has changed for Owen on a visceral level. She is still vulnerable to those full-bodied chills when she shoves open the heavy metal door from under the Wrexrent Stand and the brisk November morning air peels away to an empty Racecourse Ground against a groggy grey sky.
An easy smile melts across Owen’s face. She motions to the bottom of the now-Wrexham Lager stand. This is her genesis, where a smaller but equally football-crazed version of herself used to sit two hours before kick-off beside her brother while their dad, a match-day steward, checked off his various pre-match duties. If the siblings were good, they had the honour of stabbing the corner flags into the muddy grass.
Directly across from us looms the Kop, resplendent in that way a bygone photograph is, frozen in a time lapse. There is something akin to reverence as we take in the crumbling edifice, the knowledge of exciting new blueprints simultaneously stirring and painfully nostalgic. When Owen eventually graduated from flag stamping, the Kop’s terraces became home.
“You know the railings they’re selling?” she asks, almost sheepishly, before cracking into self-effacing laughter. “I’m one of the people who bought a piece.”
Is there a plan for it? “I don’t know,” she admits. “Probably stick it in my garden, if I’m honest.” The image tickles an even bigger smile, a peeling hunk of metal lounging among the flower beds, serving the fundamental purpose of perennial memory stirrer.
The morning is already working in that manner. It’s Saturday, game-day. Wrexham Women were in line to play their league match against Airbus at the Racecourse, but a need to prepare the grass for winter superseded that plan (heat lamps already bake the blades near the goal). Instead, it is a return to Ponciau Park, roughly a 15-minute drive away.
Owen is not bitter. The pitch is pristine, winter is brutal. The possibility to play on the pitch Owen could describe blindfolded never had oxygen when she was young, let alone the opportunity to be shifted to a further date. Owen’s football existence is that of former generations: a lonely enterprise, dealing within boys' teams and the wider periphery. By Owen’s teen years, Wrexham had a women’s team, though any affiliation beyond name and sporadic kit was notional.
“There wasn’t a lot around, not specifically for girls, anyway. It was all very limited,” she says.
Against the current landscape, the past might as well be an alternate universe. Over the course of Owen's decade with the club, seven years have been spent growing the women’s game, beginning with turn-up-and-play sessions through the Community Trust and slowly building to a point where Wrexham now boasts a senior women’s team, an under-19s side, a development centre for under-16s to under-8s and manifold sessions for younger girls.
On a macro level, the transformation is on par with a total facial reconstruction. On a micro level, the impact is intricate but fundamental.
During half-term sessions, a significant proportion of the staff comprise the senior women’s team. The visibility of a bona fide pathway from bottom-up, Owen says, is a crucial element of the game’s evolution in Wales. She experienced such a pathway with hockey, eventually climbing to international level. But no ladder was ever visible to her via football.
“I know it’s thrown around quite a lot, but if these little girls can see it, they can be it,” Owen says. “It’s all good and well to get these little girls to come and play football, but if they can see somebody who has been there, done it and is still there as an adult, that’s really important.”
The sentiment certainly beats adopting the family name of a male player and pretending to scythe down the Racecourse pitch at playtime. Instead, girls can take a crack at being Kim Dutton, Wrexham Women's first-team captain. At 21 years old and bearing the crest of her childhood club, Dutton is the living, breathing version of Owen's self-professed dream.
There is no resentment. Of Owen’s favourite club memories (and there are plenty), seeing the legacy of the women’s game manifest in real time ranks high. Girls within the under-19s set-up arrived at Wrexham’s first turn-up-and-play sessions, while others, like midfielder Lili Jones, have risen from under-12s to the first team.
“To see girls who we met at maybe 10 years old still playing football, still involved in the club and even those who aren’t, to know that however small a part we played in their development, it allowed them to remain in the game, the pride in seeing that is brilliant," Owen professes. “It’s the next best thing for me. There’s a different buzz that I get than maybe what Kim gets. Her buzz is playing for the club, my buzz is getting to help grow it.”
That buzz has certainly received an extra dose over the last two years with new owners Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds entering the fold. Upon learning who the prospective new owners were (and getting over the immediate whiplash that invariably comes with Hollywood superstardom descending upon a Welsh town that can fit almost three times into the square radius of Los Angeles), Owen’s mind immediately flew to the women’s set-up.
