For AFLW Head Coach Cam Bernasconi, growth for the club means growing together.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor our success, the one club piece is key,\u201d Bernasconi says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe men are doing well, the girls are on their way to get there, you\u2019d just love it to be all GIANTS fans come to both games, lean into the men when we\u2019re playing and the women when they are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bernasconi picked up the whistle for the women\u2019s side in 2022 and is staring down the barrel of his fourth season in charge and towards a GIANT future.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuccess is something we\u2019d love but just to have a strong supporter base, membership and growth across both programs is what we\u2019d love to see here,\u201d Bernasconi says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rise of GIANTS AFLW isn\u2019t limited to their West Australian midfielder though, it\u2019s been built on nine seasons of development, investment and since 2022, a player-led shift that Bernasconi believes will shape its future.<\/p>\n
\u201cComing 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,\u201d Bernasconi says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the key focuses for me were making it enjoyable and a really strong culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since his time in charge, Bernasconi has seen significant list turnover, with 16 new faces added in the last two seasons alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere have been so many challenges but it\u2019s so rewarding,\u201d he says. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like we\u2019re building a group that loves coming in, being here and working hard and I believe success follows that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What he needed was to create a plan for the future and reshape the culture of the squad.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to be careful as a head coach,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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\u2019s what encompasses being a GIANTS AFLW player now and is the guidebook on how to be good.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we did different to other programs, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you get is a more confined leadership group with a really refined responsibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not about being the perfect leader, it\u2019s impossible to think perfection is the way to be a leader. You come in and be yourself because that\u2019s what you\u2019ve already exhibited and that\u2019s what the girls have voted you in on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gives us diversity in our leadership group and it also creates a map of what it is to be a GIANT.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bernasconi\u2019s leadership group in 2025 are the perfect medley of the club\u2019s foundations and its future.<\/p>\n
Rebecca Beeson leads as captain, with fellow inaugural AFLW player Katherine Smith the exemplar of \u2018All In,\u2019 NSW superstar Alyce Parker the \u2018Competitor\u2019, and emerging star Tarni Evans recognised by her teammates as \u2018Fearless.\u2019<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a group that represents where the GIANTS have been and leads a new class of stars to where it\u2019s going.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Bernasconi believes it\u2019s a significant step towards a more even competition and a better standard of football.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s super exciting,\u201d Bernasconi says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means we\u2019re going to get better quickly, it means we don\u2019t have to wait four or five years for a flag.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve said to those girls; \u2018I\u2019m not going to wait for you to become important for us, I\u2019m coaching you and expecting you to make a difference now.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s still going to take a long time for that previous system to wash out as we only reached a national draft in season nine,\u201d Bernasconi laments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had local talent coming through and straight away there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn those early seasons, you couldn\u2019t just draft 15 18-year-olds, the talent just wasn\u2019t there so you had to look at mature-aged talent and local talent, so you\u2019re drafting out of Sydney and Canberra and there were some gems in there, like Britt Tully, but that big catchment wasn\u2019t available, where in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, footy had been strong for a long time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the NSW and Canberra market, a lot of players don\u2019t grow up knowing and playing footy so football IQ is the biggest work-on because here, you just can\u2019t assume people will have footy IQ, you have to coach it.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow that it\u2019s a national draft, we get access to top end talent and you don\u2019t have to have your sales hat on, you can interview the players, not the other way around.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Bernasconi, it means that not only the GIANTS, but the entire competition, is set to improve at an impressive rate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat it means for us is the GIANTS will come faster than you think but for AFLW more broadly, it\u2019s going to make the competition so good to watch,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the next two or three years it\u2019s going to be a great entertainment spectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s seen how far the game has come and what is left to come for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest growth I have seen is the professionalism in the players,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt comes off the back of having more time to put into their development, which happens as they\u2019re paid more.<\/p>\n
\u201cTime has become greater, which allows them to invest more into their football and you can see it. This season is the best they\u2019ve looked as athletes because of that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis year is a history-making year. We\u2019ve tweaked a few things, we\u2019ve picked parts of the game that were too deficient to make sure we\u2019re working to top eight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe eight players we\u2019ve bought in help us at contests, they make us immediately better.<\/p>\n
\u201cExpectations this year is improvement in win-loss\u2026 to be singing the song a hell of a lot more.\u201d<\/p>\n
His message to his team and to the GIANTS\u2019 members who he urges to be part of the journey, as the club enters its tenth season?<\/p>\n
\u201cI expect us to win from round one. \u201c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For AFLW Head Coach Cam Bernasconi, growth for the club means growing together. Bernasconi, who joined the GIANTS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85,83],"class_list":["post-69795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}