AFLW boss Nicole Livingstone has been honoured with an award at the Women's Health 'Women in Sports Awards' on Sunday night.
Livingstone, the former Olympic swimmer and now General Manager of Women's Football at the AFL, was awarded the Under Armour Person of Sporting Influence.
Livingstone joined the AFL in 2017 and is responsible for the running of the AFLW and growth of the women's game.
Since she started at the league five years ago, the AFLW has expanded to include all 18 teams, with one of the highlights of her tenure being the 2019 Grand Final, which was played in front of a crowd of more than 50,000 people in Adelaide.
In just seven seasons, the NAB AFLW competition has grown to become the biggest employer of female athletes in the country, with 540 players taking the field each week representing each of the 18 AFL clubs.
Nicole has advocated strongly to increase female participation at grassroots level, and to create pathways for female players, coaches and administrators.
Previously, Livingstone represented Australia in swimming at three Olympic Games, in 1988, 1992 and 1996, winning multiple medals.
Greater Western Sydney's Chloe Dalton was also honoured with the Leadership Legend award.
As an athlete, Chloe Dalton won gold with the Women’s Rugby Sevens team at the Rio Olympics. Now, she’s advocating for women in sport with a new digital platform, The Female Athlete Project (TFAP). Since it launched, TFAP has grown into a community of almost 39,000 people, and strongly campaigned for causes that champion equality. Dalton has also become a leading voice for female athletes in the media. In August 2021, she created a Go Fund Me page with the aim of raising $100,000 to be split evenly between Australia’s medal winners from the Tokyo Paralympics, after the fact they weren’t financially rewarded – unlike Olympians, who receive $20,000 for winning gold – was widely reported.
The page raised $68,000 in just three days and, within a week, the federal government announced they would boost funding for Paralympic athletes, to ensure they received the same cash medal bonuses as their Olympic counterparts. More recently, TFAP has donated 10 percent of all proceeds from their icons merchandise range to Beat It By Stotty, a charity created by Olympian and five-time W-League Champion Rebekah Stott to support people going through cancer treatment. In December, Stott played her first professional game, for Melbourne City, since being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2020.
Dalton played 16 games of AFLW for Carlton, and six for Greater Western Sydney.
