From boardroom to change room: How Port Adelaide built its historic inaugural AFLW team
It’s been years in the making, but Port Adelaide’s inaugural AFLW team is ready for its first match. Here’s how the club got there – and the moment they knew they’d locked in Erin.
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When Holly Ransom turned 10, she cried. Actually, cried isn’t quite the right word – she bawled. Having just been told she could no longer play Aussie Rules football for her junior club the Claremont Tigers in Perth, it was as if the world was crumbling around her.
“I cannot remember crying full stop in my life since quite like I did the day I was told I wasn’t allowed to keep playing,” she says.
Ransom’s childhood sorrow at not being able to continue footy beyond her junior years is not unique to her: there are thousands of such stories across the country, of girls who were forced to give up the game they loved for one reason: Women. Don’t. Play. Football.
By 2016, that devastated 10-year-old found a way back into the game, via a board position on the Port Adelaide Football Club (aged 26, she was the AFL’s youngest board member).
Ransom joined the board at a time of great change in the AFL, with whispers league bosses were going to bring forward the creation of a women’s league – originally slated for 2020 – to 2017. This news must have seemed like a dream for Ransom.
Fast forward another five years and the AFLW has turned from an eight-team competition into a 14-team juggernaut – with Port’s cross-town rivals Adelaide establishing an early dynasty with three premierships.
But now, it is Port Adelaide’s time …
The preparation
It’s May 2021 and the AFL makes an official statement that Port Adelaide hierarchy have been waiting for: it has approved further expansion of the AFLW, inviting the four clubs without a women’s team – Port, Essendon, Hawthorn and Sydney – to tender to join.
Port doesn’t need to be asked twice, the club is already ready. An AFLW steering committee had been established months earlier and the club already well progressed in its planning.
Club chief executive Matthew Richardson says the Covid pandemic – while devastating for the industry – allowed Port time to consider its future. “We saw Covid as an opportunity to reset the business, the saying: ‘Don’t waste a good crisis’, we narrowed our focus to footy, members and partners … and our commitment to AFLW was part of that,” he says.
The club has planned a number of key points that will go in its tender: its women’s team will play home games at a redeveloped Alberton Oval; the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart will play before all home games; the captain will wear the No.1 jumper. But it has other ambitious plans. The team will be led by women, including a female coach, and will prioritise signing multicultural and Indigenous players.
Ransom was co-director of the steering committee and says the day the AFL opened submissions was an exciting day.
“The moment that (the board) heard licences were opening ... we were absolutely aligned and all-in; it was not even a conversation, it was just an: ‘Absolutely we’re ready, this is right’,” she says.
The MYTH
One myth club insiders debunk is that Port picked pursuing the so-called “China Strategy” – whereby their team played a match for premiership points there – over establishing a women’s team.
“We had a big agenda,” Port Adelaide chairman David Koch says. “Remember where we came from just three years earlier? We were a cold case, we were in survival mode.
“I think people forget that we lost $7m in 2012, and faced a campaign from Victorian clubs that SA wasn’t big enough to support two AFL teams; there was even a push for us to change our name to be called Southern Central Australia or something like that. We were in survival mode, building a club with resources that could make it sustainable for the long-term.
“We knew there would only be one AFLW licence issued to SA and we had just started China, which had big commercial opportunities for us. But we were always interested in women’s football.”
Instead, Port established a Next Generation Girls Academy and a Women’s Aboriginal AFL Academy. Koch says: “We knew when the opportunity came in for a second licence in South Australia, we’d jump at the chance.”
The tender was submitted …
The key personnel
On August 12, 2021, the AFL delivered the news: the submissions of all four potential expansion clubs had been accepted and would enter the AFLW from season seven.
Port’s celebrations didn’t last long; the hard work was only just starting. The club turned its attention to filling key positions.
First it hired two-time Olympic hockey gold medallist Juliet Haslam as head of AFLW and she started in her role on December 13. By February 2022, Naomi Maidment – who had been coaching the club’s women’s talent Academy for five years – was named list manager. A few weeks later, Olympic basketballer Rachael Sporn – once a staunch Crows supporter – was recruited as the team’s operations manager.
But finding the right coach would prove much more difficult.
Both Haslam and Port’s longstanding head of AFL football Chris Davies started an exhaustive search, making phone call after phone call looking for the right person.
If there was one thing that surprised them at this point, it was the lack of women who applied for the senior coach role – less than a quarter of applicants were women, but the Port board, in particular, was determined that a female coach was best for the team.
Ransom reiterates that: “Sadly, it’s that frustration around a longlist and shortlist not including enough female names and therefore the belief being that there’s not the talent out there. But we were determined that the talent was there and we were going to find it.
