KICKOFF can still remember the first time we sat down with Jillaroos star Sam Bremner.
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It was late 2013 and she had just returned from the Jillaroos World Cup triumph in the UK. Not that many people – including this columnist – knew about it.
She was the player of the tournament and was dubbed “the Billy Slater of women’s league” by then Australian Test coach Tim Sheens.
It’s a tag she still carries five years later but that first interview seems much further back in the distant past. For starters, she was still Sam Hammond back then. Kickoff has also lost a fair amount of hair, and found a few pants’ sizes in the years since.
Of course those changes are miniscule compared to what she’s experienced in the ensuing time, as she recalled for this column ahead of Friday’s first-ever Women’s State of Origin clash.
She was at WIN Stadium that day to promote the Illawarra Women’s League – which she was instrumental in starting – as it entered it’s fourth season. It was already a lot further than she thought the ride would take her.
“That would’ve been one of my first interviews,” she said.
“It feels like 2013 wasn’t that long ago, but then I think about how much has happened in that time and how much we’ve moved forward, it feels like a long time ago.
“I remember when I got back from that World Cup and the [Australian] rugby sevens team asked me to play with them.
“Everyone knew about rugby sevens and that they were going to the [2016] Olympics and I was trying to make this major decision.
“I felt that I wanted to help rugby league grow and not jump on the back of something that was already well established.
“No one really understood why I made that decision but I was really young and I was very passionate about the sport I played. I’m so happy that I stuck with it and have seen how far it’s come.”
It’s come as far as the raging success of last year’s World Cup, the establishment of he inaugural NRL women’s competition – in which she’ll line up for the Dragons – and Friday’s State of Origin clash.
It’s a bed she admittedly thought she was making for the generation after hers – happily so.
“I didn’t even think we’d get a Helensburgh team,” she said.
“I was just trying to get 11 girls because that’s how we played back then under mod rules. I got 15 girls but even then I wasn’t sure how many would come back after the first game. I didn’t even know if I would.
“I knew that I was a part of the dynamics changing, on and off the field, but I didn’t ever expect there to be a women’s [NRL] competition while I was still playing.
“I didn’t expect to be playing for this long because I didn’t realise there were going to be so many opportunities keep presenting themselves.
“That’s what’s happened every year I’ve played rugby league. There’s been more opportunities to keep me motivated to play the game I love.”
Not that it’s always loved her back. She’s suffered a wretched run of serious injuries in recent seasons, including the leg fracture that kept her out of last year’s World Cup final.
It’s something else she could not have contemplated back in 2013 but always the bonds, naturally born of a long struggle for recognition, have brought her back.
It’s why she so fondly recalls the first call she made in trying to get the Helensburgh Tigerlillies off the ground – to Maddie Studdon, who will skipper the Blues on Friday.
“I played my very first game with Mads. She was the very first person I called when I was trying to make a team for Helensburgh,” Bremner recalls.
“I’d played touch football with her for years, she had all the skills and I knew she’d played when she was little. It’ll be such an honour to go out there and be captained by her on Friday.
“It’s been a bit of a roller coaster together with injuries and things like that but that’s the best thing about rugby league, the culture and the friendships.
“In camp we’ve been talking about what it means to us to represent NSW and I’ve really thought about why I keep coming back to something that, for the last 12 months, has given me a bit more grief than happiness.
“Really, it’s just because I was addicted to that feeling of belonging to the team. It’s why I started and it’s why I still play now and why I’m so excited to run out there in a Blues jersey on the weekend.”
It’s just desserts but the true rewards lie well away from the bright lights.
“When we got back from the [2013] World Cup, I remember we went to a school in Kogarah and they asked the kids ‘who’s heard of the Jillaroos’ you’d be lucky to get one hand go up,” she said.
“Now we go to clinics where the little girls say that’s why they want to be when they grow up, they want to be a Jillaroo. It’s why they play, they want to be like Maddie, or Talesha [Quinn], or Kezie [Apps] or Ruan [Sims].
“You can have all the success in the world on the field but you really feel it’s epitome of success when you’re somewhere like that and you know you’re giving young people that inspiration.”
No doubt those little girls will be running around in a ‘Sam Bremner Cup’ one day. Which brings us right back again to that first interview in 2013 and what she told the Mercury then.
“Mum said ‘stick to dancing’ but I grew up in a real rugby league family and always wanted to play,” she said.
“If someone said to me two seasons ago ‘if you go go to the Illawarra knockout you’ll represent NSW, you’ll travel to England and win a World Cup’ I’d have said ‘no way’.”
No way? Imagine if she could go back and tell her 22-year-old self what she knows now.