The dominant women's side of the modern era, Boomers were among a handful of teams to drop back to reserves last season, before stepping back up to seniors this year.

Boomers' veteran Jenae Abel recently called for an overhaul of women's football in the region, which included scrapping the reserve league all together.

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"I just find it quite ironic that we're trying to promote women's football, but clubs off their own bat are saying they're not good enough and are going to drop into reserve grade," Torcaso said.

"At United, we've worked extremely hard and lost lots of games by high scores and still tried to maintain women's football to then bring everyone forward.

"It's very disappointing from a club like ours to look at a club like Boomers who have been so successful over so many years and then come to a decision to say 'we don't have much faith in these girls to continue to be so successful, we might just drop them down a notch'."

Boomers goalkeeper Samantha Bushnell admits it's been a struggle for the club since returning to the senior ranks, but she's confident the younger players will benefit in the long run.

"They're improving week in and week out," Bushnell said.

"Coming into the senior competition, we talked about it before the season actually started and decided to go into the senior league because we wanted the competition.

"We wanted the hard-fought battles, just to show the girls you only improve in the long run."

Bushnell believes all clubs should be fielding a senior team before a reserves team.

"Regardless of score, I think that would definitely promote it a bit more," she said.

"I can understand with the young ones being in reserve grade, but I fully believe they should have said everyone field a senior ladies team and then field a reserves.

"The decision last year was more based on a lot of things.

"We had a lot of players who were scared about going into the senior competition and we were worried if we went into the senior competition, we would lose them.

"That's why we decided to go with the reserve grade competition.

"This year, we started out saying we'll go in the senior level competition, and, thankfully, these young girls that have come in and are new to football have stuck around.

"I really hope that it all sorts itself out and we can stay in senior level football.

"It's really hard when you get to the end of each year and you have a bunch of girls leaving for university, jobs and things like that."

Bushnell said the most difficult aspect is people are still holding Boomers to the standard of previous season.

"I only came to Boomers in 2017 and I know they've always been a team to beat, but people are still holding Boomers' ladies to that standard," she said.

"I think people need to stop doing that because we're not at that standard any more.

"We'll hopefully get back there, but we're just not at that standard."