A SCHOLAR of the game, North Shore Bombers’ Heidi de Saxe is leaving no stone unturned to become the best possible player. Last year’s AFL Sydney Women’s Premier Division Rising Star, de Saxe had a memorable season at senior level, and the Swans Academy member is focusing on the ‘controllables’ in 2026 as she hopes to improve all facets of her game.

We spoke to de Saxe at the recent Swans Academy Preseason Testing Day about her football journey, game, inspirations and goals for the year ahead.

Q: Heidi, tell us a little bit about your footy journey?

HdS: “Well my footy journey’s been a bit up and down all over the shop. I started in Year 6 just with the Paul Kelly Cup and then Covid happened so that all put a stop to everything. I eventually joined Willoughby Mosman Swans which was fantastic, we won a couple of premierships. Transitioned over to North Shore Bombers and around this time and I’m very grateful I got picked up by the Swans Academy where I played for a couple of years and then last year I actually unfortunately got a stress fracture, I was out for most of the Swans Academy season but I was able to come back in the Premier Division season and had a great season there and we won the premiership as well.”

Q: How’s your preseason been so far?

HdS: “I actually love preseason, I love pushing myself, I love doing the running. Not because I’m good at it, but it proves to myself when I’m in those hard games that I can push through and do hard things. A lot of it was running, it was doing 400s, it was hard but it was good. I usually did preseason with some teammates, but also a lot of the running was by myself and it was fantastic. I loved also going into the gym, working on my craft. I had a goal this preseason to work on my little left chips, so if I’m out of a contest and there’s someone right behind I can just boot it on my left if I have to. But it’s been really fun, I’ve really enjoyed it, I really like pushing myself and seeing how hard I can go.”

Q: What are some of your strengths and improvements in your game?

HdS: “I always like to start with character before I go into skills work but I definitely think I’ve got a lot of discipline and motivation to do those hard things and to look to that. But as a player myself on the field I really think I flourish in those one-on-one contests especially with the ruck taps. I take a lot of pride looking at footage, looking at how my rucks respond and how they like to do their taps and I think I’m able to adjust accordingly to them and flourish accordingly. Definitely with character I can spiral and can be quite harsh on myself to the point where I tighten up in games where I feel I can’t relax and ease into it and rely on my instincts, however I am working on those with some fabulous outside.

“As well as on the field and footy, definitely I would like to call them (improvements) my slow plays, while I really like to go fast and hit those one-on-one contests, when I have time to deliver a really good kick to a small forward or more ideally a tall forward, sometimes I don’t deliver the kick because I feel like someone’s behind me and it can cause the skills to be a little bit wonky. However once again with the preseason I have the honest and bluntness towards myself like ‘you need to work on this’ so I’ve been working on trying to deliver my skills under fatigue constantly. I would go with ‘if you miss a kick you’ve got to do a pushup’ and I would end up doing like 20 pushups or something.”

Q: Apart from your own vision, do you watch a lot of football?

HdS: “I love the strategy behind footy so every time I sit down with a game it goes to the point where my brain’s hurting because I’m watching what they’re all doing if they’re zoning, if they’re attacking, what’s their way? I like to look at both AFLW because obviously the footy and type of game I will ideally hope to play in, but also a bit of AFL because i think they’re both different games but they can both offer some really important stuff.

“For example Monique Conti is a great person to look at her contest work and how she sets up and what we call the pie of the midfield circle. But then like James Rowbottom and Errol Gulden, their selfless running especially around the midfield is something I hold myself accountable to because when you have those hard training drills and you’re running and not getting the footy, it’s like ‘oh my God’ and its endless, but I’m like ‘if they can do it, I can do it’ so I just keep pushing to do it.”

Q: Are you a Swans supporter?

HdS: “Yeah, I mean my family’s definitely more of a rugby family, that’s what we’ve grown up around, and we watch F1 a lot. Because I play AFL I really brought in the AFL to my family and now they’re all Swans supporters, we all watch the game and have a debrief after, but I definitely love watching the Swans girls and boys because I don’t know, I feel like it would be a bit controversial to go for the girls team and then a different boys team but I watch them, I watch how they play footy. I think Zippy Fish had a great first season and she brought some run and carry so looking at that and seeing what’s really useful on that team is something strategically that I like to think about.”

Q: Did you play any other sport growing up?

HdS: “Yes, funny, I was quite a good hockey player. I would play a lot of hockey, and I was also a touch footy player. Dabbled a bit of basketball at school, but those were my main two sports. All my cousins do rugby, they’re massive rugby people. Because all my cousins are boys I was like ‘well I want to play a contact sport’ but because there was no rugby available to me in my community, I looked to AFL, and that’s when I transitioned to AFL.

“I played hockey and AFL predominantly a lot, and then I got a stress fracture and I had to sit myself down and say ‘look your loading is a really important thing’. That is what everyone has to learn at this point, ‘how much to load? What’s overloading? What’s underloading? How do you eat well? X, Y, Z. I had to sit myself down and was like if you want to prioritise you’re going to have to make sacrifice so I stick to footy now, I’m just a footy girl now.”

Q: What goals do you want to achieve this year?

HdS: “I always like to do behaviour based goals rather than outcome based goals, so realistically I just want to play the best footy I can in this year and the continuing years on, whether that is getting drafted, or if that’s just genuinely improving my disposal efficiency, my contested ball things. I always really value that because it helps me not be too harsh on myself. Because when there’s a deadline, players start to be like ‘oh my gosh i have to rush, i have to do it, I have to have it now’ but realistically that just tightens up your nervous systems so the more you focus on process based stuff, the more I’m able to relax, let’s keep going so definitely behaviours.

“Behaviours looks like for me specifically addressing and working on my weaknesses, especially my kicking, how far I can kick, how far I can get into the hotspot, how I can even in the midfield you might have three on you but you’ve got the footy how cleanly you can get the handball out to someone. My decision making, that’s probably one of, if not the most important for me as a player because that contested work is always something, you can get the ball but you throw it away you’ve done nothing, not really. Those are the kind of things I look to and the parallels with potentially getting drafted then awesome, but if that’s doing another season of this or whatever happens I’m going to keep going until ideally I get drafted. It’s not a matter of the time card, I just want to keep going.”