“I remember quite vividly a conversation (with Davies and Haslam) where we said: ‘No, go back, what we want is another longlist’.
“The number of people they must have called, it was above and beyond; (our search for the right coach) was an extraordinary, extra-mile effort. But it is interesting to reflect on why we don’t have more (women) applying.”
One of the people Haslam called was retired Brisbane premiership player Lauren Arnell, who had a history of coaching (she helped established the She Can Coach program with AFL Victoria) and was working with the Lions talent Academy while juggling a teaching career. Haslam convinced her to apply as head coach.
Arnell, 35, was unveiled as inaugural coach on April 11. Her appointment made Port the only program in the league to have a woman appointed to every major role, something that makes Ransom particularly proud.
“I think it makes a really significant statement: ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’ and we haven’t seen enough women in significant leadership roles in football at large, let alone in W programs,” Ransom says.
But the all-women’s leadership team isn’t the result of tokenism and male candidates were interviewed for each of the roles.
Koch is pleased, though, that the best fit for each of the roles has been a woman.
“My view has always been you don’t have an AFLW side if you don’t want to build female leaders,” he says. “You go into AFLW wanting to develop female leaders both on field and off-field within the organisation and that was a non-negotiable for me and for the board.”
Haslam agrees: “We’ve got this incredible group of female leaders at this football club now … it’s empowering and the club’s been so supportive.”
The players
Being a new club in a league where eight others – including cross-town rival Adelaide – had six seasons under their belt, meant the Power were handed generous rules by the AFL in the trade period to aid their quest to fill their inaugural list of 30 players.
Under the rules, Port could sign up to 14 currently-listed AFLW players; eight from the Crows if they could convince any of the three-time premiership winners to cross Port Rd. History proved a Power raid on the Crows’ list was a distinct possibility, given the experience of Brisbane, which lost eight players to Gold Coast for the 2020 season, including their captain.
List manager Maidment went to work. The phone calls to players and managers from across the country started early in the year, Port gauging interest, ascertaining who was happy and where.
The Crows were prepared, telling their players to remain polite when the phone rang, but to not discuss any offers until the current season was done. Speculation swirled that the likes of Crows club champion Anne Hatchard and Eloise Jones were being sought.
But it was really Erin Phillips – two-time AFLW league best and fairest and daughter of Magpies legend Greg – that people wanted to know about.
And in the days after Adelaide’s April 9 grand final win over Melbourne, the speculation reached fever pitch, while behind the scenes, both Port and the Crows worked for her signature.
Haslam says: “I think a lot of people thought Erin signing with Port was a fait accompli, but it certainly wasn’t and she had to think long and hard about whether she was going to come and play with us at Port Adelaide.
“I think her heart was always here, this was her family club growing up, but it was still going to be a tough decision having spent six years with Adelaide and having a lot of success there.”
In the end, Phillips called Haslam with one request: “She said to me: ‘Do you mind putting aside the number 22’ – the number her father wore. That was a pretty special moment.”
And on April 27, Phillips was unveiled as the first player to sign with the Power.
Richardson recalls the feeling when Phillips and Haslam walked into the rooms under the historic Williams Family Stand side-by-side for their first press conference.
“The symbolism was real for me: here we are in a football club that is 152 years old, in a heritage grandstand, imagine everything that’s gone on in those rooms over 100 years of men playing footy, and then here are these two incredible women who are the Port Adelaide Football Club of the future. I don’t think I’ve had a prouder moment.”
Then there was the fact that three-time All-Australian Phillips was one hell of a pillar to build a team around, and fellow Crows Justine Mules and Ange Foley followed her to Alberton – but that was the extent of the Port raid; Adelaide breathed a sigh of relief. Port insiders acknowledge the work Adelaide did to keep their list intact and certainly hope one day, their list will stick together in a similar way, but they had to look elsewhere for more players.
Arnell’s Queensland connections no doubt came into play and Port signed nine Queensland-based footballers (two from Brisbane, five from Gold Coast and twins Laquoiya and Litonya Cockatoo-Motlap from the Gold Coast Academy).
The west also proved fertile territory and a total of five Western Australians were lured to Port’s side, including two-time All-Australian Gemma Houghton. Maidment was also busy scouting the local SANFLW competition and plucked the likes of North Adelaide’s Jade De Melo out of there as mature-age signings and scouted teenage talent like Hannah Ewings as potential draftees, along with Gippsland Power midfielder Yasmin Duursma (sister of Port player Xavier).
By June 15 – the first night of pre-season training – the Power had signed 23 players.
The pre-season
It was only 10 weeks ago that the Power’s side came together for the first time for night one of pre-season training. And to greet them when they ran up the players’ race from the change rooms were the men’s players, who formed a guard of honour to welcome them out onto Alberton Oval.
