GWS came out in its opening match of the AFL Women’s season and made a huge statement, downing the Western Bulldogs to the tune of 63 points, and Giants’ coach Cam Bernasconi was certainly beaming when speaking to the media post-match.

He said that it was a “great start” to the season.

“It’s been a long off season for us and a lot of time talking about what we need to improve on and revisiting last year to see key parts of our game that we need to improve on,” Bernasconi said.

“I think everyone sits in pre season and said that they’re going well, but you don’t really know until you get to round one. So really pleased to see that the things that we really want to work on translated today I’m just really happy for the girls to get some success today.”

The Giants may have set a high standard now for their season, but for Bernasconi the aim is to still maintain process.

“I think we just had it then and we spoke about our ability to play a system, so it’s not a fluke when  you play well, and in the second half, it looked like the way we trained, which is a really good sign. So the way that we’ve been training really started to translate into the game and the Bulldogs are a young developing team, a lot of young talent.

“We’ll work on it. We’ll get some really good learnings from today, but yeah, now the challenge for us is to make sure we can do that next week against Richmond. And once again, it’s week to week being really process driven. So we’ll get to work on Richmond, but we’ll try and execute the things that we did today again next week, which is just based around winning more contested ball, playing in our front half and scoring off turnover.

“I’m really, really positive and I’ve got a lot of belief in the girls that will continue to do so.”

When asked how far he thinks the side can go this year, Bernasconi’s focus was pretty straightforward.

“The biggest thing we want to do is just show some progression,” he said. “We’ve got a game style that we want to play and we changed, I think about eight new players came onto the list this year. So we, brought in a lot of new faces, making them feel comfortable and execute our system.

“So what we want to see this year is just progress is getting better, so be a bit more detailed around our KPIs and being more process driven than result driven. And I think if we can continue to be really strong around contested footy, the ability to have high pressure and score on turnover like we did today, then the results should take care of themselves.”