‘If I missed the boat, I’d be crying every time I watched’: Erin Phillips’ sliding doors moment
Erin Phillips almost didn’t get to play football at the highest level. She was 31, fresh off the Rio 2016 Olympics campaign with the Australian Opals and playing for the Dallas Wings in the WNBA when the AFL women’s league was announced.
Had the league formed a couple of years later, Phillips suspects she might have been too old and missed the boat altogether – like her two older sisters. “They would have been great footballers.”
Now, she leaves the game the most decorated elite women’s football player to date – a three-time premiership player, two as captain, a two-time league best and fairest, three-time All Australian, two-time grand final best on ground and two-time club champion.
But she’d have been happy just to play the one game. “People that know me would genuinely say ‘yeah, you would have’, because if I missed the boat, I’d be crying every time I watched AFLW going ‘oh, I wanted to play’,” she says. “And I get so many women coming to me, that are two or three years older than me, going ‘I missed the boat’.
“So, when I was playing, there was a sense of playing for those that didn’t get the opportunity.”
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After spending more than half her life as a professional athlete, with knees that have been shot for a while, she is ready for a break. As she puts it, she wrung the towel out dry.
“I’ve been told by so many athletes that your body will tell you when it’s time, and mine did. I was telling my body these past four years, that it was not time, and I was hearing whispers from it. And I was like, ‘shush, be quiet. We need to keep going’,” she says.
“But I can sleep well at night knowing that I honestly gave everything physically – and that’s all I wanted.”
Now, she says, she has the kind of nerves that come with a new beginning. “It’s so strange for me to be in this environment. But I’m also excited because I don’t know, [and it’s] the first time I’ve ever been like that.”
“I’ve always been focusing on what’s next and that drives me. I’ve rarely celebrated achievements because I’ve always then gone ‘OK, what’s next’. And it’s great because it’s got me to where I am now. But it’s exhausting, honestly, it’s really exhausting,” she says.
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AFLW coaching positions are a hot topic in women’s football circles right now with four open positions, including one at Collingwood, Hawthorn, the Western Bulldogs and West Coast. Would she be interested in going down a path like that one day?
“I definitely haven’t ruled it out, just not right now,” she says.
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She admits she didn’t think too much about her legacy within the competition until her retirement press conference was over and her phone kept blowing up.
“I was like a little bit floored to be honest, about how many text messages [were coming through] and thought, ‘Wow, like, maybe I did do something special here’,” she says.
“But I still feel like that’s not the end, either. And I’d still love to make an even bigger impact off the field now. I’m not sure how, but I still want to make sure that I can continue to give back, because this game has literally given me so much.”
FULL INTERVIEW HERE
