JENNY Loughnan had her job description changed the other day. North Melbourne's football administration manager is about to become football operations manager.

It sounds a little more senior, but it's all just semantics, really. Nobody who has had anything to do with the Kangaroos has the tiniest doubt about her importance at Arden Street.

She's been a slightly bemused bystander to the latest debate about the role of women in AFL football, particularly when it comes to that pejorative word — token. Understandably. Because few, if any, women in the game are less deserving of that slight than her.

To say Loughnan's role with North is very much hands-on is a massive understatement. She looks after the Roos' football department budget. By the end of this year, she'll be heavily involved in overseeing the club's salary cap.

She makes sure everything runs like clockwork at training, on match day and when the club travels interstate. Makes sure the Roos are prepared when there are reports and tribunals to deal with, or the drug-testers arrive at Arden Street. Makes sure the catalogue of AFL rules and regulations generally are adhered to.

It's high-powered stuff. Exhilarating. And appropriate recognition of what has been nearly 20 years' worth of involvement in the game, beginning with the Auskick program, then coaching junior football with De La Salle Old Collegians, working at the AFL, and with North Melbourne, since 2003 as coach Dean Laidley's right-hand ma … err, woman.

Loughnan is proud of where she's got in a traditionally male-dominated domain. "Yeah, I am," she says. "It's what I've always really wanted, what I've strived for and what I've achieved. I like the fact that I've worked for it, and know I've got the position because I've earnt it, and not as some sort of token.

"But what I love most is that I'm part of a team.

"It becomes your life, and some people would say this is sad, but it is my life. You just live and breathe it, and you're part of something that matters. It's not just a job you walk away from.

"You win and beat a team like Collingwood, and you're elated, it's the best thing, then lose like we did last weekend (against Adelaide) and you're just gutted. You do all that work and preparation then lose.

"But it's then just a case of back in office and start working for the next weekend."

She's the Kangaroos' match-day team manager, or Nazi, as she's sometimes tagged by those on the wrong end of her no-nonsense game-day attitude.

It means making sure the rooms are clear enough for the players to prepare and warm up. Means always keeping one eye on the clock, so coach Dean Laidley has his team out on the ground and out of the quarter-time and three-quarter-time huddles on cue.

Probably most impressively to the blokiest of blokes, it also means running the interchange bench.

Loughnan is the blonde figure you'll see at a game or on television sweating over the interchange gate as North pulls another of the now near-100 switches a game, every one of which requires immediate notification to an AFL interchange steward.

It can be a nightmare, as her opposite number at Sydney found the other week when the Swans infamously ended up with one too many players on the ground. People asked Loughnan why the Roos' bench hadn't noticed. You've got to be kidding.

"It's changed heaps with all the rotations and players taking themselves off, and when you have up to four coming off at one time, it's pretty hectic," she says.

"It's impossible to know all their interchanges as well as ours. You hardly see the game."

And this one is a role that requires more than a little football expertise. "I'm sitting next to the bench coach, the strength and conditioning coach and the runners, so a lot of the time I'm watching them, or watching behind to see what moves are happening," she explains.

There's the capacity for fines left, right and centre. If the steward isn't alerted before a change is made. If the man on the bench with the headset to the box leaves his spot to talk to an interchange player. If the player coming on enters the arena even a footstep before the one he's replacing. And so on.

But the Roos for the best part avoid them, thanks to Loughnan's attention to detail.

"I'm red-hot on that stuff, and always have been, even to the point of standing right on the line for an interchange. It probably looks a bit dicky, but imagine Daniel Wells having a good day and then he comes off and goes the wrong side, and can't come back on. There are a couple of what I call my 'red light' players, who'll go to run off the wrong side and you're screaming, 'Get over here!'

"What it's come to now, it might be actually physically holding on to some players' guernseys. Maybe they'll drag me out there with them, or give me one!"

It wouldn't be the first time. Loughnan, coy about her age but prepared to concede being comfortably into her 30s, grew up the eldest of four children but the only girl alongside younger brothers Anthony, David and Matt. Her cousins were boys. So were the kids next door.

The backyard at the Loughnans became an impromptu football and cricket ground.

"It was a matter of join in or miss out," she reflects. Thus a lifelong passion was born, one that became even more intense when, as a university student, she gained a position as a coach of the De La Salle under 12s.

Women in the game were still a curiosity then, but Loughnan quickly proved her mettle.

Initially appointed a co-coach, she flew solo after her male colleague was suspended for abusing the umpire in her very first game.

She'd occupy the role for seven years, completing a level two coaching certificate and coaching a representative side. At the same time, she began work at the AFL in a voluntary capacity.

"It was pretty much stuffing envelopes for the coaches association," she recalls. "Some people would have gone 'bugger that', but it was actually really good because I got to know people and listen to what was going on."

In 1993, she won a full-time job there, only to be retrenched six months later in a cost-cutting exercise. "I was shattered. I'd just started, and it was only a couple of days before Christmas. I thought it was the end of my working life."

But the next day, Loughnan got a call from then under-18 side Eastern Ranges general manager Tony Elshaug asking if she was interested in working part-time.

