Sport’s the right medicine for AFLW Crow Jess Foley
As the Crows prepare to mount their AFLW premiership defence next weekend, former basketballer-turned-ruck Jess Foley opens up about juggling sport with life as a doctor.
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The calendar had just ticked over to a new year, 2017, and life was good for Jess Foley.
The former Australian basketballer had been happily retired from elite sport for two years.
Then aged 33, she was in the final stages of a medical degree and just for fun was an amateur basketball coach and player. But you never really know what’s just around the corner …
On February 4, 2017, Foley made a casual decision to head along to Thebarton Oval to watch her former Adelaide Lightning teammate Erin Phillips play the historic first game of women’s football for the Adelaide Crows’ new AFLW side.
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The suburban ground was packed with more than 9000 people and Foley looked on in awe as Phillips booted three goals in the Crows’ historic first win.
At this moment, Foley – whose football up until then had been nothing more than a few kicks in the backyard – decided this sport looked like far too much fun to pass up. So after a successful basketball career, which included four seasons for prestigious Duke University in the United States, she laced up some footy boots and had a kick.
She may have been approaching her mid-30s, but she was skilled with the oval ball and suddenly the environmental scientist-turned-junior doctor was recruited by Sturt to join their inaugural SANFLW team in 2018 and, by season’s end, had been so impressive in the ruck that she was named in the SANFLW’s team of the year.
Then, by October 23, 2018, she found herself in a place only 18 months earlier she could never have imagined: drafted by the Crows for season three of the burgeoning AFLW, the oldest player on the team’s list suddenly contemplating football pre-season with all its skin-folds and yo-yo testing, and 2km time trials.
“I’ve played basketball at the national league for over 10 seasons and played in America, so I know the commitment and expectation and pressure that comes with playing elite sport,” she says.
“This was one of those opportunities that you can’t turn down, no matter how many times you turn it around in your head.”
What’s been remarkable about the AFLW, is that it’s offered athletes like Foley the chance to re-enter top-level sport when they thought that opportunity was all over.
As the 2020 season approaches, Foley, now 36, is no longer the eldest on the Crows’ list: that right belongs to 38-year-old former GWS midfielder Courtney Gum who was convinced to come out of retirement by Crows coach Matthew Clarke. Phillips is 34.
“As we progress through the seasons of AFLW there will probably be fewer people like myself and Erin and Courtney. I think the game’s already getting faster and fitter, and the demands on the body will get more and more and more,” Foley says.
“We’ve probably jumped in at the right time, where our skill set gets us through, but probably in the future the physical demands of playing AFLW is going to get even higher.”
Putting her age to one side – and the fact that she spent the season often working through the night as a trainee doctor at Noarlunga Hospital – Foley had a stellar first year in Crows colours.
But it was the footy season she wasn’t meant to have. When she was drafted by Adelaide, it was to add her 183cm to the backlines. Instead Foley was thrust into the ruck after the Crows first choices – Rhiannon Metcalfe (ACL) and Jasmyn Hewett (ankle) – suffered season-ending injuries in a pre-season trial game.
Foley had just two weeks to prepare for her new, crucial role in the team, and used her basketball background to cement her dominance in the position. She finished runner-up in the club’s best and fairest count behind Phillips.
Champion Data – the AFL’s official statisticians – last week released their player ratings for the 2020 season and Foley has been rated elite (the top rating available).
She was among the best on ground on March 31, 2019, when her side beat Carlton at Adelaide Oval by 45 points in front of a record-breaking crowd of more than 53,000 to win the AFLW grand final. As the Crows mount their premiership defence from next Saturday, Foley remains an integral part of this team and was this week named in the Crows five-person leadership group.
So, where would she like to see the AFLW down the track?
“I’m getting this question a lot and I’m a bit unsure myself, because I think one of the best things about our league is that we have lives outside of football,” she says. “So, we all have jobs and really interesting stories, and it creates good diversity on teams and I think that leads to really good culture within the group.
“So do I want to see it become fully professional where people don’t have jobs outside of football? I’m not sure. I do want to see that for the girls that want that and for that equality, but I think (semi-professionalism) really makes our game unique and (expansion) needs to happen really slowly.”
