EFFIE BATEMAN | Lifestyle | Contact
In some exciting news for sports fans, North Queensland has announced their women’s team ‘The Gold Stars’ will enter the premier women’s rugby league competition.
The team will join the NRLW competition from 2023, alongside the Canberra Raiders, Cronulla Sharks and Wests Tigers, taking the league to 10 teams.
The move comes after the Newcastle Knights, Gold Coast Titans, and Parramatta Eels joined the Brisbane Broncos, Sydney Rooster, and St George Illawarra Dragons in the NRLW this year.
The expansion has been welcomed by footy fans, and particularly the Cronulla Sharks organisation who were crucial in getting the comp off the ground in the first place, but wasn’t rewarded with a team.
It’s also a welcome sign for Rugby League in the north.
However, while there is huge excitement about the expansion, the club has explained one of the hurdles they’ve had to overcome.
The vice president of the North Queensland Organisation explained why they decided against naming the team after the brother outfit in the NRL.
“Yeah, we had to be pretty careful around the naming” sighs Hynes.
“Look, in an ideal world, it’d be nice for women to do something without being sexualised but that’s sadly the reality we live in”, explained the spokesperson for the club.
“And though there will always be some element of it in women’s sports, we didn’t want to make it easy for them.”
“You could imagine the shitstorm we’d have to deal with if we called them the Cowgirls.”
“You can imagine there’d be quite a lot of ‘aw yeah, love a bit of reverse cowgirl hey”
“‘Geez the Reverse Cowgirls really rode home that win'”
“‘Wow, the Reverse Cowgirls are right on top here'”
“And given how many jokes get made about Queenslanders being dumb, I can’t imagine it would stop at any point.”
“So yeah, we had to come up with something else.”
The club is now going full steam ahead to hit the ground running in 2023.
More to come.
