AFL Women's Under 18 Championships


The NAB AFL Women's Under 18 Championships are the annual national Australian rules football championships for women players aged 18 years or younger. The competition is seen as one of the main pathways towards being drafted into a team in the professional AFL Women's competition. Originally known as the AFL Youth Girls National Championship, the competition has teams of players representing their states and territories in a round robin tournament. The tournament is currently sponsored by the National Australia Bank. The winner of the 2019 tournament was Vic Metro.

History

A 2008 series between Queenslander and Victorian teams was the predecessor to a national state-based competition for young female footballers. The inaugural competition was conducted in September 2010, in Craigieburn, Victoria. Six teams competed: Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, a combined New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory side and two Victorian squads. These were divided into two pools: an East, made up of NSW/ACT, Queensland, AFL Victoria Development; and a West, made up of South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria. Teams played three regular games against the sides from the opposite pool before a finals series.
Several team changes occurred in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, the Victorian sides became Victoria Metro and Victoria Country. A combined Northern Territory–Tasmania team known as the Thunder Devils and an Indigenous Australian side called the Woomeras entered the tournament in 2014.
The 2017 introduction of AFL Women's, a national women's league, made the tournament into a pathway to the professional competition. For 2017, the name of the competition became AFL Women's Under 18 Championships; it was previously known as the AFL Under 18 Youth Girls Championships. Changes were also made to tournament structure. The tournament was played over two rounds; in the first round, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory played in a separate division. The best players from the states combined to form an Allies team, which competed in the second round against the other states.. In 2018, a similar Eastern Allies team was established, bringing the total number of teams to 10.

Tournaments