But it’s precisely this semi-professional environment that led Foley to feeling exhausted by the end of her first season in the AFLW.
There she was, working part-time (a minimum 30 hours a week) in Noarlunga hospital’s emergency department, with the demands of sport weighing heavily on top.
“The combination of trying to keep my body right, trying to do all the rehab, the injury prevention, the recovery after games, the training, the travel, and then managing shiftwork as well, at the time I didn’t really notice how tired I was because I think that adrenaline of playing games and being around the group,” she says.
“Even when you show up to training tired, as soon as someone cracks a joke or you have a chat about something interesting that’s happened that day, you sort of forget about how tired you are and you just get cracking at training and then you feel fine after training.
“So it’s a bit of a cycle of the adrenaline keeping you going and going and going. And then when it’s gone and you don’t have to try to pick up your energy or your mood for training you just find you’re exhausted.”
Foley had hit a wall. Something had to change, so for 2020, she’s chosen to swap the emergency department for a part-time job as a GP registrar at a clinic in Glenelg.
Her medical background has also proved vital among her teammates at times: when the side was returning from its end-of-season footy trip to Bali last year, a doctor was called for over the plane’s speaker after a passenger had collapsed and Foley stepped in (the passenger was fine). Recently, she popped a teammate’s dislocated finger back into place at training.
She’s nicknamed Scrubs (she can’t be ‘Doc’ because that moniker is well-worn by their coach Clarke thanks to his veterinary background) and it’s really starting to stick. “I quite like it,” she says.
But away from work and the footy field, she spends most of what’s left of her spare time with her two dogs – west highland terriers Willow and McDuff.
“Willow is nine and McDuff is one, he’s destroyed my house,” she says, adding that she doesn’t mind a bit of a home-renovation project.
She also loves spending time with friends and watching crime dramas on Netflix.
Since joining the AFLW, Foley has given up social basketball and she hasn’t missed it … yet. However, had the AFLW been around when she was young, she wouldn’t have been swayed from the round ball.
“I loved my basketball career … I wouldn’t have chosen footy over basketball,” she muses. “I went to the Australian Institute of Sport for basketball when I was 16, I went to Duke University in America (and studied a Bachelor of Science) and had some amazing experiences. I got to play professionally in Australia and Europe. I put a lot of time and effort, and love and sweat and tears into basketball, and I got a lot out of it.
“If I could go back, I would never have chosen football over basketball,” she says. “It’s just that football has come along at the right time for me.”
A highlight of her career was winning the WNBL championship with the Lightning in 2008 (the last time the local team won a national title) alongside Phillips and their coach Vicki Daldy.
The trio has been reunited by women’s football: Phillips now Foley’s co-captain and Daldy the Crows’ team manager.
When Foley was drafted by the Crows, one of the first things she said was that she was looking forward to, was her and Phillips getting back to doing what they were good at: winning championships together.
Both Foley and Phillips wear the same numbers on their backs that they wore when playing for the Lightning – 24 and 13 respectively – and they have achieved together exactly what Foley said they would.
The Crows’ grand final win over Carlton in March last year really was something special. Not only was it a complete domination by an Adelaide outfit that was supremely fit, supremely fast and supremely skilled, but there was a moving standing ovation for Adelaide’s co-captain Phillips as she was taken from the field with a devastating knee injury – and a record-breaking crowd watching on.
The official attendance figure was 53,034. That’s the most people to attend a stand-alone women’s sporting event in Australia.
Foley says she is more of an analytical person “but I did get pretty emotional on that grand final day”.
“The feeling and emotion in that stadium was so supportive,” she says. “Even at men’s games with 53,000, I don’t think you have that sort of emotional support from the crowd like we had on that day.
“It was a real celebration. It surprised all of us, but it was special for everyone there, not just for us (players).”
And she’s also thrilled to still be involved with women’s sport at a time when it is receiving unprecedented coverage and support, and the fact that the differences of women’s sport to men’s is finally being celebrated, instead of derided.
“I was a bit daunted going into the AFLW with the commitment I was putting myself up for, but I’ve enjoyed it so much more than I ever thought I would.”
AFLW, Round 1: Brisbane Lions v Adelaide Crows, February 8 at Hickey Park, Qld, 4.40pm. Game will be live telecast on Fox Footy.