SETTING The Scene is a pre-season series ahead of the 2024 NAB AFLW season, which starts on August 30. Picking up on storylines from last year's season, which ended in a second premiership for Brisbane, the series will also take a more holistic look at what is involved in a pre-season. 

Brisbane has long been regarded as one of – if not the – fittest teams in the competition. The Lions' high-performance manager, Matt Green, has been with the team since 2017. What is actually involved in a pre-season?

MATT Green is the under-the-radar third piece of Brisbane's AFLW puzzle, having worked with coach Craig Starcevich and head of footy Breeanna Brock since their days at AFL Queensland, prior to the introduction of the elite women's competition.

The Lions absolutely blew North Melbourne out of the water in the final quarter of last year's Grand Final, their fitness and running power unable to be matched as they powered home to their second flag.

Green has been at the forefront of elite women's football training for years, so is the perfect choice to give an insight as to how a pre-season operates.

"My role is to prepare our AFLW program to play to the best of their abilities in the AFLW premiership season," Green told AFL.com.au.

"Why do we do a pre-season? It's something my players ask every year. Fundamentally, it really is just about establishing a solid foundation for the players ahead of the upcoming season.

"It provides us a really good opportunity to assess their profile – physically, technically (skills), tactically and psychologically – and it gives us a really good idea of where we need to get them to, to tolerate the demands of an AFLW season."

It's a heavy and important workload, and there are two major keys to a well-performing S&C (strength and conditioning) team.

First, it's crucial to be on the same page as the coach and head of footy, to identify goals and areas of improvement for pre-season.

Then, it's all about the planning. Individual v team programs, loading for different points of the season, off-season training, all worked into a football program which still has limited hours.

"The plan is all-encompassing, and I think that's a nice way to sum up the role of a high-performance manager, just making sure they all harmoniously work together, like a conductor of an orchestra. If one instrument isn't playing its part, everything starts to fall apart, nothing's in time," Green said.

"Making sure what we're doing is being underpinned by the head coach and the style the head coach wants to play with, Craig (Starcevich) in this matter. Our relationship is of the utmost importance to me, because it ensures we have a plan in place that's going to allow us to play the game-style we want to play, or work on the weaknesses that have been unravelled from the year before, or whatever it might be.

"It's really getting down into the nitty gritty of what made us good, what made us successful, but equally, what were our deficiencies, whether that be physically or technically, what were they?

"To use a (hypothetical) example of being beaten around the contest – is it that we're not strong enough, we'd have data to suggest yes or no. Or was it a technical thing? Were we not getting lower or not getting our bodies into the right positions, so making sure we're working on the right things.

"Football is an incredibly complex game, and you can get lost in working on too many different things. That's where pre-season preparation is important for us to really assess the right things. You can assess so many things, but we need to assess the right things to make sure we're on the right track or we're being able to assess the components of our game, physically, that marry up to the technical demands of the game."

Not only does Green and his team have to plan around both individual and team needs – whether that's areas of physical or skill improvement – but there's another balancing act involved in managing workloads.

One off-season or pre-season of poor load planning – seeing players either over- or under-train – can very quickly derail a season as injuries begin to mount.

"We've got lots of different athletes with different athletic ages, so they might be 25 and just come into the system, but they may have only picked up the game in the past three or four years," Green said.

"Now, we've got 18-year-olds who have played the game since they were 11 and grown up playing rough and tumble with the boys. It's not just their chronological age, it's also their athletic age, which makes it pretty tricky to find the balance amongst it all.

"We've had multiple players come back after having a baby, and navigating being a new mother and trying to play footy, trying to come to work and do all those sorts of things as well. It's one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.

"We've got a lot of multitalented athletes who have come and gone from other sports or come in late, and we've had to develop them and speed them up. Our Irish contingency fall into that bracket as well – whatever they feed them in Ireland, they're obviously incredible athletes, I don’t think I've seen a poor athlete come out of Ireland. But we need to get them up to speed with the demands of our game."

Like all areas of football, there's also a mental health overlay to the work of Green and his team.

"One of the other components is general female stereotypes. It shouldn't even be said in this day and age, but [the idea] that women shouldn't be strong and athletic and all of those different types of things," he said.

"It's about empowering the girls to know that it is perfectly normal and strong to be strong and athletic, and it's a whole other component of this, but there's the body image side of things, and making sure they feel happy and confident and self-assured in their own body."

At this point of pre-season, a fair percentage of Green's work and planning is done, and coaches take control, involving match simulations into training sessions, replacing the repeat running and strenuous gym sessions from earlier in the program.

When it comes to matches, Green has seen the athletic demands increase at a rapid rate over the years. The remaining 2016 draftees are in the tail-end of their ninth pre-season, with plenty of kilometres now in their legs, while the current crop of youngsters have come through more developed talent pathways compared to the opportunities given to their older sisters.

"As skill level increases, the speed of the game increases. The girls themselves need to run faster and need to cover more ground. The length of the game is gradually growing, so the demands in that space have progressed. I don't think we could have ever questioned the physicality of the game, it's always been their great weapon," he said.

"The athleticism to get themselves into positions to mark the ball – I think of Tayla Harris, Dakota Davidson, Jesse Wardlaw – they get themselves into some pretty compromising positions, same as defenders. I'm amazed at how Nat (Grider) and Bre (Koenen) and Jen Dunne are able to spoil the ball when they've got no right to.

"But I think the biggest thing is the application of the AFLW cohort across their off-seasons have exponentially improved. You see that at the rate at which teams are improving physically, fitness and all of that. I believe that's really tightened up our competition as well, because you're starting to see the more recent expansion teams close the gap on us foundation teams really quickly.

"That's also come with CBA negotiations and whatnot, but the application across the league in that space has been exceptional, to try and really elevate the physical standards."