YARTAPUULTI senior coach Lauren Arnell says playing against the best teams in the competition is what will lead to overall improvement and long-term growth.
In what has been a challenging start to the season, the Power is sitting on one win and six losses, however Arnell says the opportunities and learnings presented so far this year are important for her young group.
Arnell spoke to the Adelaide media on Thursday about the season so far, selection this weekend and her thoughts on this year’s NAB AFLW fixture.
Arnell on the season so far
“It's been an interesting narrative I think across the whole competition, particularly in the last week there's been some commentary around how you measure growth and progress for all teams and for us, I'm really mindful that we’ve only played 17 games of footy as a team and so we've made huge turnover in our playing list again this year. A lot of our group haven't played a lot of footy together and a lot of our group hasn't played much AFLW footy either so if you're purely measuring on wins and losses, while it's not where we'd like it to be, the ledger this year, I don’t reckon you get anywhere. So we have a real focus on measuring off field and on field progress and a big part of that is our values and our standards and building those as a really young team. And when I say young I don’t just mean age, I mean how many games we’ve played in this competition.
“You also look at your on-field measures week-to-week. The fixture we’ve had has been really challenging for us but it's also a massive opportunity. We’ve played against I would say, all of the best teams in the comp, outside of the Dees (Melbourne) we're fixtured against this year and so there's great opportunity for us to play against the best to be better. And the scoreboard's not going to look the way we want it to but we play against the best talent in the competition and that should mean great learnings. It's probably just a case of how fast we learn the lessons we'd like to and how quickly we can implement our game style for four quarters.”
Arnell on long-term growth
“I think you have to be mindful of being really strategic in what are you building blocks to make sure that you're going for long-term success. This is the third wave of expansion in AFLW so we’ve seen two previous waves of expansion and some teams have done that really, really well and other teams have reached really quickly for early wins and then fallen away off a cliff really early. So, our strategy from the start has been about building for long-term success.
“From a game style perspective I've been really bullish that to beat the best teams long-term you're going to have to score well and create good offence so there are teams who throw plus three, plus four at times behind the ball and I don’t think that’s a brand of footy that will create long-term success for our playing group and to help them understand the game and so maybe at times, that means that the margins are bigger but that also means that long-term, we're putting better building blocks in place that are going to hold up against the best teams in the best games.”
Arnell on the AFL’s fixturing
“It's up to the AFL to do the fixture and it's up to us to have the right mindset to grow as an expansion team in its second year. If I'm going to lead this place and lead our team, the mentality's got to be that you take every lesson you can and if we're playing the bottom end of the competition every week I don’t reckon you learn as much as you can if you're playing against the best. So the scoreboards may be not what we want them to be but you're actually playing against the best players in the comp so why would we shy away from that?
Arnell on Hannah Ewings’ omission last week
“Han's made some good progress, it's obviously all just a week really but yeah, pleased with Han's progress and we’re working really strongly to support her. We'll name her as an emergency this week and there's fortunately another match scrimmage game across AFLW where the players that are not selected play in a group match with other teams so she'll play in that game and look to put her best foot forward on Saturday.
“All of our players and even staff go through some off field stuff at different points in time and as a young person Han's had a few things to deal with this year so as I said, we support her as best as we can and certainly putting her best foot forward. I think one of the hardest parts of my role is selection to be really honest, it's tough. I make a real effort to have really open and honest conversations every week with every single player that's in or out of our side. I think the main thing for us is we just support our people as best we can.”
Arnell on Erin Phillips
“Erin's always been week to week since she got to the footy club, so I think the focus for us is the same. I think she's had a pretty strong year to be fair, for a 38-year-old she's led the way on and off field for us and the work she's doing off field has been incredible. The focus is very much on this weekend.”
