AFLW 2022: Port Adelaide captain Erin Phillips opens up on the most emotional year of her life

In the past five months, Erin Phillips has won a flag with the Crows, left the club and signed with Port – and she admits it’s been one of the most emotional years of her life.

Port Adelaide’s inaugural AFLW coaching panel: (L-R) Cam Sutcliffe (player development coach), Hamish Hartlett (assistant coach), Dave Reynolds (assistant coach), Lauren Arnell (head coach), Clayton Lamb (player development coach), Renee Forth (player development coach), Daniel Care (assistant coach), pictured at Alberton Oval on May 25, 2022. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

It’s 4.45am when the alarm sounds.

The house is quiet, the kids still sleeping.

Erin Phillips knows this is the time to fit in a training session before the morning chaos starts and she’s wrestling her three kids into uniforms and getting them off to school.

This is life for the AFLW superstar: if she is to stay at the top of her game, she still has to put in the hours. But, when? It’s the ultimate question.

“I’ve even trained late at night, 9pm, 10pm I’ll fit in a session,” she says.

“I still have to put in the hours, even though it can be a crazy time fitting it around the family schedule. But there is still an element that if you want to be a top athlete, you do have to put in those hours that comes as a prerequisite.

“If you cut corners, that doesn’t work.”

There’s no denying that 2022 has been a year of transformative change for Phillips.

In the past five months alone, not only has the AFLW superstar won her third premiership with Adelaide, but has since left the Crows to join their cross-town rival Port Adelaide and become the inaugural captain of the club she grew up supporting, where her dad, Greg, was a champion Magpie.

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Inaugural AFLW Port Captain Erin Phillips (centre) with her leadership group, Justine Mules, Gemma Houghton, Ange Foley and Hannah Dunn. Picture: Getty Images

By her own admission she feels “like I’m in a dream and I’m about to wake up”.

But all she has going through her head is the mantra that one of her junior basketball coaches taught her: “The harder you work, the luckier you become”.

“I feel extremely lucky, but obviously it hasn’t been all smooth sailing and I’ve had injuries to deal with, (basketball) non-selection to deal with in my career, but I do feel like with hard work you really do create your own luck,” she muses.

“And I have worked extremely hard, especially to get back to this position, health-wise, with my knees (two torn anterior cruciate ligaments over the years).

“But life has taught me to appreciate every day because you don’t know what’s next.

“I didn’t ever believe that I’d ever played for the Crows and there I was playing for the Crows for six years and I never believed or imagined that I’d get to play for Port Adelaide and here I am … it’s almost like: ‘Never give up on your dreams because you never know what’s around the corner’.

“You’ve just got to keep persisting and work hard and create your own luck and your own destiny in some way.”

Phillips in action for the Crows in January, 2022. Picture: Getty Images

As a five-year-old, playing marks up on her dad, Greg. Picture: Advertiser Files

But what hard work looks like has changed over the years.

Twenty years ago, the day after playing a basketball game – particularly if she hadn’t liked her game – you’d find Phillips running around the West Lakes lake on the concrete path, or down on the beach doing the jetty-to-jetty run between Grange and Henley Beach, sprinting on sand.

No more.

Today, as a 37-year-old mother with three kids under the age of six and two reconstructed knees, Phillips has adapted the way she trains: Swimming, pilates, riding a bike.

Low impact. Train smarter. Quality over quantity.

The Erin Phillips story is well told: a talented junior footy player, forced to find another sport when she became a teenage, steering her to the basketball court, eventually competing for Australia, as well as playing in the world’s best league, the WNBA.

Then, in her early 30s, footy came calling again. And when the AFLW became a reality in 2017, the elite athlete returned to the game she loved, becoming the league’s most decorated player to date, with three premierships, three All-Australian honours, two Crows club champion medals, two AFLPA MVP honours.

Phillips competing for Australia in the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Picture: Getty Images

Phillips with the season seven AFLW premiership cup. Picture: Getty Images

And it’s all led her to the start of a new chapter in the Erin Phillips book: August 27, 2022.

The day when she will run out onto Perth’s Mineral Resources Park as Power captain in the team’s first AFLW game.

“This has probably been one of the most emotional years for me,” she muses.

“Deciding to leave Adelaide and deal with that part of it was one thing, but then to sign with a new team that is obviously close to my heart and I’ve got so much history there, that was another huge emotion.

“Then being announced captain, it’s been a lot in terms of high emotion, but that’s made it a special year and once I did sign, I’ve just been so excited to be back at Port Adelaide, with so many familiar faces of people who have been around the club since my dad was there.

“But I don’t want to sit here and say, ‘Well, it’s all done now’.

“There are things I want to achieve and I have a lot of energy and passion and determination to be as successful as possible. And the drive is still there.”

Which is why the alarm will keep sounding at 4.45am for as long as it can.

The phone call which heralded in AFLW’s new era

It’s mid-March and retired AFLW footballer Lauren Arnell is going along just fine.

Having hung up the boots on a five-season career with a Brisbane Lions premiership medal around her neck, the 35-year-old is settling into a new life balancing a teaching career with coaching at the Lions Academy.

Then the phone rings.

