The powerhouse club of women’s Aussie rules – and perhaps Aussie rules overall – couldn’t get much further from the game’s Melbourne roots.

It’s about 1,400km as the crow flies. Or, more appropriately, 1,700km as the Lion strides, given that Brisbane has twice beaten Adelaide – another AFLW heavyweight – in the past six weeks.

But tradition is the last thing on the mind of the Brisbane Lions as they upend Australians’ outdated sporting assumptions one grand final appearance at a time.

The Lions are contesting their fifth AFLW decider in eight years, this time against North Melbourne, on Sunday. Yes, the Lions. From Brisbane, Queensland: what many consider to be a non-AFL state.

“They keep telling you that,” says Breeanna Brock, head of women’s football at the Lions. “But times they are a-changing.”

Brock is proud to say 28 of the Lions’ 34 listed players this season are from Queensland, including the captain, Bre Koenen, and their three 2023 All-Australians: midfielders Ally Anderson and Sophie Conway, and forward Dakota Davidson, who is racing to recover from a knee injury.

The tradition goes back to the AFLW foundation club’s original list in 2017, and the Bundaberg-born captain Emma Zielke, who retired in 2021 but is now the team’s runner and academy coach.

“Even in our proposal to the club, when we were first trying to get a licence for the Brisbane Lions women’s team, we put in that we wanted the team to be at least 80% Queensland talent,” she says.

“We did get a few interstate girls at the time but the majority were Queenslanders and then we’ve picked up a fair few each year through the QAFL.”

This pipeline has helped the club overcome the loss of key players to expansion clubs. Three of last season’s All-Australians left the club in the off-season: Jesse Wardlaw to St Kilda, and Emily Bates and Greta Bodey to Hawthorn. That has made this season, according to Brock, particularly challenging.

“The loss of those three, it’s probably the first time in all of the losses we’ve had that our very, very top quality players had to move on,” she says. “We’re just so, I guess, blessed in Queensland to have so many girls playing the game.”

According to 2022-23 AusPlay data, 9.8% of Australia’s Aussie rules participants aged 15 and over are in Queensland, closing on the 12.5% in South Australia and 12.6% in New South Wales.

AFL Queensland reported in August that more than 4,000 girls now take part in junior competitions, an increase of 72% since 2019. Women’s participation across community competitions overall has risen 10%.

Lulu Pullar grew up a Lions fan, and debuted for Brisbane last year (after also playing in the W-League for Brisbane Roar), but will take the field for the Kangaroos this Sunday. She believes the Melbourne football community is starting to take notice of the progress in Queensland.

“The amount of participation in even under-sixes up there is just phenomenal,” the 25-year-old says. “When I was a young girl playing soccer, that was sort of the buzz back in the day – soccer was kind of taking over – and it’s probably what’s led to the Matildas’ success we’re seeing this year, but it makes me really excited for what particularly women’s footy is going to look like in 10 years’ time.”

The nature of the AFLW draft means the Lions can still recruit their best local talents. Draftees can nominate for the “state pool” to remain in Queensland. But Zielke says it might not be long before Victorian clubs pry open the northern pipeline.

“I do think our draft will turn national probably in a few years when that minimum wage is up around the $80,000 mark so that it is a little bit more viable for these young girls to actually go interstate,” she says. Minimum wage under the CBA is set to hit this threshold in 2027.

But Brock, Zielke and their colleagues have tried to establish a culture to help insulate the club from the ever-changing winds of footy. The coach, Craig Starcevich, and high performance manager, Matt Green have been at the Lions alongside Brock since the AFLW’s inception. Brock worked in talent development before taking charge of the Lions’ AFLW side.

She is “a trailblazer”, according to the outgoing manager of women’s football at the AFL, Nicole Livingstone. “You think about the consistency, the combination of Bree and Starc, who have been there from the start, and the stability and also the knowledge that they have, has obviously helped with them being able to do this year in, year out,” Livingstone says.

Brock and Starcevich go back even further to their time at AFL Queensland.

“We’ve got a great working relationship,” Brock says. “We know what we’re doing, we know what’s worked, we build on it every year – ‘don’t like that, change that’, ‘move to this, go to that’ – and so every year, we’re not starting again.”

The pair have targeted players who, as she says, “love to work really hard, train really hard, and are eager to learn”. Zielke says it has created an environment akin to the famed “Bloods” culture at the Sydney Swans.

“From the start, we had some strong leaders in place and they set the standards from day one, and those standards have been driven throughout the entire eight seasons, whether those players are still there or not.”

This tradition, Zielke says, will help the players make the most of grand final week : “Take it in day-by-day, but also embracing the fact that there’s not been too many other clubs that have been in this situation before.”