Emma, how do you reflect on your team’s season?

We didn’t pull away as many wins as we would have liked to but overall there’s been a lot of growth within our team. Being such a young side and having so many new players the growth we saw off the field was huge and slowly but surely we will start to see it on the field as well. 

West Coast had 15 new players join this season and fielded the youngest ever team in the AFLW, how did such a large group coming in together impact the playing squad?

Obviously, there is going to be challenges having such a big group of newcomers, a lot of those girls were drafted and came in already four weeks into pre-season because of when the draft was this year, so that brought a lot of challenges with it. A handful of those girls are quite young as well. A lot are finishing Year 12 at school and having little to no experience at a professional club, while it did bring those challenges, I thought it revived the program having so much fresh energy come in with brand new ideas and different perspectives. With such a young group we also had a few older players come through, players like Emma Humphries and Jess Sedunary came in with a wealth of experience behind them in football and in other sports which certainly helped the program and saw us go forward.

What were some of the challenges of leading the young group, and what do you continue to learn about yourself as a leader?

Personally, as I get older and the draft group gets younger it’s going to keep challenging me to try and find that connection with the younger group. I’m sure the other older girls have those challenges as well, it’s not just me and alongside that I’m sure the younger girls feel the same way, so it certainly makes a difference having those young girls come through. Just watching how our rookies balance school life as well trying to help them with that challenged me as I wasn’t that great at school so it was hard to work out how I could support them in any way to get them through those Year 12 studies. My expectations of what they were bringing to training didn’t waiver and it took me a little bit of time to come around to the fact that maybe our expectation of these girls who are juggling school and being an elite athlete might need to be a little bit different. It certainly brought challenges for me and my leadership but I’m sure it did for other players as well who were leading in their own ways. 

There was a big focus in lifting professionalism – can you tell us some of what that looked like on a daily and weekly basis amongst the squad?

We spoke about professionalism a lot midway through last season and personally I thought it was based around the education of the younger players. We expect these girls to walk into this footy club and know how to be a professional athlete and the reality is you need to learn that so off those discussions what came out of that was more access to education. We were able to get good resources into the footy club through the staff that came in, Jodii McGuire came in who was a Sport Pyschologist and she was able to educate us how to conduct yourself as a professional which I think was a huge step in the right direction, and I’m really keen to keep on going that way into next season. On a daily side of it, it’s watching the girls take things like their recovery to the next level, take their training up another notch and have the understanding that what the coaches prescribe for us is the minimum standard, then it’s up to us to raise the bar and get those extras in and get that recovery in, do the cross training we need to do and know your body.

While the new players were finding their feet, experienced trio Aish McCarthy, Dana Hooker and Isabella Lewis produced consistent seasons – what did you make of their contributions? 

In any young group, doesn’t matter what you’re doing whether be footy or business or anything, you’ve got to have a bar set by consistent performers to be successful. We didn’t lack that this year, we had it in spades. We had senior players step up every week and were consistent throughout the whole year. Not just consistent on the field throughout the home and away season but consistent from day one of pre-season in the way they approach each session, the way they recovered and how professionally they carried themselves throughout the whole year which is just as important if not more important than how they perform in on gameday. As a leader it’s great to have fellow leaders like that who show up every week no matter whether it’s first week of pre-season or round nine when you know you’re out of finals they just kept showing up and that’s priceless for a young group.

What do you think are the next steps this side needs to take to continue progressing?

Again, education around being professional is so important and so vital and I’m really proud of the footy club and the program Michelle Cowan has led and put together and I feel like the ultimate professional when I walk into the club, and it makes me strive to be a better athlete. If we can just maintain that program and keep building, the athletes who are going to enter this program and just going to keep striving to get better as well. At one stage the club will push the program again to the next level and as a playing group we will have to catch up and we will just keep lifting, so I’m looking forward to doing that again next year. 

The players are going into the first proper off-season break they’ve had in a very long time. What would your advice be to your teammates on how they treat their off-season to make sure they come back ready for next season?

It’s different this year how our off-season is so long. My first advice would be to have a good break, I see a couple of players already back in the gym and running, I’ve been telling them to pump the brakes a little. The off-season is a marathon not a sprint and nobody wants to be peaking in February-March. Personally, I’ve done that in the past and you find you are only just hanging on by the end of the next season. Even I’m still trying to wrap my head around the best way to approach such a long off-season and you don’t want to be thinking about footy all summer. It’s a long break and it’s a long time to be running laps around an oval thinking about round one which isn’t until August next year. I’ve said to the team to start to find some things they enjoy outside of footy to occupy some of their time but still keep fit and healthy.

Secondly to that, what are some key areas you’ll focus on personally over this break?

Something I’ve been working on for the last couple of years is my running technique, it’s no secret that my running technique is unique. I sort of shuffle around out there and the game is getting more skilful and a lot faster, so I feel I’m at the stage now where I have to adapt. I’m going to work with Wes (Salisbury) our strength and conditioning coach throughout the off-season. He’s a great athlete himself and he’s got a sprinting background so I did a bit of work with him last year and definitely saw the results, and I look to build on that so I can be a bit more faster and a bit more powerful so I can hold on to those young girls in the midfield.

A lot to look forward to next season, what excites you the most about where this team can go next year?

There’s so much to be excited about, the continuity of our list will be fantastic if we can keep majority of the group together. We have an average age of 22.8 so I’m really excited to stay together. We’ve got a fantastic culture that we’ve built in such a short amount of time and every time you walk into the club you get to know the girls better and better. I feel like the season has been cut short for us so I’m really looking forward to being able to build on what we’ve put down this year. The last four seasons I feel like we started a fresh every season and it’s probably been to our detriment a little, so I’m happy we’ve now got a base we can build from next year.

Lastly, how did you view the progression of the competition this year after expansion to 18 teams?

This is my seventh season in the league so when I was there in season one, 80 to 90 percent of athletes were cross-coders and hadn’t played a lot of football and if they had it’s probably down in the amateur leagues or come from other sports. It’s really different to see girls coming in now like Ella Roberts who’s played footy her whole life. She’s got the skill, her body is ready for it and she’s played a contact sport since she was seven. They’re just so much more ahead fundamentally to what any of us were at that age and it’s so much more exciting and for the older girls who have been around a while and it’s changing the way we play the game as well. It’s super exciting and it’s going to go from strength to strength with so many young girls out there who are just waiting to get their crack. We saw it this year in Abbygail Bushby who’s a fantastic footy player and going to be a great legend of this club so I can’t wait for more girls to come through the door who are like that.