To the Lions community.
There will be twenty-one of us on Adelaide Oval on Saturday trying to claim the Lions’ first AFLW premiership.
I’m confident, because these girls are my closest friends and I know every one of them wants this as badly as I do, and each knows exactly what the team needs from them.
It is a cliché that is as old as the game itself, but it has never been truer. A champion team will always beat a team of champions. At the Lions we don’t rely on individual star power, we simply expect every one of the girls to play their role and we have total trust in the plan our coach Craig Starcevich and his team have prepared for us.
It will be a huge and hostile crowd but the spirit within our team will shield us. Some of our best wins such as the record-breaking defeat of Fremantle over in the West and the “home ground” boilover of Collingwood in Melbourne, have come on the road and against the odds.
That spirit has grown over a long journey - and it is a journey that you the fans have played an important role in. Every one of us players know and appreciates that.
Right from the start of the AFLW competition, every one of the Lions girls felt the incredible support from the best fans in the game and drew strength and inspiration from that.
Another key building block for our team spirit has been the appreciation of the opportunity we have been given. Those of us born with footies in our hands never dreamed there would one day be a national competition. And the girls that picked up a footy a bit later in life, or have come from other sports, wouldn’t be where they are today without having an elite competition to aspire to be a part of.
There are so many stories in our team and those shared experiences and histories combine to create the personality of our squad. Every one of us at some point has taken a risk and made a commitment to be a professional footballer. When we look across at each other from the huddle on Saturday, we will have appreciation and admiration for the steps our team-mates have taken to reach this point.
Like every kid my journey began with a crawl. But unlike many girls I was already chasing a footy around.
My father Lloyd was my hero.
He was a Victorian so footy was in his blood and it didn’t bother him one bit that he had three daughters. It was his passion and he wanted to share it with his kids.
I owe him so much.
He was a stalwart of the Yeronga footy club and my earliest memories are scurrying around his feet as he performed one of the multiple roles he filled at the Club over the year, from senior coach to my first coach in the Under 12s.
He believed so strongly that girls play too that he coached me the whole way through my junior career.
Dad passed away when I was 15 and he never saw me get drafted or play in All-Star games or Grand Finals, but he made me the footballer I am today and he has definitely shaped the way I see the game.
Where footy has come from and where I believe it can still go is a source of great inspiration for me. Whatever the next step forward in commitment and professionalism might be, I look forward to it.
However, I still see footy as a community game. Thanks to those years at Yeronga the game to me is still about the people, the sense of shared purpose.
The scale is different, but that’s how I see the Lions. We care for each other. We care for our fans.
We are the Lions community and when we run out on Saturday, it is that community I will be playing for.
Yours sincerely
Emily Bates
