AFLW West Coast Womens 2025

[Barrybran]

Will be interesting to see how early they get games. Smart has some serious wheels, can lay a tackle and seems confident overhead. Gerardi looks like a pocket rocket and would look very handy at Ella's feet in the F50.

 

[bUCKET__]

Some Smart picks

 

[AlphaSheep]

There's now only four players in the team older than 25 - Gibbo, Swanny, McGrath and Western. I think that makes Roxy the fifth oldest player in the group at 24. And maybe Lindgren?

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

Lily Smart Draft Profile

Lily Smart is a hard-running winger with plenty of upside having had a terrific top-age campaign for Sturt and South Australia.

central.rookieme.com

Sturt - SANFL

sanfl.com.au

The athletic ability is eye catching but I’m not overly enthusiastic about this pick. Mostly because of the smaller AFLW lists which make it a lot harder to stash players who need time to develop. And our list changes this offseason end up as follows, along with years of experience:

In: Slocombe (2 years but only one match played)
Paterson (1 year)
Skepper (4 years)
Russo (new)
Skewed-Clinton (new)
Gerardi (new)
Smart (new)

Out: Hooker (10 years)
Drennan (8 years)
McDonald (6 years)
Lindgren (1 year, but 24 years old)
Johnson (4 years, 25 years old)
Kavanagh (2 years)
Boyd (1 year)


Skepper is the only new recruit with any sort of significant AFLW experience and she’s just turned 22 years old! It just feels to me like we would have been better served going to a more ready-made player than another teenager who is likely to need significant development time. Hopefully she will prove me wrong.

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

Sucks that Henry didn’t get picked up. Deserves a shot

They did mention in the PSD show that from now until the start of the season it’s just a free-for-all, so any team that suffers season-ending injuries can sign any eligible player. Theoretically this would also include if Rowley or Western have a setback with their knee recoveries.

What’s the rule with top-ups? Steane played one game last year. Do they have an agreement with a local WAFLW club or can they just try to pluck any player out of WAFLW?

 

[bUCKET__]

It just feels to me like we would have been better served going to a more ready-made player than another teenager who is likely to need significant development time. Hopefully she will prove me wrong.

I get what you mean - Gerardi looks a footballer but seems so slight still, and Smart is athletic but ball skills a work in progress. Both will need time and development.

I guess other teams are in a similar boat with older players getting pushed out by kids who've had a better pathway. It'd be even harder to find mature players from other states who'd want to move to WA. We did incredibly really well to pick up McGrath last year.

We were reportedly into the Irish girls, but I imagine they would've set the terms to clubs.

It's not unreasonable to think we tried to pry some experienced talent loose prior to this via trade. Perhaps what's left of mature age talent now is on a list already, as apart from the Irish girls most of the picks seem very young.

 

[AlphaSheep]

Lily Smart Draft Profile

Lily Smart is a hard-running winger with plenty of upside having had a terrific top-age campaign for Sturt and South Australia.

central.rookieme.com

Sturt - SANFL

sanfl.com.au

The athletic ability is eye catching but I’m not overly enthusiastic about this pick. Mostly because of the smaller AFLW lists which make it a lot harder to stash players who need time to develop. And our list changes this offseason end up as follows, along with years of experience:

In: Slocombe (2 years but only one match played)
Paterson (1 year)
Skepper (4 years)
Russo (new)
Skewed-Clinton (new)
Gerardi (new)
Smart (new)

Out: Hooker (10 years)
Drennan (8 years)
McDonald (6 years)
Lindgren (1 year, but 24 years old)
Johnson (4 years, 25 years old)
Kavanagh (2 years)
Boyd (1 year)


Skepper is the only new recruit with any sort of significant AFLW experience and she’s just turned 22 years old! It just feels to me like we would have been better served going to a more ready-made player than another teenager who is likely to need significant development time. Hopefully she will prove me wrong.

Yeah, but you have to spend draft capital to get experience. If you can spot super-talented kids without much experience, you can get them pretty cheap, like we did with Slocombe. (and we got SO lucky with Russo).

Experience sounds nice, and it works for some other clubs, but Swanny was the only player over 23 in the top ten of best and fairest last year, and she was only 8th. (and would have been 9th if Rowley hadn't been injured).

All the action and excitement with us has been the kids, the leadership group is increasingly kids, that's just what's been working for us, and the talent scouts seem to be doing a great job picking the next big stars, and getting them for bargains (Riggs was damn cheap too, and Dalgleish).

So I'm fine with the current strategy, it's not like we're going to be winning premierships in the next few years anyway. But we will have a big mob of our best players all entering their mid-20s in about 3 years, and that'll be the biggest experience surge we need... about the time we start looking to go very deep in finals.

 

[UseR2006]

 

[UseR2006]

 

[Byron_Clanger]

The VFLW season doesn't even start until the 16th, which is why no Victorians got drafted and probably why we asked the league if we HAD to use both our picks. I'm sure we would've liked to have seen exposed form from the Vic girls before filling up a list spot.

Would it really have hurt the competition to have the draft in a months time so we could see exposed form from every state league? Maybe it's because pre-season proper starts Monday since Sienna says see everyone on Monday

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

The VFLW season doesn't even start until the 16th, which is why no Victorians got drafted and probably why we asked the league if we HAD to use both our picks. I'm sure we would've liked to have seen exposed form from the Vic girls before filling up a list spot.

Would it really have hurt the competition to have the draft in a months time so we could see exposed form from every state league? Maybe it's because pre-season proper starts Monday since Sienna says see everyone on Monday

I tend to agree. Why is it important to give draftees a full training period with the club prior to the session? We’ve seen in the men’s mid-season draft players like McCarthy and Hutchinson get drafted and almost immediately become mainstays in the senior side. No reason that the same couldn’t happen with AFLW.

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

2026 AFLW Preseason Draft wrap

ATHLETICISM, footy IQ or versatility were the key features of the 2026 AFLW Preseason Draft last night with 11 players earning their chance to test themselves at the elite level. Of the 11 players taken, just four remain in the state they are currently playing in, bucking the trend that was...

central.rookieme.com

Following on from the Dockers, West Coast went the one expected, one surprise route as the other team – along with the Giants – who picked up two players in last night’s draft. The pickup of the exciting Sienna Gerardi is a great one, with the Swan Districts small forward – who can also play off a wing – having explosive speed and natural footy skills and smarts. She was hesitated on last season as she tossed up between football and a College career, and now leaning into the former, it was a no brainer. Does not need to win a lot of it to provide some serious highlights.

With the second selection, the Eagles pulled a surprise in the form of Sturt winger Lily Smart who also played on the weekend. Many expected West Coast to stay local, but instead went with the hard-running Double Blue who has some elite athletic traits, particularly from a speed-endurance standpoint. Smart is a former international long-jumper at junior level, and all-round athlete. She has improved her kicking over the off-season, and caught the eye in her most recent match, a draw against West Adelaide on Saturday.

And some info about the other WAFL player (selected by Freo)

Fremantle stayed local as expected but pulled out somewhat of a surprise in the form of East Fremantle midfielder/forward Noa McNaughton. The former South Fremantle talent who missed out on the past two drafts moved to the Sharks last season and showed some nice development, but in the wake of departures from the blue and white, got even more of an opportunity around the ball and became her side’s prime ball-winner. She hits the scoreboard, applies pressure and has fantastic evasion, with Dockers coach Lisa Webb at McNaughton’s most recent WAFLW game on Friday night where her future Fremantle player starred.