FROM a whirlwind start in the job to the eve of his first season as an AFLW coach, new Carlton coach Mathew Buck has dealt with a lot in his first few months of the job.

There was very little time between Buck’s appointment at the Blues earlier this year and this year’s draft (as little as only two hours) so he ultimately had no say on who the Blues ended up drafting and relied on the recruiting team to pick the right players.

However, since then he has certainly loved the ride he has been on.

“I’ve absolutely loved it to be honest” he said.

“We’ve got a great group of players who’ve all been willing to take on a lot of new stuff. A lot of new staff as well, so it’s kind of felt like a really fresh kind of environment. The big change for the players has obviously been the times that they train and that kind of thing.

“We get comments from them that they feel like elite athletes now and they rub shoulders with everyone else in the building as well, and it just feels like a program that progressing and getting better all the time.”

Buck noted that when he came into the program at Carlton he was able to implement his own strategy without too many issues.

“What I wanted to do was come in with how I wanted the team to play and my expectations around that,” he said. “The beauty of that was the board were really clear with what I wanted and what they wanted as well so I’d come in with really nice expectations around this is what we’re going to do.

“Credit to the players, they are great at taking that on and asking questions and showing their understanding on the training track through all the drills we do to reinforce how we want to play. So it was a complete overhaul I guess to what they did do, I mean footy’s footy so of course there’s elements where what they used to do kind of blends itself to what we do now, we might just use a different word for what it was.”

Some may see where the Blues are at with a new coach coming in and so much list turnover as at the start of another rebuild, but that is not where the Blues are at according to the coach.

“What I see it as is we’ve got some great young talent who I’ve come in to develop and we’ve got a great coaching group in who are great at development, so our real focus is around how quickly can we get players to become great AFLW players,” he said.

Like the rest of the competition, Carlton have had a few practise matches over the past few weeks and Buck said they had a few key focuses in both of the games.

The main focus coming out of both the match simulation against Melbourne and the official practise match against the Swans was around contest work and how the team defends.

Despite the drop off they had as the game progressed, Buck said he and the coaching staff were pleased with what they saw from ‘individuals’ and were not worried about the scoreboard in practise matches.

To those Carlton supporters who may be frustrated with how the team has not kept up with other inaugural teams in terms of development, Buck has a simple message.

“What I do know is that we have a really passionate Carlton supporter base and we see that in the men’s program at the moment which just exciting,” he said. “The boys are a bit like rockstars at the moment and what I do know is that we have some players in our W program that are going to excite the Carlton fanbase as well because when you’re a Carlton player you sign up to play a certain way to be honest and if we look at Crippa, you’re brutal in the contest and we’ve got some players who I think our fans will be able to track.

“A Keeley Sherar coming through who’s had a great preseason, Mia Austin returning from injury who’s going to be someone they can absolutely support, so I think we’re going to have some great story lines throughout the year of growth and development through some players and some players that fans are really going to love to come back and watch time and time again.”