AFLW star Erin Phillips says for the first time in her life she’s uncertain on her future and leaving basketball behind
Two-time All-Australian footballer Erin Phillips talks about how, for the first time in her sporting career, she’s happy to not have a long-term plan, while revealing what it was like to leave basketball behind her.
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When Erin Phillips turned 18, the budding basketballer started writing down on a special board all the things she wanted to achieve in the next five years. Then the next five and then the next.
Her future was mapped out.
The long-term goal-setting became a way of life and it laid the foundation of the ambition, focus and standard that has since defined her successful sporting career, spanning almost two decades.
That planning has seen her transition from a teenaged guard playing for the Adelaide Lightning in the WNBL, to a stint in Poland and a nine-season career in the WNBA in the US – the world’s best basketball league. It’s seen her then code-hop into Aussie Rules football and become a household name.
“For me, it’s always been, ‘Right, this is what I’m going to be next and I’m going to work really hard and do that and then hopefully this could happen’,” Phillips says.
But suddenly, as she prepares to turn 35 next month, life has thrown up something unexpected for the Crows co-captain: for the first time she has no solid plan for what the future will look like.
Surely, this could partly be because of what she’s already achieved: two-time Olympic basketballer, two-time WNBA champion, FIBA world champion, All-Australian footballer, dual AFLW premiership-winner. Not to mention, wife and mother of three.
But instead of fearing it, she’s embracing the unknown for once.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m very lucky in my situation and there are so many people worse off, but for me, I don’t know what’s next aside from hoping there is another AFLW season ahead and just wait and look forward to that,” she says.
“It’s scary, but also it’s nice to not put that on me anymore.
“So I’m not going to stress about it or worry about it too much.”
NO MORE HOOPS
Phillips is technically “jobless” (apart from AFLW player) because she recently made the tough decision to cut ties with basketball coaching in the US.
She had spent three years working in assistant coaching roles at WNBA club Dallas Wings – the club where she finished up her playing career – but at the end of last year resigned because the demands of juggling football with basketball coaching role became too much.
Footy won the shoot out, you could say.
“Coaching really is a 12-month job and something you’ve got to put a lot of time and effort into and I felt at times that I wasn’t giving it everything,” she muses.
“I gave it everything I could at the time, with what I was doing back here in Australia, but it was a lot of work and I just never stopped.
“I left the Wings on great terms, it was just one of those things that I wasn’t ready to give up football.”
But she certainly won’t be cutting ties with the city of Dallas, since it is the hometown of her wife, Tracy.
COVID-19 CRISIS
The Phillips family – Erin, Tracy and their three children three-year-old twins Brooklyn and Blake and nine-month-old Drew – are a well-travelled bunch and accustomed to spending six months in Texas and another six months in Australia.
But the coronavirus crisis – which has affected almost every detail typical existence – has thrown that into turmoil.
The Phillipses are due to head back to Dallas at the end of July, but are awaiting advice about whether international borders will be open and whether it’ll be safe.
It’s a difficult time for Tracy – who met Erin when they were teammates at the Lightning and won a WNBL title together in 2008 – as she looks on from afar as her family grapples with a worsening coronavirus tally.
According to the latest stats, there have been more than 925,000 COVID cases and 52,000 deaths in the US, with nearly 5000 of those cases and 150 deaths coming from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Tracy worries for her parents who are both almost 70 and one of two brothers is a surgeon.
“They’ve been self isolating now for about six weeks,” Tracy explains. “My brother’s a urologist so he’s not on the frontline … but he has friends in the ER and it’s just horrific.”
Tracy can’t wait to get back to Dallas once it is safe. “That first hug and the first time I see my parents will be pretty special. I’m hoping it will be July, but we wouldn’t put anybody at risk, so if it means waiting that little bit longer, we would.”
NEW MENTALITY
In the meantime, the couple is using the unprecedented self-isolation time to slow down.
“Trace and I, were just talking about how you can actually spend some quality time with your kids without the need to be somewhere all the time,” Phillips says.
“I don’t have any training, I don’t have any commitments, most meetings are now just done by Zoom. Everything’s just stopped and we’re just thinking: ‘OK, let’s be in the present, be in the now’. You can get really caught up and lose sight of the here-and-the-now.
“The other thing I’ve noticed is how little you actually really need to survive … so you’ll create (a meal) because you have to avoid going to the grocery store, you kind of appreciate those little things. Then you understand you don’t need a tonne of stuff to get by, everything else is just a real luxury.”
A REMARKABLE 2019
Slowing down is something that Phillips probably deserves. After a dominant 2019 season with the Crows – that ended when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament in Adelaide’s grand final win over Carlton – she returned to Dallas where she not only began the long and monotonous process of rehabbing her knee, but she held down the demanding coaching role at the Wings, before welcoming baby Drew in July and then returning to Adelaide in December for Crows pre-season.
So when Phillips made her remarkable comeback to the footy field for two games in 2020, less than 12 months after tearing her ACL, it was nothing but pride she felt for all the hard work it took to get there. Tracy recalls how nauseous she felt watching Phillips’s first game back on March 1 against Carlton, which the Crows lost by eight points.
“It was probably the hardest game ever to watch,” Tracy says. “Honestly, I didn’t even care if she played well, I just wanted her to get off the field and not be carried off, knowing how hard she’s worked to get there you just don’t want it to be taken away. I think it’s a credit to her and her work ethic, I’m in awe, basically of what she has had to go through in the last 12 months.
“In general, she is just such a driven, focused person that she won’t let anything beat her and she’ll do whatever she needs to do to take care of us and make sure we’re OK.”
Phillips jokes of Tracy’s comments: “I got away lightly! She didn’t tell you how terrible of a patient I was at times”.
BRING BACK SPORT
There are elements to the COVID-19 sport shutdown that worry Phillips: as a two-time Olympian she’s devastated for the athletes who will now have to wait until 2021 to head to Tokyo, some of whom will no doubt miss out. And she’s desperately missing Friday night football and as such is becoming a convert to the AFL’s “hub concept” because of the importance of getting sport back up and running.
“Initially, I didn’t think (the hubs were a good idea), but now I feel like yes, because you don’t realise how important sport is to so many people, it’s a great distraction.”
But it’s the concerns over the AFL’s financial loss during this crisis and the impact it could have on the AFLW that have her most worried and she hopes for a 2021 season that will still contain all 14 teams.
As for Phillips herself, she has no plans to retire from footy just yet (despite the constant questioning she gets about it, which started when she turned 30), but she has dipped her toe in the media landscape and recently completed a three-month stint in breakfast radio alongside Mix102.3’s Mark Soderstrom.
“I really enjoyed that and I guess it opened up my perspective of what’s next after football,” she muses.
“It’s something I could see myself doing down the track, but even with that, there’s nothing set in stone, nothing in the cards, so right now I’m just looking after three kids and trying to get through the days keeping them entertained.
“I’ve got a bike in the shed so I’ll get on the bike to keep fit, but other than that, it’s just trying to live your best life with whatever you got.”