“How big women’s football is out in the States and Canada, that was my first thought,” she says. “All they know is how big women’s football is. I didn’t know if they fully realise that it’s not fully at that level or anywhere near that level here.”
In McElhenney and Reynolds' statement of intent to purchase the club, the women’s team was specifically identified as an area for improvement. While jumping onto the women’s football bandwagon has become vogue, Owen quickly shuts down any insinuation that the pair shoehorned women’s football into their pledge on the basis of optics.
“They haven’t been flippant about it all,” she says. “They really want to support trying to grow the game, not just us, obviously that goes without saying, but they want to help us to help grow the game itself. They think it’s massive over there, it’s not here. Can we help it to get to the point it should be anyway? They’re great.”
McElhenney in particular has embraced the women’s profile. According to Owen, McElhenney keeps tabs on their results in the Adran North, the second tier of the Welsh women's domestic league, and discourse revolves explicitly around supporting the team on all fronts. A feature in the Disney+ docuseries Welcome to Wrexham's second season is very much on the cards.
“A few of us – myself, the manager, assistant manager and some players – were invited up to the box with Rob when he was here," Owen says. "He watched us on the Sunday. He speaks about us all the time. He just gives us that sense of how much he wants to support what we’re doing and back up what we're doing. That’s genuinely where the conversations go. And it’s starting, it’s on its way.”
McElhenney and Co.'s sincerity goes some way in explaining why the club feel resolute in their goal of promotion to the Adran Premier, the top domestic tier, this season. After adapting to the restructure last year, all eyes rest on promotion and at the time of writing, those eyes look prescient. Wrexham sit top of the table with nine points from nine. They recently added Premier side The New Saints to a swelling list of FAW Women’s Cup victims. In the Genero Adran League's team of the week on November 13, four of the 11 belonged to Wrexham.
The natural next question is whether the chances of both the women’s and the men’s earning promotion in the same year has been whispered in the corridors, or if this writer needs to find the nearest piece of wood to knock on and apologise immediately.
“It has to be on your mind," Owen says. "Both sides of the club are aiming towards that, we’re trying to put things in place to get to that point. But I mean…” She pauses and the prospect of it all suddenly washes over her. “Imagine the celebrations if it came to that. It would be fantastic. For the club as a whole, it would be a double celebration."
Owen shakes her head and laughs incredulously as she sinks into her chair. “Can you imagine that? That’d be…” The temptation is only allowed legs for so long. The Airbus clash is fast approaching and already first-team manager Steve Dale has arrived for the bag of balls.
Conversation turns back to the Racecourse. While promotion is on the near horizon and a return to Europe rests on the far, a match at the Racecourse feels incredibly imminent, yet the magnitude such an event could hold is equally huge. In the last three months, the record crowd for the women's domestic game has been shattered twice, yet both occasions took place in south Wales. For Owen, that geographical fact fails to accurately represent the football heartbeat which pulses through north Wales.
A friendly was held on the ground last summer, but it was a distant cry from the full Racecourse experience, being used ultimately as a guinea pig for testing Covid-19 regulations before the men’s season kicked off.
Still, for a little girl scoring imaginary Bennett-style hattricks on a playground park, any chance on the Racecourse ground was unfathomable. Owen can still recall in unerring detail the day she played on the pitch in a spur-of-the-moment staff match before the grass was due to be pulled up last year. The media team joined, along with the Community Trust, the groundsmen, and documentary favourite Humphrey Ker.
“Humphrey, he’s your target man, you just try to lump it on his head because he’s so tall.” Like the Wrexham Peter Crouch? Owen breaks into laughter. "You can put that in," she says.
No crowd watched that day, a fact Owen is more than appreciative of. Obviously she had Gemma Bennett whirring through her head. The reality was an unfortunate contrast from those early imaginative episodes, but that piddling detail derailed none of Owen's pent-up euphoria at playing on the pitch she watched and dreamed of and stabbed corner flags into for years.
“So playing a league game out there…” Owen slowly shakes her head and lifts her hand high. “That would top everything off. That’s the next step for us. That would be the ultimate.”
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