Andrew Crowell, Personal Excellence and Wellbeing Manager at the Lions, chats all things player welfare during the COVID19 Pandemic and carpool karaoke with Chris Fagan on this week’s The Roar Deal.
Crowelly has probably had one of the most important roles for helping the Club, it’s staff and players navigate these past few weeks of COVID19 lockdown. Not only has he had to build out completely new individualized plans for managing player welfare whilst they’re at home, he’s had to do it with no physical interaction.
“For us in the first instance it was about being really proactive and setting up really clear programs from the get-go” Crowell said.
“We looked at what the risks were to each individual player through a risk assessment, and then had each player do their own personal risk assessment themselves and we updated our critical incident plan to be relevant to the situation.
“We also wanted to make sure we had one spot for consistent and up to date information so we put together a manual, a one-stop shop almost, for players to get all the info they needed around the Coronavirus and the Club’s protocols and that has been kept up to date as new information comes to hand.”
Once all of that was in place the communication and management had been relatively easy, there were even some positives to take out of the situation from a welfare point of view.
“The one piece of research we’ve been able to gather over past few weeks that I didn’t expect to be honest is that our players are actually in a better mental state now then they have been over the entire time I’ve been at the Club” he said.
“We measure this by their diary entries which they fill out three times a week and it’s a rating system where a 5 is thriving and a 1 is really struggling and we’ve been able to gather some good data over the past 3 years around where a player generally sits and when you compare that to the past three or four weeks, that’s gone up across the board.
“So that’s really highlighted for us how stressful playing footy can be, we’ve had some players who are generally up and down with their mental state in-season, so it’s been nice for them to have this time to spend with their families and really embrace it.”
There’ve been other positives for the Club too during the shutdown like Crowelly and Senior Coach Chris Fagan’s recent social media debut doing carpool karaoke.
“It was a bit of fun, Fages is a funny guy and so it was really fun to do” he said.
“The video has over 30,000 views on Facebook so Fages thinks we can now class ourselves as social media influencers.
“There might even be an encore and I think you’ll see us do the song “The Boys Light Up” (by Australian Crawl), that’s pretty relevant for now – we’ve done “The Boys Are Back In Town” and now the next step is the boys are going to light it up – so look out for that.”
