Lauren Arnell was back at work just months after giving birth to daughter Marlie. She tells Sarah Black how that’s affected her, and her coaching.
AMID Port Adelaide’s whirlwind 2024 season, it’s often overlooked that coach Lauren Arnell gave birth to her first child in January.
Arnell was pregnant through the 2023 AFLW season, and baby Marlie arrived exactly two months after the Power’s last game of the year.
Arnell was back at Alberton Oval for the start of pre-season – only five months after having Marlie – with senior assistant coach Sam Virgo having run the show in her absence over the off-season.
“I hope the dark circles around my eyes aren’t saying too much about it. I’m so lucky to have my family and my wife Lexi and little Marlie at home,” Arnell told AFL.com.au.
“She’s ticked over 10 months now, and she’s absolutely bananas. She’s the loudest person in the room, nothing fazes her. She’s right in her comfort zone [during games at Alberton Oval], right in the thick of everything.
“It has been quite challenging in many different days and points of weeks, you just kind of roll with it. It’s been a really humbling experience, actually, to be a mother.
You go into it, and obviously I’m a very strong-minded person and I think to do my job, you have to have a level of belief in yourself. And then you enter motherhood, and different things get thrown at you at different hours of every different day. It’s certainly been a humbling experience, to be Marlie’s mum, but it’s also just incredibly special, I’m very grateful.”
While motherhood hasn’t radically changed Arnell, she’s noticed a few shifts when it comes to her relationships with others.
“One of my players, when I was pregnant, said to me I was instantly more empathetic, and I hope that’s not a comment of where I’ve come from, just that I was more empathetic in general,” she said with a laugh.
Having such an obvious change in your life, and a baby and a new addition, it just allows me more naturally to share part of myself. That builds relationships better than anything.
“To be fair, I’m someone who doesn’t always easily share a lot of myself away from football, so having Marlie and that whole new element of my life, it’s become easier to share more of myself, and share different experiences with the people around me.”
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Port Adelaide’s record from its first two seasons in the AFLW competition read as 20 games, three wins, two draws, 15 losses.
While afforded some generous draft concessions over the past two off-seasons, taking full advantage of the rich band of South Australian talent, there’s been an awful lot of sheer bloody-mindedness involved in trusting the development process.
Despite finishing 15th last year, the writing may have been faintly legible on the wall to indicate 2024’s rapid improvement, the Power having had the second highest “points for” tally among the bottom 10 sides.
They’ve now won seven on the trot, and have qualified for a semi-final in their first AFLW finals series, with fun, attractive and high-scoring footy on the agenda.
The first two years for us, we lost a lot of games of football. At times, it felt like a real slog, and we had to keep our eyes up. I had a lot of help from senior people here at the football club, in particular Chris Davies (general manager of football), to help lift my eyes around building sustainable success,” Arnell said.
“We’ve only played one final, and we don’t want to be a flash in the pan. I think something to be pleased with right now is the brand of football that was played.
“It’s been something we’ve been working towards for almost three full seasons now, and it’s meant we have lost games and lost moments in games where maybe if we spent time on stronger defence at training in the previous two years, it wouldn’t have allowed that performance to come through on Sunday.
We’ve sacrificed areas of the game so we can produce that level of offence in a final, and I’m pleased that our contest and team D (defence) have really come on and been really strongly coached by Sam Virgo and Daniel Merrett this year, and Braedon Talbot in the forward line. I do hope the wider competition see it as a blueprint, because certainly teams we’ve looked up to have been the Brisbanes and North Melbournes and Melbourne to an extent, who really like to score heavily and open up on offence.
“It’s hard. You’re playing really short seasons, and we’ve always had a really young playing list, and we still do. Even with experience, it’s difficult to navigate, particularly when you’ve got difficult fixtures at different points in time.
“You want to attack it with the right mindset of wanting to play the best teams, so you know exactly where you’re at and the areas you need to improve on. Those things have been helpful to this point. But you also have to balance that with generating belief and confidence – in a very young team against experienced bodies over the last two or three years, it has been a challenge at times.”
This year has seen Justine Mules-Robinson rise as acting captain, the successful recruitment of Kirsty Lamb, Caitlin Wendland and Teagan Germech, career-best years from Julia Teakle, Olivia Levicki and Amelie Borg, and of course, the development of young stars Matilda Scholz, Shineah Goody, Piper Window and Molly Brooksby.
But for Arnell, the best part of the season has been simple reward for effort.
“In the previous two years, you’re looking at telling a story with the players around the growth that we’re having, when you can’t walk off the field and sing the song,” Arnell said.
So there’s obviously been growth prior to this year, but it hasn’t allowed us to really enjoy it, because we haven’t been winning.
“I think the most pleasing part is our players have put their heads down and worked their backsides off 12 months ago, when we had another year we weren’t overly happy with. We knew we had work to do. Now I know, with confidence, that our players have a much greater understanding of what’s required to be successful at this level.
“That’s a whole mixture of things on and off-field, and particularly in the off-season coming. For me, that’s really exciting. I think this year – we take every opportunity we generate for ourselves with both hands, and we cannot wait to play a second final on Saturday night – but also, we’re not in the finals for this to be a one-off in our history.
“We want sustainable success. I’m deeply excited about what our group has learnt this year, that can impact future years to come.”
