Nine pairs of West Coast AFLW boots were designed by school students
Nine pairs of West Coast Eagles AFLW boots were designed by PLC First Nations students for Indigenous Round 2026 - custom boots as design, not gear.
Nine pairs of footy boots, designed by students at PLC First Nations and worn by West Coast Eagles AFLW players during AFLW Indigenous Round 2026. That is the count West Coast Eagles gave in its own post, and it is the only hard number attached to this story.
The school program is co-ordinated by Tegan Maffescioni, and the players who ran out in them were her students' work on a game-day stage that lasts four quarters. The West Australian reported it on 4 September 2026, in Sophie Gannon's piece.
Neither source names the boot models underneath the artwork, or which player wore which design, so you will not find that here. Our census is built the other way round: it records the model a player turns up in, week after week, and it has no column for what was painted across the upper.
A boot tracker sees a size and a silhouette. It does not see the thing the students actually made.
Where the design started
PLC First Nations co-ordinator Tegan Maffescioni approached artist Andrew Beck, the designer of the Eagles' Indigenous guernsey artwork, and the students' boot designs came out of that approach, according to The West Australian's account of the project.
That is as much of the origin story as the public record holds. Beck's own role in the boot project is not spelled out. Neither the club's announcement nor the newspaper names the students who drew each pair, or sets out how a drawing moved from paper onto an upper. The people who can fill those gaps are at PLC and at the club.
The project began with someone who already knew how West Coast talks about Indigenous artwork, going to the person who drew it.
Whether the students' work made a better boot is a question for the players who wore them, and the census has no column for it.
Two sources, one story
Sophie Gannon's piece for The West Australian, published 4 September 2026, sits behind a paywall. Anyone checking this story runs into it almost immediately. What is visible is the standfirst and the opening paragraph, and that is enough to confirm the shape of it: PLC students, the Eagles' boots, AFLW Indigenous Round.
West Coast Eagles' own post is public, and it carries the claim anyone can verify independently - students at PLC First Nations, their designs on the field that weekend, worn by AFLW players. Gannon's article is the story of record. The club's post is the evidence that does not need a subscription.
We keep them separate rather than blending them into a single sourced paragraph, because a club announcing its own project and a newspaper reporting on it are different claims carrying different risk. If the two ever disagreed, you would want to know which one you were leaning on.
If you have a subscription, the rest of Gannon's piece is the place to look - we would rather point you at it than paraphrase a paragraph we have not seen the end of.
What we can't see
Nobody published a player list. There is no public document pairing a named West Coast AFLW player with a specific boot from that night. No base model is named, no size is listed, no description of what the artwork shows.
The claim that survives verification is one line long: the boots were designed by PLC First Nations students, and AFLW players wore them. Past that line, everything is guesswork dressed as reporting.
A miss gets corrected. Players change boots and the next round's record fixes itself. These do not. When West Coast's AFLW side runs back out onto the oval, these designs will not appear in our database - not because we judged the story too small, but because no source has handed us a list saying which boot belongs to which player. We will not build one out of photographs and a hunch.
If you can close that gap, the places worth your afternoon are the club's own match-day material and the full Gannon piece. Watch the quarter-by-quarter footage from that weekend, too. If you find a mapping we have missed, send it in and we will fix the row rather than keep guessing at it.
Boots as art
An Indigenous Round design usually lands on a guernsey. This one landed on nine pairs of boots.
The project had a lineage before it ever reached a boot room. What the artwork depicted, how many students contributed, and which player drew which pair - none of that is confirmed anywhere public. The record runs out there.
We log boots as equipment - model, size, brand, colourway - because those fields still mean something ten rounds from now. Artwork has no column, and there is no obvious value to put in one. "Designed by PLC First Nations students" is a credit, not an attribute, and a credit does not resolve to a row.
Shoot it from the boundary and you get the colour. You do not get the artist.
If you watched that round and know which player wore which design, tell us.
The What's Worn Crew
Boot details and availability change - check with the retailer before buying.
Start with these
Evidence plates - the register's most-worn boots
Recorded by Kelso & Hobbes
Counts: the What's Worn census