AFLW 2021: Bec Goddard becomes only female AFLW coach as Hawks join competition

The truth no one will speak aloud is that many AFLW players have a gender preference when it comes to coaches. Bec Goddard doesn’t disagree, but she has a counter argument.

New Hawthorn AFLW senior coach Bec Goddard lost her relationship with football after her shock departure from Adelaide a year after coaching the club to a historic premiership.

The Herald Sun can reveal Goddard will take the Hawthorn AFLW side into its first season next year after being officially elevated from the club’s current VFLW coach.

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The 43-year-old will be the only female AFLW coach in the league as it grapples with a worrying gender imbalance with all 14 current coaches male.

Goddard believes quotas for female staff and exemptions from the football cap to incentivise hiring women are options AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan must consider.

Her own return to the AFLW is a triumph of perseverance, as Goddard quipped: “They can’t kill me off”.

In that brilliant first season of AFLW football Goddard marched Adelaide all the way to a premiership.

Newly appointed AFLW Hawthorn coach Bec Goddard. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

But amid rumblings over player discontent and an elusive push for a full-time role she left after a fifth-placing the following year to return to Canberra to work full-time for the Australian Federal Police.

She told News Corp she was ecstatic to get another chance to coach at the top level.

“I am extremely grateful to have another crack at coaching in the AFLW. I wasn’t sure it was ever going to happen. I have had such a great time coaching with Hawthorn in the VFLW this year and I think it’s one of those things in 2021, that a healthy attitude about what women can achieve is contagious,” she said.

“There have been a lot of tears over the last few years. I did feel like I had lost a relationship with football for quite a while there. It has led to some really hard conversations and I guess a fair bit of resilience to keep going. And to get invested in footy again, and it was really Hawthorn that did it for me.”

Goddard says the departure from Adelaide so quickly after achieving AFL history rocked her confidence after the validation of lifting a premiership cup in the league’s inaugural season.

“After winning that premiership I was at the top of the mountain. I thought after all my years in coaching and umpiring at community level, of trying to prove I was able to coach football, that this was it. I have shown everyone I can do it.

“I realised very quickly I was probably no better off than before I started coaching. Or at least that’s how I felt at the time. I felt under significant pressure, I felt like my coaching was being watched more so than my male counterparts, whether it was real or perceived. That’s how I felt because of my gender, and it was really difficult.

“I couldn’t understand how I had ended up on top of the world to quickly being back to reality. Had I made a difference in helping women get these jobs?”

Goddard applied for and missed various AFLW jobs, and spent time as an assistant in the WNBL with the Canberra Capitals.

Bec Goddard during her stint as the Adelaide Crows AFLW coach.

In a season working with stars including Leilani Mitchell and Marianna Tolo she learned to hone areas of how she communicated without stripping away the core of what made her an elite coach.

“I saw how other sports communicated differently, how they coach under pressure and give and receive feedback at the highest levels. It was important for me in my evolution as a coach. And then at the same time, I am still me,” she said.

Then a chance phone call at the end of 2019 brought her back to football.

“At the end of 2019 I was working in Cambodia with the Federal Police and I got a phone call from (Hawthorn head of football) Rob McCartney who wanted to talk about women’s football,” Goddard said.

“He wanted to convince me to apply for the VFLW job. He presented to me how great Hawthorn was and what they could offer me. And it went from that point.

“It says a lot to me about Hawthorn. Winning isn’t normal, it takes unusual acts to get wins. And it reflects the priorities of the club, that is it hiring women, that it is making women part of the football club.

“It is brave and overt leadership.”

The truth no one will speak aloud is that many AFLW players would prefer to be coached by men who they believe will extract more from their potential and have a greater background in elite AFL coaching.

Adelaide coach Bec Goddard lifts the 2017 AFLW premiership cup with co-captains Chelsea Randall (left) and Erin Phillips.

Goddard doesn’t disagree with the view but disarms that point with a simple analogy.

“Oh, I think that’s a bit of a misnomer, because players have largely only ever been coached by men,” she said.

“They haven’t been coached by women. I liken it to my labrador who eats the same dog food and he is so excited because he wants to get fed.

“If you give him roast chicken, holy hell, his life changes. So I think there is an unconscious bias in the industry. It’s all about the future and finding a full pathway in football.

“It isn’t just playing, it’s leadership positions, it’s coaching, it’s CEO positions.

“If we don’t start changing the way we hire, we will stay the same.

“It won’t just happen with, ‘Erin Phillips thinks about retirement and becomes a coach’. It won’t happen unless we force the change.”

Goddard says an 18-team competition is a huge step in the right direction for the AFLW, hopeful a united league will soon drive higher levels of pay and an expanded schedule where all teams play each other.

Bec Goddard has a point to prove at her second AFLW club. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

As for higher female representation in coaching, Goddard says it is time for the AFL to act.

“We need to take the individuals out of the conversation and look at the issue as a whole,” she said.

“The inequalities are significant. Quotas are an option. They aren’t tokenistic.

“It shouldn’t be a prerequisite for all AFLW teams to have female coaches, but we need to make a concerted effort to fix it. That’s from people in power.

“Quotas might be the only way it is going to change. And we need some creativity around the football soft cap.

“A $50,000 (exemption) isn’t going to cut it. Why can’t we sit entire salaries out of the cap?

“And there are some great sponsors, especially in the women’s space, who would help make that happen.”

When Jeff Kennett got up to pay tribute to Shaun Burgoyne at his 400th game recently, he casually dropped the news that Goddard would be the club’s AFLW coach.

Did she just hear straight? Could she get that in writing on a serviette?

For Goddard, quirky and enigmatic but in her own words addicted to winning, her coaching career had come full circle.

If she wants to win and win often, she couldn’t be at a better destination than Hawthorn.