Jasmine Garners yet another Club Champion Award
AS the AFL Women’s season starts to wind down, clubs are starting to award their club best and fairest awards, recognising the stars of the season.
In this new series from Rookie Me Central, we take a look at the seasons of these club champions and what led them to have such stellar seasons.
Next up in the series, we take a look at the season of the all conquering star Roo Jasmine Garner.
It truly has been a huge year for Garner, who has taken out her third consecutive and fifth overall North Melbourne Best and Fairest Award.
She won the 2024 award with 211 votes, 18 votes ahead of runner up Ash Riddell. Sarah Wright finished third, with Mia King and Ruby Tripodi rounding out the top five.
It was not her only award on the night, also taking home the player-voted Shinboner of the Year award for how she embodied the club’s values, and the fan-voted Next Level Performer award.
There really was not much Garner did not achieved this season.
She averaged 26.7 disposals, 7.6 tackles, 6.3 clearances and one goal per game this season, which is roughly on par with her numbers from last season. But in a premiership year, that came with a whole bunch more individual awards, including an All-Australian blazer for the seventh time and captain of the side again, and a best on ground medal in the grand final to go with her premiership medal.
She however did not win the league’s best and fairest award, in a snubbing that continues to confuse many in the AFLW community. In 2024 she dramatically did not poll even a single vote until the fifth week of the season.
Despite starting her career as a forward – even kicking the first ever goal in the AFLW back in 2017 – in recent years Garner has become a just about unstoppable midfielder, teaming up with Riddell and more recently King to establish an inside midfield crew that is the nightmare of the rest of the competition.
The only way that seems to work to stop Garner is playing an active tagging role, which Brisbane has done with Bre Koenen and Melbourne with Shelley Heath in recent seasons.