Fresh Rangers on fast-track to football No.1

Stuck on the wall in the women’s changing room at the West Coast Rangers Football Club is the catchphrase: It means more here.
It personifies what it means to players to belong to a club in Auckland’s north-west that’s just three years old, but already has a team who’ve fought their way to the top tier of women’s football in New Zealand, the National League Championship.
The women’s premier team coach, Andy Dunn, put the slogan on the wall before this football season began.
“We had this saying even before the team bonding event at Muriwai Beach,” Dunn says. “We’re sitting in the surf club having an open discussion around ‘What do we want from our team?’ And one of the players just said it, ‘It means more here’.  Honestly, I was like, ‘I should just leave now – my job’s done’.”
To Rangers captain Marissa Porteous, it ‘means more here’ because she’s played football in the north-west since she was four years old. “I’ve played for other clubs, played National League with other clubs, but it means everything to play for my club. And hopefully go all the way,” she says.
“We were absolutely devastated when we missed out on the league by one point last year, so this means everything. It’s a whole team movement, a whole club movement.”
West Coast Rangers made their presence felt in their historic opening match of the National League, with a 5-0 away win over Central Football in Palmerston North last weekend. Last night, they played under lights at home at Fred Taylor Park, drawing 3-3 with fellow Auckland club Western Springs.

Rangers are a team with many different rungs of experience. There are two former Football Ferns – defender Nicole Stratford, who played professional football in Germany’s Bundesliga but missed the Tokyo Olympics after a freak accident in training; and Emma Kete, who played at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and that same year scored New Zealand’s first goal against Australia in 10 years. She’s also played for clubs in Canada, Finland, Germany, Australia, the US and the UK.
Then there’s the young “heartbeat” of the team – Porteous, Luci Hollister and Emily Lyon – who are all still under 21. Hollister first played in the Norwest United women’s top team when she was just 12.
Dunn is still shocked Rangers have made it into the country’s elite women’s league in such a short space of time. “To be one of the better clubs nationally, within the space of three years, it shouldn’t happen,” he says.  But nevertheless, their ambition is to win the league in their first year.
West Coast Rangers formed in 2021 after an amalgamation of two neighbouring clubs – Waitakere City and Norwest United.
Both clubs realised that to survive, they needed to form a bigger, more sustainable club, with better funding and resources.
“There needed to be change out west, but to get it, we needed buy-in from the clubs,” says Thom Epstein, originally with Norwest, and now a board member at West Coast Rangers.
“So we got all the old fellas in a room and said ‘Here’s a nice cold beer. Let’s talk about getting married, given the fact that we’ve been at war for the last 20 years’.
“We explained it wasn’t about us. It was about the path for youth out west and the development of football. It’s one of the best success stories of sports clubs amalgamating that I’ve seen.”
The two clubs had markedly different strengths: Norwest had a women’s team in the Northern Region premier league; Waitakere had a men’s premier league side.  When they melded, the new West Coast Rangers made a commitment to treat the women’s and men’s games equally.
Andy Dunn coached in Canada for 16 years before coming to New Zealand, working with a club in British Columbia where the boys and girls programmes were identical. “Every player had the same access to coaching and training, and they paid the same fees,” he says.
“When I first moved here, that was the stark difference. I couldn’t understand why you’d have a supposedly top club with a men’s and youth programme for boys, and then nothing for female footballers. When these clubs amalgamated, I wasn’t going to be involved if it wasn’t equal for women and men.
“Our men are in the Northern Premier League and they’re competitive. And if we wanted them to make the National League, the easiest way would be to get rid of the women’s programme and give all the budget to the men. But we’re not going to do that.”
There’s a concerted effort at West Coast Rangers to encourage more female players to join, and now having a women’s side in the 10-team National League will allow girls to see a pathway.  
Right now, the club has only 20 percent female membership, which West Coast Rangers chair Mike Brooke says is standard in New Zealand football. “But it’s not good enough,” says Brooke, who has two daughters playing the sport. “We’ve got to get that up to at least 35 percent female.
“We need to get to a point where a girl walks into the club and she sees enough girls to make her realise this is her sport as well. The women are not just an add-on, but they have to feel like they belong here.”
There’s been an obvious shift in girls’ interest in the sport since the FIFA Women’s World Cup was played in New Zealand in 2023. The Vietnamese team trained at the Rangers’ ground at Fred Taylor Park, which has new LED floodlights, changing room upgrades and a new turf through the tournament’s legacy programme.
Now the club is working on getting girls starting football at an earlier age.
“We see them starting at eight or nine, and they’re missing out on four years of football versus what the boys get,” Dunn says. “But we’ve got just under 100 girls in that four-to-eight year bracket, and 70 in the nine-to-12 range, which is significantly bigger than it’s been. So our base is growing.”
The Rangers women stormed through the Northern League this winter, finishing strong runners-up to the reigning national champions Auckland United (who are favourites to retain their title, having also won the Oceania Champions League and the Kate Sheppard Cup this season).
“It’s still crazy to me that we’re at this level after only three seasons,” says Dunn. “When I first started at Norwest, we had 12 women’s players who’d come to training. But some of our younger players were super-committed and have come through.”
When the team narrowly missed qualifying for the National League last year, they arranged for five of their players to take the field for other teams in the league. Two Rangers – Porteous and Kendrah Smith – played in the national final for Southern United.
Midfielder Smith has spent this season playing in Melbourne, for the Essendon Royals. But she’s returned home in time for the National League. Porteous, who’s now played 101 gams for Norwest and Rangers, has assumed the captain’s role after their previous leader, goalkeeper Emily Couchman, missed much of this season through injury.
The team have come a long way in 12 months, having struggled to put the ball in the back of the net last season.
“Scoring was our Achilles heel,” Dunn says. “Defensively, we’ve always been a tough team to play against. If we’d finished our chances last year, we would have been a comfortable second, so that was something we needed to address.”
Then Shannon Henson arrived at Rangers, from Auckland United, and won the golden boot award in the Northern premiership, netting 16 goals. “She’s been unbelievable – she came into our environment and hit the ground running,” says Dunn.  All up, the team scored 65 goals – equal with Auckland United.
So what would success look like in Rangers’ first National League? “Winning it,” Mike Brooke says.
“Last year, I watched the league final at Mt Smart, between Auckland and Southern, and I sat there thinking, ‘We need to be here’. And now we’re there, we want to win it.”