‘If I missed the boat, I’d be crying every time I watched’: Erin Phillips’ sliding doors moment

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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.”

At lunch with Erin Phillips at Cafe Oar in West Lakes, Adelaide.Credit: The Age

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.”

Erin Phillips has the vegan big breakfast at Oars Coffee House in West Lakes.Credit: The Age

Phillips, 38, has chosen a regular haunt for lunch, Oars Coffee House in West Lakes in Adelaide, right on the banks of John Dyer Lake. It’s just a fortnight after her retirement after 66 games and eight seasons with two clubs – the first with Adelaide and then Port Adelaide, her father’s old side, which came into the competition as an expansion team in 2022.

Phillips asks for the vegan menu.

She gave up red meat when playing basketball in Israel in 2009, where there was no beef or pork and lamb was hard to get and expensive. Later, she gave up dairy in the lead-up to the Rio 2016 Olympics after her teammate Penny Taylor told her it would help with inflammation issues in her knee.

It did, and so she took an approach she was familiar with and went all in.

“My body felt so much better, and then I just thought, ‘I got this far. I’m going to do everything’.

Her go-to is the vegan big breakfast, which features avocado, hash browns, kale, beans and a veggie fritter on toast, while I choose the vegan tostada with beans, avocado, corn and salsa on a crisp fried tortilla.

“If I missed the boat, I’d be crying every time I watched AFLW, going ‘oh, I wanted to play’.”

She gets an oat latte on the side and I opt for an orange juice. I ask whether her nutrition has changed at all since hanging up the boots, but being healthy is all she’s really known. Although she has a bit more red wine now.

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.

The vegan tostada at Oars Coffee House in West Lakes.Credit: The Age

“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.

There are many emotions tied to sports, the deep pain of a loss, pure happiness from a win. For a while, Phillips and her wife Tracy – who she says rides every emotional wave of a game with her – want to be able to watch a few games unshackled by her own participation.

Erin Phillips won her third premiership with the Adelaide Crows.Credit: Getty Images

Phillips grew up around Alberton Oval in the early 1990s, where her father Greg, an eight-time premiership defender and Australian Football Hall of Famer, played in the SANFL. She’d always have a football in hand.

Often, Phillips would jump the fence at the quarter-time breaks to stand between his legs and listen to the player huddles.

“People used to say, I was a tomboy growing up and I went through this phase of like, I didn’t ever want to be a boy, but I wanted the opportunities boys had,” she says, adding: “Play footy, that was it. Nothing else, actually. It was just to play footy.”

She often says she has had two fairytale endings. A third premiership with the Crows last year and then a couple of seasons at Port in her father’s number, 1, as captain. The pair is the first father-daughter captain duo in the league and to top it off, her first season there was in the year 2022, 22 being his other number.

Erin Phillips and her teammates sing an emotion-charged rendition of the Power theme song.Credit: AFL Photos

“It was my outlet, my happy place. It gave me a purpose. My football club gave me a connection to my dad, gave me a connection to the community, all the things that we try to preach now as players … community. I know how important that is. Because that was me hanging over the fence at Alberton.

“That is still so important to me. Because when I was young, if I didn’t have football when I was younger, I would have been really lost.”

She still wants to play her role in the progression of AFLW, which she says is tracking well. Phillips featured in the 2019 grand final at Adelaide Oval in front of 53,034 – which at that time was the record for a standalone women’s sporting event in Australia (since broken by the Matildas during the Women’s World Cup this year).

Although average crowd numbers have fallen to just over 2500 this season, Phillips says there are other numbers we need to look to. There are 18 teams, she says, with 30 players on the roster (as opposed to just 12 in the WNBA). All of this in eight seasons is a huge achievement and one not to be underestimated.

“Everyone’s in a hurry in life [but] I feel like when you’re building something that you want longevity, you want to make sure it has financial stability, you want to make sure it has its own supporter base that’s going to grow,” she says.

“And whilst I’d love to see, yeah, it would have been great to be a full-time footballer, and eventually, it’ll get to that point, if you go so fast, you miss the foundation. And we’ve seen too many sporting teams, or organisations, trying to throw so much money at one thing without establishing those strong roots and to be able to make sure that it’s stable for generations, hopefully forever, like the AFL.”

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.

“I’ve been an elite athlete since I was 16 and in that environment of high performance … I need to have some type of just distance or a little bit of a break. Whether that’s six months, a year, I don’t know,” she says, adding that she has more experience coaching basketball than football.

She does have a book on the way, a project she’s been working on with sports journalist Sam Lane, due to come out next year. It documents her sporting journey, but she also wanted it to be a resource with lessons she’s learnt about life more broadly, including her IVF journey with Tracy.

“We had no idea, we kind of just worked on the fly and had we known some of the things we know now … It would have been so much easier, just to be able to prepare and understand why they do that, or why that happens or why do you feel like that,” says Phillips, now a mother of four.

“Hopefully, it can help people, and young people, understand that if you did want to have kids, and you’re a full-time athlete, or you have a job that pulls you in so many directions that you feel like now’s not the right time, I would 100 per cent have gone back and frozen my eggs at a younger age.”

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.”

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