On the eve of Carlton’s 100th AFLW match, it’s worth revisiting the moment when it all began: Lauren Arnell, a former basketballer turned inside midfielder, leading her teammates out at a bursting Princes Park on a Friday night in February back in 2017. Fans were still trying to scale fences to get into the ground long after it had been declared full, television commentators were fumbling for the right superlatives, and a competition that had existed only in theory for months suddenly had a pulse.

Arnell had served as Carlton’s first female football ambassador the previous year, in helping to shape the pitch that won the Club its licence, and was rewarded with the honour of being named the Blues’ inaugural captain. That she got to lead the much-vaunted Game Changers into the very first contest, against Collingwood, only added to the sense that Carlton’s women’s team was, from the outset, intertwined with the AFLW’s own origin story.

The football on show that night more than matched the occasion. Darcy Vescio booted four goals - more than Collingwood tabled as a team - in a performance befitting a genuine star, whilst teammates drawn from suburban leagues and other codes gave Carlton a seven-goal-to-one opening statement. It was a modest playing group by later standards, all pioneers rather than polished professionals, but the scenes outside the ground told their own story: this was a competition and a Club that had touched a nerve nobody in football had quite predicted.

Leadership at Carlton has always carried a strong sense of lineage. Arnell handed the captaincy to Brianna Davey for 2018, before Katie Loynes and Harrington shared the armband through the co-captaincy era of 2020–21, and Harrington - later Peterson - carried it alone from 2022 through to 2024, becoming the Club’s longest-serving AFLW captain and a three-time All-Australian along the way.  Abbie McKay, Carlton’s inaugural father-daughter signing, was elevated to sole captain after Peterson, becoming the first player in AFLW history to captain the same Club her father had led.

After a difficult stretch through the early 2020s in which finals football proved elusive, Carlton’s mostly homegrown, increasingly youthful list clicked into gear in 2025. Wins piled up through the home-and-away season, Harriet Cordner earned her first All-Australian blazer anchoring the defence, and the Blues went on a September run - capped by a joyful, dance-fuelled finals campaign led by young talents like Poppy Scholz and Sophie McKay - all the way to their first preliminary final since that famous 2019 run. Brisbane ultimately ended the fairytale, but the season re-established Carlton as a Club on the rise rather than one living off old memories.

That momentum has carried into season 2026, with McKay and vice-captain Mimi Hill -  one of the most durable and dynamic players on Carlton’s list since her own Rising Star-winning season - leading a group that has started the year among the comp’s benchmark sides. It is fitting that a Club whose whole AFLW story began with a full house and a wave of public attention should, a decade on, be pushing for finals football on the back of genuine depth rather than shallow novelty.

There is a neat symmetry too in where the Club’s inaugural leader has ended up. Arnell left Carlton for Brisbane in 2018, won a premiership with the Lions in 2021, and retired to become the first former player appointed as an AFLW senior coach, taking charge of Port Adelaide from its first season in the competition. The player who led Carlton out for game one has spent the years since helping shape the next generation of the sport from the coach’s box – validation if any was needed of how far the pathways created in 2017 have since extended.

None of this - the record crowds, the Grand Final appearance, the Rising Stars and Best and Fairest winners, the goalkicking records, the Pride Round fixtures, the captains who have carried the jumper -  was guaranteed on that February night at Princes Park. AFLW itself was an experiment and Carlton’s place within it was far from secure.

A hundred matches on, what stands out is not just the highlights reel but the continuity: many of the players who built the club’s identity in 2017 are still shaping it in coaching boxes, leadership groups and Club culture today, and the values Arnell embodied as that first captain - standard-setting, community-minded, unafraid of the spotlight - remain recognisably woven into the fabric on the cusp of the 100th match.

For a club with a men’s history sourced to 1864, a hundred games is a small number. For the Game Changers, it represents the entire lived history of a competition that didn’t exist a decade ago - and a story that, from Arnell’s opening stride to whoever leads the team out this week, has been worth telling one chapter at a time.