Essendon Wheelchair Senior Coach Chris Henderson sat down to reflect on a momentous occasion for the Club after they took home an inaugural CWFL premiership on Sunday.

Henderson on… the year in review

It’s been such an interesting and challenging year. I mean, for such a huge turnover of the list and then to sort of have to gel together – all the other teams are fairly well the same as they have been for the previous year – we had five new players, I think. 

That meant at the start of the year, we were so far back, and so just the growth in the group collectively, both championship and community, but also individual players, just to see them grow and we timed our run perfectly.

I think in the last four or five weeks, we really doubled down and said we can finish finals. We can beat St Kilda, we can beat Collingwood, we can beat Richmond, we can win this thing.

We started to believe that we could. I think one of the training sessions we had was themed ‘why not us’? And that’s what we started to live by.

It’s excitement, joy, relief. Yeah, it’s a bit of all of those things, I think.

Henderson on… the Grand Final performance against Richmond 

At Dreamtime, (Richmond) got hold of us, they smashed us early, and it was like we were really overwhelmed. 

We knew that we needed to change that and also, we had to be really careful. A lot of our teams haven’t played in Grand Finals before, so that can be overwhelming.

With a bit of experience, I tried to keep it very normal for the group this week. I didn’t want them playing the game on Thursday or Friday, I wanted them playing it on Sunday.  

We got there really early, we did some walkthroughs – how we were going to set up out of the centre for whatever – and then we just really committed to scoring the first goal to start the game. We just wanted that momentum. 

Richmond scored the first, but we just didn’t let that fluster us. Gary (Overliese), our Community Coach, Benny (Milton) up forward as our Captain were really instrumental, and along with myself being able to just keep that composure. 

We understood what we wanted to do, so it made it pretty easy when you’ve got that smattering of experience around. 

The other person that you have to mention, our best on ground in the Grand Final, Jordan Kinniburgh, the game that he played – I watched some of the highlights this morning and I mean, he just had a day out.

He was phenomenal in terms of his work rate, back, forward, through the centre, he worked so hard, so, yeah, it’s a great credit to all of us to individually grow and then, as a team grow, it’s really cool.  

Henderson on… his pride, the influence of the wider Club

I had the audacity to pop into Craig (Vozzo’s) office the other week and ask him for an idea around (the Grand Final) because I wasn’t sure what to do as a Coach and he told me what I should do.

I went away and thought about it, and he said to me yesterday, this is so good for the footy club to have a bit of silverware. 

After the game, I got everyone out of the stands to come down for a photo and to see so many of our senior people here, Mark (Bolton) and Craig and then to see, I don’t know, there could have been seven or eight of the AFLW girls there, not even just our ambassadors but some I didn’t even get to meet. 

They flew in at midnight the night before, but they still got up to be there to support us. Benny Brown was there with his beautiful wife and kids, and so to see the whole group down for a team photo, it just highlighted how much it means to the Footy Club and how much the Club means to us.

Even if we had lost, it would have been a similar result – it just encapsulated what we were about.

It’s a great big cup back at the NEC Hangar, and it’s pretty cool.