She'd end up working every day for a part-time wage, in the meantime working as a "blue coat" at Waverley Park games, "just to earn a bit of money and stay involved".

The dedication didn't go unnoticed. Soon she was back at the AFL, first in an office at Waverley, then at headquarters in ground operations and ticketing. She'd become an AFL tribunal secretary, worked in football operations, then as membership manager.

In 1999, when the Kangaroos were trying to crack the Sydney market, club chief executive Greg Miller had her seconded to the Harbour City, where she spent nine months, before the Roos put her in charge of membership and merchandise.

The biggest break, however, was becoming involved with the club's reserves side, the then Murray Kangaroos. "My passion was always to be involved in the footy department, so it was really just a way of getting in," she says. It worked.

When a role in North's senior football department coincided with Laidley's arrival as coach in 2003, she grabbed it. "I took a bit of a pay cut to do it, but I had that passion, and they knew I'd done the yards …

"I reckon what's great about North is that there's never been the slightest issue that I'm a female. As soon as the players see you're there to work, you're not there for any other reason, you're accepted.

"I think the great thing is they actually come to me to find answers to things."

If there's one point of difference, Loughnan says, and in her role a handy one, it's that the players might also open up a little more as people, "let their guard down on a few things". She plays the "big sister" role to those who might need it more, young men still basically kids, who have moved interstate, away from their families.

Having come from a close family unit herself, and touched only a year or so ago by a family tragedy, she is acutely aware of how important that role is, too.

Loughnan is single, but has three nephews and a niece, all of whom she dotes upon. Bryce, 6, and Kyle, 4, stay with her at least one night a week to give her brother Anthony a break.

The tears flow as she tells of Anthony's wife Samantha's death from cancer last year. "It's been tough. It's still pretty raw at the moment. Leaving two little kids behind, and watching them say goodbye to their mum, it kills you, I'll tell you."

But again, football remained a constant, and a comfort. Twenty North players travelled to Lilydale for the funeral. "It was unbelievable. They wore black armbands for her the next week, and they didn't even know her," she says.

But everyone at Arden Street knows and respects Loughnan. Not because she's a woman who has made the grade in a male domain but because she's great at her job, and a nice person to boot. "Everything you read about North is true," she says with pride. "They are a sensational club, and that spirit is real … Dean treats me like everyone else. If they get a spray, I'll get a spray, but that's great because I don't want to be treated any differently."

Fat chance of that happening. Loughnan doesn't just like her hands-on role in AFL football, she loves it. And both she and North Melbourne are thankful that the club's newly titled football operations manager won't be getting out any time soon.

ANALYSIS

JENNY Loughnan was busy packing for North Melbourne's trip to Adelaide last week, the television on in the background, when Sam Newman launched into his latest Footy Show rant about women in AFL football.

Her reaction was far from anger or outrage. As an integral part of the Kangaroos' football machine, she knows how the game works. "It doesn't worry me in the slightest," she says. "He's smarter than to believe what he was saying, but, you know, if you don't like it, don't watch it."

It was the spirited testimonial about Loughnan's job as the Kangaroos' football operations manager from Footy Show co-host and North chairman James Brayshaw in the same discussion that meant far, far more.

"I'd sort of tuned out, but I heard my name. Then the phone started to ring, and I was getting all these text messages. I really appreciated it," Loughnan says.

"I reckon it's good for other girls and women to see that. In my opinion, a woman is never going to coach an AFL club, or play AFL football, but already in clubs, you've got female doctors, physios, I'm a football manager, there's female goal umpires, and there could possibly be a female field umpire. Girls can see all these areas they can get into."

And their numbers are increasing. Which made it disappointing to see so much of the response to the Footy Show's "mannequin-gate" falling for the three-card trick of giving a very cultivated and affected chauvinist tirade credibility and oxygen it didn't warrant.

Age chief football writer Caroline Wilson was satisfied by the apology she received from Channel Nine over the incident.

It was no fault of hers a group of other women involved in AFL football, then a horde of bystanders and commentators, turned it into several rounds of hysteria, petitions and silly calls for compulsory counselling for those naughty Footy Show boys, and the intransigence of the sexists merely hardened further and the importance of female role models such as Loughnan was totally lost in all the hand-wringing.

Rightly, that annoyed Loughnan a lot more. "I was pissed off," she admits. "I thought: 'You're not signing anything on behalf of me.' All it does is fuel it. And I don't care what people say or think, I'm there, and I know how it is."

So do the North Melbourne players and officials who deal with her in a role as close to playing as is possible without actually donning a jumper and boots, her gender a complete non-issue.

"It's got nothing to do with it," says captain Adam Simpson. "We don't treat her any differently because of it. She's got respect through her work ethic, and because she's very organised and good at what she does. There's a sort of calming feeling when she's there, but I think that's just the way she is rather than the fact she's a woman."

Loughnan's rise through the ranks to the game's elite level is a real success story. She's not the only one convinced there will be plenty more to follow. For women in football, that's the encouraging and important reality. The Sam Newman stuff is simply a cartoon.