So what did your kids play on the weekend? A bit of Super Netball on Saturday morning, or maybe some NBL or some A-League?

Perhaps they competed in the Olympics down at your local Little Athletics club.

Because apparently they can all play.afl this season, according to the league’s misguided marketing drive for junior footy.

Referring to the sport of Australian Rules football as AFL started out in New South Wales and Queensland, where their primary codes might have already been known as footy.

So while it was amusing to hear someone from Sydney say their 10-year-old son played AFL, it was understandable and even tolerable.

While the sport’s official name is Australian football, there’s no shortage of acceptable choices. There’s also Aussie Rules, football and footy.

But the AFL knows the power of changing the way our kids talk and now it has ramped up the rhetoric.

And what better way to assert control over an entire sport for ever more than to change its name.

Directly driving this nonsense into footy heartland States like WA — where we have our own proud football history, clubs and legends that have nothing to do with the AFL — is another matter altogether.

West Coast star Jeremy McGovern has become a pawn in this silliness, asked to say “AFL’s a game for everyone, find a version that’s right for you” in a WA Football Commission video.

Actually, there’s one version of the Australian Football League and it has just 18 clubs.

You’ll have to be pretty handy to get drafted by one of them. There’s also this absurd line on the AFL’s own website: “For over 150 years this wonderful game of AFL has been evolving.”

For those keen to join this fight, there is a small but worthy Twitter account called @aflisnotasport worth a follow.

It highlights risible things that get said or written, like the late Mike Willesee, who played AFL for West Perth, or Cardinal George Pell, who was a towering former AFL player.

Before you throw your hands up in despair, there is also some resistance to the AFL’s agenda from where you would least expect it.

The Gold Coast Bulletin produced a footy preview liftout last weekend called ‘Aussie Rules – Complete Guide to Aussie Rules on the Gold Coast in 2019’.

Maybe they could send a copy the WAFC’s way, because this is more than a debate about semantics.

The AFL and the football commission are in ongoing negotiations about changing the name of the WAFC itself to AFLWA. Of course, there would be money in it. Even WA footy’s soul has a price.

The WAFC should reject the switch to a name that is nonsensical.

AFL is not the name of the sport the commission runs and it is not a State branch of the AFL either.

The best marketing campaign money could buy the AFL in WA might be to hand the cash over anyway and not enforce the name change.

Putting a bit more money aside to bring the Australian Football Hall of Fame event to Perth for the first time wouldn’t hurt either.

Just don’t refer to it as the AFL Hall of Fame when it gets here.