After another fine individual season, dual Club Champion Emma Swanson says she is hungry for team success and believes West Coast is putting together a list that is up to the challenge.
The 27-year-old added her latest Club Champion award to an already extensive list of individual accolades, which includes Club Champion and Trademark Player from AFLW season six alongside seven Best and Fairest Awards for East Fremantle and Peel respectively in the WAFLW competition.
“It’s a huge honour to be recognised individually throughout the season,” Swanson told SEN.
“To do it two (West Coast Club Champions) in a row, they are hard to win – even harder to win back-to-back - so I’m really proud of it.
“It’s probably something I’ll reflect on when I’ve finished my career because at the moment, I’m pretty hungry for team success.
“While it’s an honour my focus is to win a premiership with the Eagles so I’m going to keep striving for that.”
Finishing up what will probably be the most unique year in AFLW history, Swanson admits that having two seasons within 12 months brought its challenges personally, nevertheless it gave the club the chance to get games into younger players.
“The club managed us really well and the benefit for us was we turned over a large chunk of our players and most of the younger players came in fresh and ready to go,” Swanson said.
“When you have such a young group and the time they come in, they’ve had little to no pre-season, and they aren’t elite yet its terms of their fitness and they’ve done minimal gym work prior to entering our program.
“They are so raw, and I think where the excitement comes for us is, in those four games we lost, we lost by under 10 points, so there were around six potential games that were grabbable this year.
“Out of the 10 games we played this year, we were competitive in about eight of those.”
Amongst the Eagles rookies, Ella Roberts was a spearhead in the side and with the W awards looming on November 22 she has placed herself as a firm contender for the Rising Star award.
“Ella is one of many that we have, she’s a born footballer and these are the type of girls we are going to start seeing coming through the draft now,” Swanson said.
“She’s played the game since she was six years old and has followed the female pathway the entire way through and she’s had a footy in her hands for the best part of her life.
“Her skills show it, a lot of players closer to my age have to put the footy down at 12 and don’t pick it up until they are 20.
“It’s something you usually see in the men’s program but at 17-years-old Ella has grown in a way that her body is ready to go and compete against senior players and she did really well this year.”
With the off-season now in full swing the Eagles will look to make necessary adjustments to their list and plan another tough pre-season program with the hope that season eight will bring a few more wins in the club’s journey to the AFLW’s promised land.
