West Coast’s new No.1 ticket holder and female football pioneer Jan Cooper opens up about her fight for equity, career and future

Still, that didn’t stop the uneducated from pondering “who?” in the comments when West Coast announced the female footy trailblazer as its new No.1 ticket holder.

“A friend started typing out my resume to send back to them,” Cooper joked.

“You look at the people who’ve come before me and there’s global giants like Julie Bishop, Sam Kerr and Daniel Ricciardo. Now they’ve gone with an elderly woman.”

Cooper can comfortably stand shoulder to shoulder with those aforementioned giants. Many consider her the godmother of AFLW.

She was in her early 30s when her husband, who was working with the Western Australian Football Commission, invited her to watch the women’s league grand final, a competition she had yearned for growing up but didn’t know existed until it was too late. A few years later, Cooper was appointed the WAFC’s female football development manager. A short time after that, she joined the AFL as national development manager and started pushing for equality on a national stage.

Not only did Cooper’s vision for female participation underpin the birth of the AFLW in 2017, but she also played a significant role in bringing West Coast’s AFLW team to life.

Cooper continues to work in the club’s community department. She was at West Coast’s Christmas party in late 2022 celebrating another year of strengthening female pathways when Chief Executive Trevor Nisbett approached her and asked if she’d be interested in becoming the club’s No.1 ticket holder.

“I left the Christmas party early because I didn't trust myself to contain my excitement,” Cooper says.

“It wasn’t set in stone at that point. They had to nominate me to the board but I said to Trevor, ‘You’re putting me up alongside those sorts of people?’ And he said, ‘Well, yes, because what you've done for the code and what you’ve done for this club, why wouldn’t we?’

“To me, it just reeks of the steps that the club is trying to take to be more inclusive and diverse in their thinking and a bit more equitable as well. At first I was gobsmacked but now I’m pretty chuffed.”

Cooper has already broken a lot of ground in the industry. But she laughs that she may just be the first turncoat to step up as West Coast’s supporter-in-chief.

“I thought, ‘Bloody hell, they’re going out on a bit of a limb here’. They have embraced the fact that I was a Dockers member,” Cooper says.

“I don't like to whack the opposition around the head but they’ve just done a few things that I haven’t really liked, mainly around tokenism when it comes to AFLW in the first couple of years and a few other things.

“It got to the point where I chucked in my membership a few years before I joined the Eagles. But the club could’ve easily thought, ‘Oh god she was a Fremantle supporter’.”

Cooper doesn’t do anything by halves. She’s competitive and especially eager to make the most of whatever time she spends in the position.

“My first question to Trevor was, ‘What exactly is it that I’m meant to do?’ Because I’d like to be the best No.1 ticket holder ever,” she says.

“It’s an ambassadorial role and it’s the club’s chance to recognise your place in the community. I’m a bit annoyed with myself that I haven’t thought about how I can add value.”

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A national women’s competition was a far-flung dream when Cooper first started working in female participation.

Opposition to the concept was rife. Women will lose their femininity. Women will hurt themselves. Women will take money away from the men’s game.

Cooper continued fighting but spreading the word was a constant challenge. The AFL’s PR machine had to get creative.

“We were hosting a press conference in Perth to open the 2009 Women’s National Championships at Subiaco Oval. We were so excited because the status of some of the women's leagues had really started to improve and we’d even organised the final to be a curtain raiser to an Eagles Geelong AFL game,” Cooper recalls.

“But none of the media cared. Michelle Clyne was the AFL’s media and communications guru and she said, ‘John Worsfold is holding a press conference at the moment’. We realised it was on the other side of the stadium so Clyney goes, ‘Everyone follow me’.

“We virtually crashed his press conference but he said ‘interrupt away’ so all the media who were there for Worsfold listened to us instead. It was one of those brave moments but we got some great mileage out of it.”

Cooper has made a habit of converting non-believers.

One of her favourite achievements is setting Craig Starcevich on the path to AFLW premiership coach. Starcevich was the WAFC’s high-performance manager when Cooper asked if he’d let some of WA’s most talented females join training. Chelsea Randall and Kirby Bentley were among them.

“He was converted after that,” Cooper says.

“They actually calmed down some of the boys and made them go, ‘Jesus, these girls work hard.’ They had to lift their work rate and not swan around as though they were entitled, talented young men.”

Cooper also counts the inaugural AFLW game between Carlton and Collingwood in 2017 and West Coast’s debut match in 2020 as some of her favourite moments.

“I still have a physical response when I speak about that lockout,” Cooper says.

“I was watching a Mexican wave of 25,000 people flood into Ikon Park. And then the roar of the crowd when the ball was tossed up for the first time was just astonishing. I've never been part of something apart from the birth of my kids that’s been sort of so significant, historic and huge and has had such a positive impact on so many people.

“I get tears in my eyes when the Eagles run out.”

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Cooper wants to be remembered as a facilitator. She’s closely mentored countless women and equipped them with the tools to continue re-educating and reshaping a male dominated industry.

It’s why after years of fighting the ongoing war on equality, Cooper is finally content to withdraw from battle.

“I still have the same amount of passion but I'm not as energetic as I was to be honest,” Cooper, who was also diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, admits.

“There's still so much more to achieve but I have other priorities in my life now. Being the national manager, the timing of it in my life was perfect and I’m pretty sure that’s why I was able to do so much and be so dogged when doors were slamming shut and people were building brick walls to climb over.

“I think there are so many capable younger people, men and women, who can fly the flag now quite successfully.

“Even now the AFLW strategic plan, they’ve set out some high-reaching targets and the industry can now hold them accountable. You don’t need a Jan Cooper to hold them to it.

“I'm in awe of many of the younger people in the industry and what they’ve been able to achieve and they have still got years ahead of them.”

Now observing the industry from the perimeter, the Order of Australia medal recipient still sees one glaring problem.

“I’ll start off by saying that it's human nature to look at gaps rather than look at what’s been achieved so far,” she says.

“But there's a bigger body of work that needs to be attacked. For me, it goes beyond AFLW. AFLW is a subset of it.

“The code must have leaders that reflect the community. We can’t keep having white, middle-aged men being in CEO roles or chair of the AFL commission or board chairs or whatever else. Women are under-represented.

“The ratio gets even worse when you look at Indigenous Australians and people from multicultural backgrounds.”

The issue extends to football departments.

“I think the industry has to get their head around the fact that you don't have to have played AFL or AFLW to be a very competent head of football operations,” Cooper continues.

“A lot of women that are in the industry don't have aspirations to just contribute to AFLW. They want to be in an AFL role. At the beginning of the AFLW, a lot of women got shunted to the side while a whole bunch of men swooped in. A lot of very capable women left the industry.”

A lack of representation off-field can’t however deny the revolution happening on it. Females now have the opportunity to play football at an elite level. All 18 clubs are now represented after the league expanded by four teams last season. And Cooper is one of a select group of pioneers we have to thank for it.

“I still wish I could have physically hung up the boots,” Cooper says.

“As for my legacy, I never had one in mind. It’s actually evolved and I hope it will be someone like a Daisy Pearce who said, ‘Coops, you and Debbie Lee were my inspirations’. If some of the young women behind me feel that they've been inspired or saw the way I went about things and want to lean a similar way, then that’s icing on the cake.

“All of this has been by accident. All I ever set out to do was just make sure that there were opportunities for women and that there was equity in those opportunities.

“I wanted to make sure that the generations behind me did not have the door shut on them to do whatever they wanted to do in our code because I think it’s the best sport in the world.”