📰 Play Her Way: Building the Next Generation of Female Leaders
Women in League round is about more than celebrating what happens on the field. It is a chance to recognise the women and girls building futures through Rugby League, on the field, in the boardroom and everywhere in between. For the Rabbitohs, there is no better example of that than Play Her Way, the all-girls Rugby League training program that completed its first full year in 2025.
Launched by Souths Cares with support from the Australian Government, Play Her Way was created to tackle the barriers that stop girls from playing sport, including affordability, access to quality coaching and a lack of training programs built specifically for female athletes. The ten-week program is aligned with the school term and delivers far more than Rugby League skills. Participants are coached by accredited mentors in a safe, inclusive environment, with additional guidance on nutrition, mental fitness, leadership and goal-setting to help them grow as athletes and as individuals. Each participant also receives mentorship from female athletes and coaches, access to strength and conditioning support, team registration subsidies and training gear and equipment, all delivered after school at accessible locations across South Eastern Sydney and the Inner City.
Why Play Her Way exists
The reality facing girls in sport is stark. Around 60% of girls aged 15 and over drop out of organised sport, and many never return. The drivers behind this are well evidenced, including confidence, with 31% of girls saying they would play more sport if they felt more confident, cost, cited by 28% of women as a reason for leaving, body image, and a lack of visible female role models, with 60% reporting they have none. Play Her Way was built to address each of these barriers directly, rather than adapting a program designed for boys.
What the program delivered in its first year
2025 was a landmark year for Play Her Way. The program received 289 applications across the year, with demand consistently outstripping available places, while 150 expressions of interest for the Girls Only Clinic came in within under a week of it being announced. Completion across the full ten-week program reached 75%, delivered through four squads spanning Under 11s to Under 17s. Five players from the Under 15 squad went on to be selected in the Rabbitohs Lisa Fiaola Cup squad, a strong sign of the pathway Play Her Way is building toward representative Rugby League. First Nations participation stood at 39%, reflecting the program's reach into community, while 31% of participants named family finances as a barrier to playing, underlining why the subsidies and free equipment built into the program matter.
More than a game: building the next generation of female leaders
What Play Her Way builds in its participants goes well beyond the football field. Rugby League, like any team sport, teaches girls to communicate under pressure, to lead a group toward a shared goal, to back themselves in high-stakes moments and to recover from setbacks and try again. These are not just sporting skills. They are the same skills that underpin strong leadership in business, community and public life.
By pairing girls with female athletes and coaches as mentors, and by embedding leadership and goal-setting alongside the Rugby League curriculum, Play Her Way is deliberately building capacity in its participants, not just fitness. A girl who learns to captain a team, front up to a Girls Only Clinic alongside 150 other applicants competing for a handful of places, or push through to complete a demanding ten-week program is building the confidence and resilience that will serve her well beyond sport. The Club sees Play Her Way as an investment in the next generation of female leaders, whether that leadership plays out on a Rugby League field, in a boardroom or somewhere not yet imagined.
Backing the next generation of Rabbitohs women
The first year of Play Her Way has shown what is possible when girls are given a program designed around them. From the successful launch at Redfern Oval through to the first-ever Girls Tackle Clinic and the graduation of players into representative squads, 2025 has proven that when the barriers of cost, access and confidence are removed, girls turn up and they stay. This Women in League round, that is a result worth celebrating.
South Sydney and Souths Cares thank the Australian Government, the National Indigenous Australians Agency, Training Services NSW and the Department of Training and Skills for their support in making this program possible.
If you are a community partner interested in supporting Play Her Way, or a family wanting to find out more about the 2026 intake, get in touch with Souths Cares to be part of the next chapter in women's Rugby League in South Sydney.
Help us change the future of women's sport, one game at a time.
