IT has been a tough few weeks in GWS land, but after his side defeated Carlton on the weekend Giants coach Cam Bernasconi said that he was “super proud of the girls.”

“It was a challenging week” he said. “Footy’s a funny thing. It’s 100 minutes of football can really shape your week, and last week we’re really disappointed with how we went but the response from the girls was unbelievable today. We just asked them to compete a little bit harder and come back what they can do and work on what they needed to during the week, so I was really happy with how the girls responded.”

After a tough loss to Adelaide the week prior, Bernasconi said that his side had simplified things during the week and brought things back to a central focus.

“We came back to just one focus point and that was around the contest and just competing” he said. “You know coming in we’ve created a game plan which is new and different and we’ve had some injuries, which has made it more difficult, but we don’t want to play the ‘poor me’ card either. We needed to make sure that for us to work on our ball movement we need to win it at its source, and we coached that really well during the week and then just made it really simple for the girls to enjoy competing, win your contest and then sometimes when things don’t go your way you can start to worrying about everything you can’t do, and we just came back to focusing on their strengths, and I thought the girls responded really well in that sense as well.”

On the fact that his side was beaten at the stoppages but still managed to win off transition, Bernasconi said that he and his team took a different approach.

“We measured the stats a little bit different this week, and broke down contested footy, because every coach comes into these pressers and talks about contested ball, so we actually broke it down a little bit more for the girls around ground ball. I think we lost overall contested ball but we were plus 17 or 18 at ground ball, so that would a really good KPI for us about being cleaner over the ball and the intent to win the ball.”

Although he was full of praise for a number of his players, Bernasconi singled out one player in particular when praising the younger members of his list.  

“We can’t be more proud of our young players at the moment. We’re asking a lot of them. You know when you draft these girls into the program you think they might play a few games year one but then when you have such a big injury list it’s a great opportunity for these girls because they get more time but they also carry a bigger load then other first year players and the girls have just been so good at coming in and wanting to learn and understanding that there’s so much growth in their own individual game. As a coaching staff we couldn’t be more proud of our young girls who are just cracking in. And you look at Madi Brazendale, and she gets to every contest. Her running power is going to be such a weapon for her and she’s going to be a really important player for us.”