The popular narrative about the ‘rise’ of ‘women’s sport’ and associated celebratory affects (of love, passion, excitement) can obscure the formation of gendered boundaries and the ‘stickiness’ of certain bodies within the complex assemblage of sport. Gender diversity policies, exercise science, and talent identification and development policies and practices are continually enfolded into spacetimematterings that weave together past, present and future desires. Multiple imperatives—for profit, pleasure, success, inclusion and so forth—have shaped the rise of professional competitions for sportswomen. Yet, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, women’s status as sport professionals who are paid for their athletic labour is tenuous and precarious. Women’s hopes and desires—to be recognized as playing at the ‘top of their game’, to be paid for their capacity to play sport, to engage fans, to be players and to inspire the next generation—are simultaneously being fulfilled and hampered by the development of women’s competitions within the machinic desires of masculine sport organizations such as the AFL. To account for this complexity and contradiction we articulate the notion of the sport-gender-assemblage as a tool for thinking.