On the end of the line was Juliet Haslam, the newly appointed head of women’s football at the Port Adelaide Football Club who was in the process of piecing together the club’s inaugural women’s team.

Haslam — a dual Olympic gold medal hockey player — was Brisbane-bound with the Power’s AFL team for their Round 1 clash against the Lions at The Gabba; would Arnell like to catch up?

That phone call turned into a coffee that quickly turned Arnell’s life on its head.

Lauren Arnel (left) and teammate Emma Zielke are chaired off Adelaide Oval after winning the 2021 AFLW grand final. Picture: Mark Brake/Getty Images

“We talked deeply about the whole AFLW and AFL industry … and the conversation evolved to a point where I asked Juliet where she saw me,” Arnell recalls.

“She said: ‘I’d like you to apply for the head coach role’.”

Shocked, Arnell spent the coming days considering the offer with her partner, Lexi.

“This was not an expected or planned part of our lives,” Arnell muses.

“And so we went through a pretty rigorous process of decision-making around: ‘Is this is this the right sort of time for me to put my hat in the ring and have a go at that role and apply?’.

“Being one of the older players in the AFLW competition, I always tried to make sure that I was working throughout my playing career because I knew that I probably wouldn’t get a lot of time as a player and so I set myself up; I was teaching, I was coaching Lions’ Academy and I had a really secure, positive pathway outside of playing … There was nothing really in my mind thinking that I would be a senior coach.”

Richmond’s Akec Makur Chuot and Lions’ Lauren Arnell compete for the ball during the 2021 season. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images

Accordingly, it took Arnell two days before she responded to Haslam’s proposition and during that 48-hour period, she considered many things: She thought about her love of the game, spawned on her family’s rural Victorian cattle farm, kicking the footy with the neighbouring boys; memorising the birthdays of the players from her beloved Western Bulldogs.

She thought about her media work with the ABC, having been an expert with the network’s AFL coverage from 2016 in a time when people were not used to hearing women’s voices during footy matches.

She thought about her own 36-game AFLW career, captaining Carlton in their inaugural season in 2017 and heading to Brisbane from 2019-21, being named All-Australian on three occasions and winning the 2021 grand final against the Crows; herself ingrained as an integral part of the burgeoning league after she took up footy competitively while studying teaching at university in Ballarat.

Lauren Arnell leads Carlton onto Ikon Park in 2017, the inaugural year of the AFLW. Picture: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

She thought back to 2016 when she working in coach development with AFL Victoria and helped establish the She Can Coach program which is now delivered Australia-wide and about how during the three years she worked there, she was the only woman in the room, being given a close insight into the barriers preventing women rising up the coaching ranks.

“When I was working with AFL Victoria I really tried to target why women weren’t thriving in the AFL industry as coaches,” she explains.

“I listened to stories from incredible women who hadn’t thrived in the environment (former AFLW coaches Michelle Cowan and Peta Searle as examples), so I tried to put together a program which supported women to thrive.

“And a lot of that was around breaking through barriers and classic stereotypes of a mum being at home with kids or her outside work not being supportive of her coaching.

“And then I’m sitting in this (myself) all really heavy having just retired and thinking: ‘Is it time to try and have a family? Do we just stay in job security’.

“But I’d been in a position where I designed a program to help push people out of that and ask them to step forward and have the courage to break those barriers.

“So the discomfort of that conversation actually pushed me to step forward … living in those barriers of why I wouldn’t do it, became actually a real motivator.

“And here I am.”

On April 11, Arnell was unveiled as the inaugural coach of Port Adelaide.

Arnell (right) shares a joke with star recruits Erin Phillips and Gemma Houghton on Port’s team photo day. Picture: Matt Loxton

Last season, a key criticism of the women’s league was that there weren’t any female senior coaches of any of the then-14 teams.

Season seven sees three stepping up: Arnell at Port, Bec Goddard at Hawthorn and Essendon’s Natalie Wood (interestingly, all women are heading expansion clubs in their debut seasons).

Arnell’s appointment is also significant given she is the first person in AFLW history to transition from playing to head coaching.

Ask her whether she feels added pressure because of that, she says: “Only when people ask me that question”.

“But I know mum’s really proud and I’ve got great family and friends who think it’s pretty cool,” she says.

“And if it means that more women feel they can step forward and do something like this, then half my job’s done and then the next part is empowering my players.”

Arnell (centre) leads a seven-person coaching panel for Port’s inaugural season comprising (from left) Cam Sutcliffe, Hamish Hartlett, Dave Reynolds, Clayton Lamb, Renee Forth and Daniel Care. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

Arnell will coach her first AFLW game in Round 1, against West Coast in Perth on Saturday, August 27.

She said the most enjoyable part about her first pre-season to as the person wielding the whistle instead of responding to it has been the people.

“It’s a really dynamic environment, different days can be more challenging than others but what I love is the people,” she says.

“We’ve talked a lot about connection within our four walls across pre-season; the essence of being human is we’re connected people and being a part of a really genuine, authentic community of good people is a pretty privileged position.

“And I love footy.

“I’m around footy every day: good people and good footy, you can’t really go wrong, can you?”

Originally published as AFLW 2022: Port Adelaide captain Erin Phillips opens up on the most emotional year of her life