Port’s men’s captain, Tom Jonas, then gathered both the AFL and AFLW teams into a circle and spoke. He recalls being nervous because “I wanted to say the right thing”.
“I welcomed them, firstly, and reiterated our support for them, but also made sure that they knew their importance to Port Adelaide and the significance of welcoming a women’s team to the club, five or six years after other clubs had reached that milestone,” he said.
“Essentially they were completing Port Adelaide and they were giving women from around South Australia and Australia who have supported Port Adelaide their whole lives, the opportunity to support a team of their own sex and to also aspire to play for that team as well, like young, male Port supporters do.”
Pre-season hasn’t all gone to plan for the side, with injuries to players including former Collingwood utility Ebony O’Dea who suffered a collapsed lung in a practice match, while their planned pre-season trip to Yorke Peninsula was cancelled as Covid surged in winter. But with the team’s key word being “connection”, they’ve also found inventive ways to stick together, including Foley starting a spreadsheet that contains each teammates’ preferred coffee order along with their pets’ names.
The captain
Then on August 1 another big announcement came: Phillips – the league’s most decorated player – was fittingly unveiled as the side’s inaugural captain. She’d been told a few nights earlier, and the club released a video of Phillips telling her father, Greg – a former club captain himself, let alone an eight-time SANFL premiership winner – that she would wear the club’s famous No.1 jumper, as have club captains for the past century.
He cried as he hugged his daughter as the realisation came that she could captain the club for which he played 343 games.
“I’ve never seen him so emotional,” Phillips said of that moment. “He was obviously just happy and he said to me: ‘It doesn’t matter what number, he would have been proud’, but it’s just a massive, massive honour.”
But the appointment was significant for other reasons, too: the 37-year-old became the first person in SA football history to captain both Port and the Crows; while Phillips and Greg also become the first father-daughter duo in AFLW history to captain the same club.
The club
But the women’s program has brought more to Port Adelaide than simply a new team. It’s meant the multimillion-dollar transformation of the historic Williams Family Stand to accommodate modern changerooms and office space underneath, as well as new coaches and media boxes up top.
It’s meant more than 120 new employees – including 30 footy players – have been welcomed into club headquarters.
As Richardson explains: “We’ve gone from 140 people to almost 280 people within 12 months and a lot of that has been driven by W, so there’s probably 60 new women now working at the club.”
Ransom says that’s put the club on a “12-month learning journey”.
“This is the biggest cultural transformation we’ve had in 152 years,” she says.
To embrace that, the club has partnered with organisational psychology firm, Metisphere, who have run workshops on diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias to every member of staff, including the president and players.
Commercially, the women’s team is proving a success for Port as well, with Ransom saying the club has been told by the AFL they are starting as the strongest commercial AFLW program in the league. Richardson also says the club underestimated how much AFLW would build its next generation of supporters.
“We’ve had almost 20,000 new fans register in the last three months and all of that has been driven through W,” he says.
Jonas has noticed a tangible shift in energy through the hallways of Alberton since the women’s program started.
“There’s excitement around the whole club that probably wouldn’t have been there, given that the men’s program hasn’t been performing to the same level,” he says. “It’s created a really inclusive feel at Port Adelaide.”
Richardson agrees: “One thing that is very real for us at the moment is that our men’s season has been disappointing, and we’ve got to address that, but then on the flip side, we’ve got this incredible energy and excitement that’s building for our W program. Culturally, it’s been terrific … our whole club is buzzing on adrenaline.”
Game one
Today, August 27, 2022, will go down as another major milestone in the history of the Port Adelaide Football Club, with the AFLW side playing their first official game against West Coast in Perth. Sitting in the stands will be Richardson, Ransom and Koch; Ransom, no doubt, reflecting on her 10-year-old self and the immense societal change that’s occurred.
In the coaches’ box will be Haslam and Arnell along with the assistant coaches. On the field will be Phillips and co.
It will be the culmination of years – but particularly months – of extreme hard work, made even more difficult in mid-May when the AFL made the decision to bring forward the start of Season 7 to late August, instead of the expected December.
As Haslam admits: “We’ve faced our battles” and Arnell adds: “Some days are more challenging than others”. But you get the sense neither would have it any other way.
“I just love this group,” Arnell says. “I love the players and staff that I get to work with every day. We’ve talked a lot about connection within our four walls across pre-season. The essence of humans is we’re connected people and being a part of a really genuine, authentic community of good people is a privileged position to be in. And we all love footy.
“Sometimes our environment can get a little bit serious and so it’s a nice reminder at times that we are actually all here because we enjoy footy and being able to protect that, in what can be a pretty cutthroat environment, is important.
“Good people and good footy. You can’t really go wrong, can you?”
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