For AFLW Head Coach Cam Bernasconi, growth for the club means growing together.
Bernasconi, who joined the GIANTS back in 2020 to lead the GIANTS Academy, has spent his coaching life developing players to be at their best in orange and charcoal and is now encouraging the entire GIANTS family to come along for the journey.
“For our success, the one club piece is key,” Bernasconi says.
“The men are doing well, the girls are on their way to get there, you’d just love it to be all GIANTS fans come to both games, lean into the men when we’re playing and the women when they are.”
Bernasconi picked up the whistle for the women’s side in 2022 and is staring down the barrel of his fourth season in charge and towards a GIANT future.
“Success is something we’d love but just to have a strong supporter base, membership and growth across both programs is what we’d love to see here,” Bernasconi says.
“Both game plans are really similar, they play with the same traits. You look at Finn Callaghan and a Kaitlyn Srhoj as two similar players on their rise.”
The rise of GIANTS AFLW isn’t limited to their West Australian midfielder though, it’s been built on nine seasons of development, investment and since 2022, a player-led shift that Bernasconi believes will shape its future.
“Coming in, Jason McCartney and (former EGM of AFLW) Bri Harvey gave me two KPIs that they were really honest with me on; help them enjoy it, and create an identity and a game plan for the team,” Bernasconi says.
“I felt like the game plan came in really quickly, we went from playing a contest brand of footy to more of a transition, more live ball [brand] and play a little faster through our hands.
“I was pretty lucky that Adam Kingsley then got the job and came across and I could just steal his IP on how to do it properly, that really helped us add the right system and detail.
“But the key focuses for me were making it enjoyable and a really strong culture.
“You can have really strong philosophies as a coach and your values, but culture is people. We spent a few years getting the right people in.”
Since his time in charge, Bernasconi has seen significant list turnover, with 16 new faces added in the last two seasons alone.
“There have been so many challenges but it’s so rewarding,” he says.
“I feel like we’re building a group that loves coming in, being here and working hard and I believe success follows that.”
Having begun a career as a talent development manager with the AFL, after playing at TAC Cup and NEAFL level himself, he knew how to identify skill and potential.
What he needed was to create a plan for the future and reshape the culture of the squad.
“You have to be careful as a head coach,” he says.
“I think you can spark ideas and ask the right questions to lead a direction but at the end of the day, the players came up with our values of Fearless, All In and Competitor and that’s what encompasses being a GIANTS AFLW player now and is the guidebook on how to be good.
“What we did different to other programs, it’s not just a generic 3,2,1 vote [for our leaders]. For us, you vote for your values and the player that has the behaviours that link into that.
“What you get is a more confined leadership group with a really refined responsibility.
“It’s not about being the perfect leader, it’s impossible to think perfection is the way to be a leader. You come in and be yourself because that’s what you’ve already exhibited and that’s what the girls have voted you in on.
“It gives us diversity in our leadership group and it also creates a map of what it is to be a GIANT.”
Bernasconi’s leadership group in 2025 are the perfect medley of the club’s foundations and its future.
Rebecca Beeson leads as captain, with fellow inaugural AFLW player Katherine Smith the exemplar of ‘All In,’ NSW superstar Alyce Parker the ‘Competitor’, and emerging star Tarni Evans recognised by her teammates as ‘Fearless.’
It’s a group that represents where the GIANTS have been and leads a new class of stars to where it’s going.
In 2023, the GIANTS selected their first interstate draftee in Srhoj. In 2024, the first official National Draft saw the squad add two more prodigious talents to the list, taking Sara Howley at pick four and Grace Martin with pick 22.
Bernasconi believes it’s a significant step towards a more even competition and a better standard of football.
“It’s super exciting,” Bernasconi says.
“It means we’re going to get better quickly, it means we don’t have to wait four or five years for a flag.
“I’ve said to those girls; ‘I’m not going to wait for you to become important for us, I’m coaching you and expecting you to make a difference now.’
“But it’s still going to take a long time for that previous system to wash out as we only reached a national draft in season nine,” Bernasconi laments.
“We had local talent coming through and straight away there’s an advantage of a bigger pool in Victoria than in NSW so those clubs down there will benefit more from that but even more to the detail of local level.
“In those early seasons, you couldn’t just draft 15 18-year-olds, the talent just wasn’t there so you had to look at mature-aged talent and local talent, so you’re drafting out of Sydney and Canberra and there were some gems in there, like Britt Tully, but that big catchment wasn’t available, where in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, footy had been strong for a long time.
“It wasn’t a level playing field. It was pretty hard to convince a great mature-aged player to move to Sydney on $10,000 or whatever it was in the first few years.
“In the NSW and Canberra market, a lot of players don’t grow up knowing and playing footy so football IQ is the biggest work-on because here, you just can’t assume people will have footy IQ, you have to coach it.
“Now that it’s a national draft, we get access to top end talent and you don’t have to have your sales hat on, you can interview the players, not the other way around.”
For Bernasconi, it means that not only the GIANTS, but the entire competition, is set to improve at an impressive rate.
“What it means for us is the GIANTS will come faster than you think but for AFLW more broadly, it’s going to make the competition so good to watch,” he says.
“In the next two or three years it’s going to be a great entertainment spectacle.”
With the GIANTS having been there from the start and Bernasconi having a unique, critical lens on the way the game has changed as he developed talent from across the region and through Academies to the top tier, he’s seen how far the game has come and what is left to come for it.
“The biggest growth I have seen is the professionalism in the players,” he says.
“It comes off the back of having more time to put into their development, which happens as they’re paid more.
“Time has become greater, which allows them to invest more into their football and you can see it. This season is the best they’ve looked as athletes because of that.
“This year is a history-making year. We’ve tweaked a few things, we’ve picked parts of the game that were too deficient to make sure we’re working to top eight.
“The eight players we’ve bought in help us at contests, they make us immediately better.
“Expectations this year is improvement in win-loss… to be singing the song a hell of a lot more.”
His message to his team and to the GIANTS’ members who he urges to be part of the journey, as the club enters its tenth season?
“I expect us to win from round one. “