Adelaide AFLW coach Bec Goddard warns Crows are more than ready for premiership defence

NO ONE rated Adelaide a premiership chance last season but the Crows defied the critics by winning the flag. Premiership coach Bec Goddard has plenty of experience in beating the odds and she’s ready to do it again.

Adelaide AFLW coach Bec Goddard. Picture: Tom Huntley

ADELAIDE premiership coach Bec Goddard can hear the murmurs.

The Vics are coming.

“I get a sense of a lot of Victorian optimism at the moment,” Goddard told the Herald Sun this week.

“But in Adelaide, we’re really optimistic as well.

“Keep writing us off because people wrote us off last year and look what happened.”

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The Crows shocked the AFLW competition by winning the inaugural flag but the buzz is still about the Victorians, with Melbourne and Carlton the top picks ahead of her South Australians.

But Goddard is used to fighting conventional wisdom.

She started her football career running the scoreboard and raiding the canteen at Belconnen Football Club before taking up the sport alongside her brother Paul.

Adelaide AFLW coach Bec Goddard. Picture: Tom Huntley

When she ran out of playing options as a teenager she took up umpiring.

“I goal umpired my brother’s team, in fact I knocked my brother’s fullback out waving my point flag,” Goddard recalled.

In about 1998 Canberra got its first women’s football competition and she returned to playing the game.

She came to Melbourne and played with Melbourne University, playing against legends including Western Bulldogs female footy boss Debbie Lee.

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But she declared she was a “rubbish” player and turned seriously to umpiring, becoming the first female to officiate in the men’s state league in Canberra.

“That was where I got my best view of the game, because I was inside the game,” Goddard said. “Tactically, I could see what was going on.”

Her coaching career started at the club she helped set up, the Gungahlin Jets women’s football club.

Bec Goddard and forward Abbey Holmes celebrate the premiership win. Picture: Tom Huntley

She joined Queanbeyan in the NEAFL men’s competition as an assistant coach and worked for SANFL club Woodville-West Torrens in its junior program.

“I thought am I going to take the next step or am I going to stay with the girls, a bit of community footy with my mates?” she said.

“I actually think the reason I got the job at the Crows, I had a large background in women’s football, but if I hadn’t coached in that semi-professional men’s space, I’m not sure I would have had the credibility to get the job.”

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Goddard continues to juggle football and her career as a sergeant with the Australian Federal Police, where she’s the team leader of the joint anti child exploitation team in South Australia.

She takes leave from her job to coach as she’s not full time at the Crows.

Last season she worked right up until Round 1, but this season she started her leave in January.

Adelaide Crows women's coach Bec Goddard and her younger brother — she was always a huge footy fan.

“It means I’ve had more time for the girls,” Goddard said.

“Last year was madness. If I was on an afternoon I’d split my shift. I’d start work at 2pm, I’d have my dinner break at training time and after dinner I’d go back to work and finished my shift and then go back to the footy club in the morning to get meetings in before I started my afternoon shift with the AFP again.

“It was too much pressure.”

And while all the hype is about the Victorians, Goddard is backing her side.

“I’ve got an uncle who’s a doctor and he’s always said to me; you’re either going to get better, you’re going to bet worse or you’re going to stay the same,” she said.

“We’re not going to get worse, we’re definitely not going to stay the same, we’ve set that bar pretty high.”