CASEY coach Peter Mercoulia always wears more than one hat while coaching the Dees in the VFLW.

Not literally of course, but not only is his focus on achieving the best season possible for the Dees, but with one of the aims of the Casey program to get players drafted, he always has that in the back of his mind.

Most VFLW coaches step away from their state league roles once they get a role in the AFLW system but Mercoulia bucked the trend and decided to go the opposite way after Melbourne’s grand final loss in Season Six. He did so to strengthen the connection between the AFLW side and it’s VFLW sister side, which he believes is vital to the success the Dees are currently enjoying, and with four key players drafted to the Dees in the last few years – including premiership stars Eliza West and Maeve Chaplin – he certainly has a point.

Looking back on last season, despite falling agonisingly short of a maiden Grand Final Mercoulia was happy with how the season unfolded.

“Overall I would say as a club we moved forward in the direction that we set out two years ago when I was fortunate enough to get the position here as head coach. We saw a natural progression of I guess our game style and as well as probably a bit more consistency in our list,” he said.

“From a connection with the Melbourne footy club point of view, we felt that was a strong season for us building that relationship and ensuring the players that come down from the AFLW program continue to develop parts of their game. The connection between the players and the staff was really, we built on that as well. Obviously we were lucky to have around six players drafted out of our program, I think five of which played AFLW last season.

“To see Eliza West and Maeve Chaplin come from our program and win a premiership with Melbourne was also really exciting for us as a club. Just demonstrates the continual relationship between Melbourne and Casey, so that was really exciting and for us now we just need to continue to build on that.”

The Dees made it all the way to the preliminary finals in 2022, losing to the Southern Saints, and when asked what went wrong that day, Mercoulia noted that the club failed to win enough “critical contests” and that realistically the list “wasn’t good enough” to match it with the final three. Looking ahead to this coming season, there are plenty of new faces pulling on the red and blue for the first time.

“We’ve been lucky enough to be able to obtain a number of new players to our club,” Mercoulia said.

“Marla Neal is a massive inclusion for us. Thinking back when we played Collingwood in that first final and seeing her running around against us and I just thought to myself ‘jeez, I don’t want to be playing against her next season’ and we thought the best way of not playing against Marla was to bring her to our club. We were really fortunate to have her come across.

“India Lehman has come across from the Sydney Swans Academy, Ella Morris is another one that unfortunately has a lisfranc foot injury, but she’s come across from Sydney. Kara Henderson has come from Hawthorn, and we have a number of players from Ireland that have joined us as well that have made the big journey across, trying to explore their position potentially in football and in AFL. They’ve all got strong Gaelic backgrounds and they’ve come across from Ireland, made the big move across so that’s just to name a few.”

Much like other VFLW coaches, Mercoulia said that with the AFLW season moving from Summer to Spring it has not changed too much with regards to how they are preparing for the coming season.

“Our preparation hasn’t changed too much, we’re very honest with the way we approach the games that the AFLW players need, so we really look at our program in two phases, we just change the phases for lack of a better term,” he said. “We’ll look at phase one which will be the AFLW players will be selected, and we’ll look to play anywhere between six to 10 every week from Melbourne.

“That’ll happen for the first probably six to seven rounds and they’ll transition out and then our phase two which will just be our VFLW players will move on from there. From a preparation point of view nothing really changes, we just need to prepare our VFLW players and our AFLW players that come down in the best possible way to upskill fundamentals and their game knowledge, so yeah nothing really much adjusts apart from when they play.”