THE COLOURS red, white and black come naturally to Peta Searle.
Her earliest football memories are of being taken to Moorabbin, near her childhood home, to watch St Kilda play. Footy took hold of her in an instant.
"When I was five or six I thought I would play for the Saints, not knowing that women couldn't play," she told AFL.com.au on a recent afternoon at the Linen House Centre.
"We can't play yet, but I've done the next best thing, haven't I?"
That she has. Searle broke new ground last season when she was appointed to a development role at St Kilda, becoming the first woman to join the coaching staff of an AFL club.
An assistant coach at VFL club Port Melbourne under Gary Ayres until the end of 2013, she left that role, partly for financial reasons but also rolling the dice that she could win a job in the AFL system.
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It appeared for a time she had missed out. For the first time in 20 years, she wasn't involved in a football pre-season and by her own admission, "there was a period when I was grieving."
So she took a teaching job and helped out Daniel Harford, the former Hawthorn and Carlton midfielder coaching St Kevin's Old Boys in the Victorian Amateur Football Association.
And then St Kilda coach Alan Richardson picked up the phone, offering the chance to create some history.
Fast-forward nine months and Searle cuts a contented figure as she sits at an outdoor table at the Saints' training facility. She sits at the bottom of the totem pole, as a development coach working with the club's first- to third-year players, polishing their decision-making, analysing games and identifying trends and specialist coaching with their forwards.
She doesn't travel with the Saints when they play interstate, and if there is a fixture clash with VFL feeder club Sandringham, then the Zebras win out. Yet for all that she is an integral and respected member of the St Kilda coaching staff.
"She's going incredibly well," notes Richardson. "She comes from a teaching space and she's very experienced in educating people irrespective of gender. But she's also a really experienced footy person, which is different to a lot of other development coaches and that's a positive."
The experience comes from playing footy, with the boys as a youngster and then with women when that became the only viable option. She was a star player, but if possible, an even better coach, taking previous stragglers Darebin to five straight premierships in the Victorian Women's Football League.
Her ascension to the Saints is all the more remarkable because when it comes to football theory, she is self-taught.
"I was never taught like the boys," she said, noting there was no TAC Cup system for women footballers where they were exposed to top-level coaching.
"I was a self-taught coach because nobody coached me. It was basically how I read the game, and one of the reasons I left Darebin was because I wanted to grow and develop. I wanted to learn from someone else."
What her time in the VFL taught her was that her knowledge of the game was first-class. "I must have been teaching myself the right things," she said.
Still, she needed mentors. Ayres provided her with just that at Port Melbourne and Searle can't thank him enough.
"When I coached it was the whole team, but to go back and spend a lot of time with Gary he filled in a lot of the gaps in knowledge that I had. His wealth of knowledge is just outstanding and he has been absolutely pivotal. I was very privileged to have him come into my life," she said.
Neil Craig was also generous with his time and advice when he was at Melbourne and helped develop Searle to the point that when she walked through the doors at St Kilda she was able to contribute right away. There was no time, as Richardson said, "to skill her up".
"The concepts are pretty easy to grasp," Searle says. "Often it is the terminology that I've had had to get my head around, but my understanding of the concepts has been fine. You are learning every day and what wows me is that I am paid to learn about footy. That's amazing."
More than anything, what drives Searle is to dispel suggestions that hers was a token appointment.
"The AFL is such a competitive environment and there is so much that rests on the head coach, so he is not going to employ someone on the basis of tokenism because their job is too important," she explained.
"Richo would have employed me on good faith based on our conversations and the skill-set that I have that will enhance his team and take this club to where it wants to go. I'm pretty comfortable that's why I was employed here.
"If other people think its tokenism, let them do so. But it's not something I think about. The club wouldn't take the risk."
Having a woman on the coaching staff has changed the working environment at the Saints. Even subconsciously, the locker room language has changed as players mind their p's and q's.
"Her presence is a positive," says Richardson. "Players have changed how they communicate – a bit more respectful and articulate in how they talk, instead of letting it rip."
And it has also led to a fresh perspective among the coaches. Asked what she brings to the coaching dynamic at St Kilda, Searle mentions research that shows how women handle workplace scenarios in a different manner to men.
"They talk about things like empathy, reading people and communicating in a different way. We bring lots of little things, but it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, you need to be yourself. That's what helps us achieve what we want."
It is a tough grind for Searle, a single mother to eight-year-old Tessa and Jackson who is five. Games are starting and the weekends are a challenge, particularly when the Saints and Zebras play on different days.
"They've been fantastic with everything I've thrown at them," she says of her children. "Tessa has had to grow up a little bit quicker in terms of having to get ready for school in the morning so they've had to take on some responsibility. But the club is pretty fantastic and if I need to spend some time with the kids they do what they can to make it work."
So frantic is life in the AFL coaching bubble that Searle is just "getting on with it," as she says. There will be a time to reflect on the enormity of the barrier she has smashed down, but she is mindful how many other aspiring women football coaches are barracking for her to succeed.
"I can have a significant impact on other people coming through," she acknowledged. "There is a massive responsibility to that where I can help out and lead the way. Part of being a leader is about developing other people.
"I need to make it work not just for myself but other females out there. I'm carrying a fair bit of weight on my shoulders but nobody is placing more pressure on me to do well than myself. I feel privileged to be given the position and carry the expectation and I will carry that as best as I can for other people coming through."
