May 8th, 2025Women’s soccer team booting goals

For the first time in 37 years the Daylesford Hepburn United Soccer Club once again has a senior women’s team playing in the Ballarat and District Soccer League … and loving it.

What started a couple of years back with a clinic and a bit of casual fun booting a ball about, has continued to gain momentum such that the club recently started playing home and away fixtures as part of the League every Sunday.

Training is Tuesday evenings and with 23 registered team members and more lining up to join, this local senior women’s team has been booting goals in more ways than one.

Away from the soccer pitch, club secretary, under-16 girls manager, and keen women’s team player Dianne Tran is a solicitor.

She says that after spending plenty of time watching her kids play soccer from the sidelines, she decided it was time to have a piece of the action herself.

“It has been 37 years since we had a women’s team in the League,” Dianne confirms.

 “We weren’t even aware there was a senior women’s soccer team that played 37 years ago. But we were corrected on that.”

Current day club committee member Krystyna (Krys) Szokolai was a member of that original women’s team 37 years ago and she recounted those days.

“That was a long time ago. We only ever played one season.  “But that year kick-started my career (in soccer refereeing),” Krys says.

“Most of us were in year 11 that year. So we played a season and the following year I guess most of the players wanted to focus on HSC, as it was back then, and so we didn’t have enough people to form another team.

“We haven’t had another team until this year which is very exciting.”

While that original women’s team itself was short-lived, Krys went on to become a national and international soccer referee in an impressive career that included refereeing at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.

It seems soccer is in her blood. Krystyna’s father, Marton Szokolai, is one of the Daylesford Hepburn United Soccer Club club’s co-founders, a European immigrant who was passionate about seeing the game bring people of all backgrounds and persuasions together.

Krystyna – these days working as a professional veterinarian – recounts how, when that original women’s soccer team ended, she had “still wanted to be part of the game”. So when a regional opportunity to take the refereeing route presented she grabbed it and ran.

“I started off refereeing and the following year I moved to Melbourne and worked my way up through the ranks and started doing national league games,” Krys recounts.

She was then nominated for refereeing duties at international games, serving as an Olympics Games referee at Athens in 2004.

“Then when I hung up the whistle I started working for FIFA as a referee instructor and travelled the world with that, preparing referees for World Cups and tournaments.

“I was out of the country nine months of the year,” she said. “There are things you learn in sport that you learn to use in your everyday life.”

“Dad was always very into his football. We called it football. He grew up in a tiny village in what’s now Serbia. But we’re Hungarian descent. When thinking back to it … he had so much courage to decide to start a club.

“He only ever wanted to bring people together through the sport. Any age, any gender, any ethnicity. Anyone who wanted to play sport was welcome. That was his philosophy. Uniting people was his mantra.”

Dianne Tran says getting a women’s team back and playing competitively in the League today, after a 37-year absence, is hugely significant.

“Since the Women’s World Cup there’s been a renewed interest from women and girls in soccer and we’ve certainly seen that in our club,” she says.

“The senior women’s team was revived a couple of years ago from a clinic. We had a good group of women and we just informally continued training ourselves, just kicking a ball around. No coach at that stage.

“But each week we continued to get consistently about 15 women come and join us and over time more and more people would turn up.

“After being more of a social thing for about a year, the team ended up with not just one, but two coaches.”

Now Di says the team’s members range in age from a 15-year-old to someone in her 60s, and while some players do have soccer backgrounds a lot don’t have any prior soccer experience at all. And that’s fine.

“I really didn’t know anything about soccer,” she says.

“It wasn’t something I’d played at school. I only started getting into it when my kids –  my son and my daughter – started playing competitively, just watching them find something they were passionate about.”

Di’s husband also coaches. In fact he’s one of the two coaches for the women’s team. So the whole family is into soccer.

“It’s like a common language that we all share now,” Di says.

“Playing for me meant that I had another thing in common with my kids that we could communicate about. So we’ll all go to Matildas matches together, watch an A-League match together, talk strategy together.

“My husband is Chilean so it’s in his blood. It’s something that gels the family together.”

Chatting to Di, though, it’s fairly clear that she appreciates her soccer for more reasons than the valuable fact that it’s something the family can enjoy together.

 “There’s a lot of strategy and thinking that goes into the game,” the soccer-loving local solicitor says.

“It blows your mind. It’s all very technical. It’s not just about kicking the ball to the back of the net.

“Our goalkeeper is a myotherapist so she’s making a killing. Being older and playing means we’re a bit more clever about pushing ourselves and about things like stretching and recovery.

“A lot of people have said to us ‘I feel so welcome in the team. It’s not intimidating at all’.

“We’ve played a couple of friendlies and two rounds in the competition season, against Creswick and the Forest Rangers from Wendouree, and we’re getting better each week.

“It’s been bloody tiring and bloody hard work but a lot of fun.”

Daylesford and Hepburn United Soccer Club president Adam Sadler says the club generally has been enjoying “quite a lot of growth” in recent times.

“We are very much a community-based club that is welcoming to anyone who wants to come and play regardless of ability or experience,” Adam says.

“Over the past two years we have managed to grow the club significantly even achieving some national recognition having been listed in the top five soccer clubs of the year by Football Australia.”

The club very recently secured a $4950 state government grant for professional development of its women, girls and gender diverse participation policy.

“That’s gone to subsidising our women’s registration,” Di says. “That’s been fantastic.”

“The committee has worked really hard in encouraging women, girls and gender diverse participation in our club and in soccer.

“We also worked with Football Vic to develop an action plan for women and girls and we’ve kicked off a lot of those goals.

“They’re a great bunch of women. We get along great and have a lot of fun. We’ve got some good energy. It’s about supporting each other and having some fun.”

Krystyna Szokolai reckons her Dad would be pretty happy to see the recent developments at the Daylesford and Hepburn United Soccer Club.

“Oh my God it just goes to show how far we’ve come,” she says.

“Maybe we could get another international referee… or a Matildas player…”

Words: Eve Lamb