MELBOURNE Vixens Training Partner and Melbourne Uni defender Maggie Caris has sure had a busy life over the past few years.

Not only is she a rising force in the netball world, but until recently was also pursuing an AFL Women’s career with the Melbourne Demons.

Caris said that it was really tough to balance playing both sports at such a high level, but there was a system in place to try and make it work.

“Tt was super challenging, but I was fortunate enough that Mick [Stinear, Melbourne’s AFLW coach] and Todd [Patterson, Melbourne’s list manager] met with the netball coaches Simone [McKinnis] and Di [Honey]. We had a Zoom meeting and everyone had their piece to say, and it just created a schedule, which worked for the most part,” she said.

“It definitely was challenging for me to balance it, just with fatigue and training six to seven days a week really. It was quite challenging once you mixed in uni and family and friends and all those bits and pieces in with it. It definitely was challenging but it really made me push to be more independent and have more time management skills, be organised, I had to be at the top of my game. If I wasn’t making sure my sleep was getting organised, my food organised, parts of my training would slip away.”

Originally from the town of Quantong, near Horsham in Victoria’s west, her netball career began at the local level at Horsham Saints. From there it was into the pathway system at the Under 15s level, then at the Under 17s and Under 19s. Then it was onto then Vic Fury state team and now she is playing in the Victorian Netball League (VNL) with the Melbourne University Lightning and is a training partner with the Melbourne Vixens.

After looking around for a VNL club, Caris was attracted to the Lightning by the group of girls playing there at the time, especially the ones in the pathway system already like Gabby Coffey, and the coaching staff, and hoped that their professional approach would rub off on her and make her a better person.

Although these days she is a defender, that was not always the case.

“Well initially I was a shooter growing up. Always played goals and given being quite a tall kid and sort of head and shoulders above everyone else from Net Set Go, I was always sort of swapping around shooting to defence, but I played a lot of my rep as a goal shooter and goal attack until I was about 15 or 16,” she said.

“When I got selected in the 17s state team and as you do when you fill out the form there’s position one, position two, position three, and I thought ‘oh I’ll just put position three as goal keeper, make myself a bit more appealable’. Then I was chucked in there a few times and swatted a few balls here and there and they were like ‘you know what, she can be a defender’. So I made the under 17 bottom age state team as a defender, although I trialled majorly as a shooter.”

She loves being a training partner at a club like the Vixens, and speaks very highly of how they do things at the club.

“It’s pretty amazing to spend five days a week with the girls and really get into the nitty gritty of preseason. But they are a talented group of individuals who are really connected with one another, but also really understand the value of team, and I think that’s really important…”

“The way they conduct themselves is great, and the way they reach out to our training partners and the way we can go away and play VNL and seamlessly transition back in to the training court and gym and conditioning sessions is due to the culture they create. I think that stems from the coaches and the players alike maintaining that.”

Caris’ footy career also began at the Horsham Saints and she played in the inaugural year for the league in the area. Then after she moved to Ballarat for boarding school in Year 10 she made the regional school girls team and then made the Greater Western Victorian Rebels side.

Speaking about how she came across from netball into the pathway programs of footy, she said that adapting to the high performance environment in a different light was really interesting and just to see how different sports and different dynamics run.

Her draft year experience was certainly a unique one compared to most years, having to do time trials and experience the draft during the height of Victoria’s COVID pandemic response.

While at Melbourne, she was working under dual All Australian Lauren Pearce, who even though Caris speaks so highly of her was still her direct competition for a spot in Melbourne’s starting line up. Despite the obvious frustrations that came with that, Caris still found the positives out of the situation.

“I was training with some of the best people in the league, so it was making me the best player I could be. But it was also hard as you said, I was competing with them for a spot in the team each week, but I also felt I was developing potentially more than other players from other teams who weren’t playing Lauren Pearce four training sessions a week,” she said.

Recently Caris made the tough decision to step away from her AFL Women’s career to solely focus on her netball career.

Choking back tears, she said that the decision to do so was really tough.

“It was really challenging. I think as it came out in the media it sort of became real then. When you dedicate the past two years, three seasons of your time, anyone who’s been in an AFLW program knows that as a first or second year player you get to the club at 2:30pm/3 o’clock, and you’re there til 9:30pm, it’s huge chunks of your time of your day, spending all this time with the girls, your best mates, mucking around. When you’re investing so much time and effort into a sport, it was super challenging to make a decision,” Caris said.

“It got to a point where I did have to make a decision though, because sometimes in this busy period when I was doing both my performance was lacking at some trainings and it wasn’t very me as a person and to do uni alongside this, I couldn’t do placements and I couldn’t do bits and pieces, so little bits of everything, but to step away from footy was a huge decision and something that still hasn’t quite settled with me yet but I’m looking forward to seeing what this next chapter of netball can do.”

“Hopefully it’s not the end of my footy journey forever, but just at the moment I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do when I completely invest myself in netball, and see what I can produce out on the court and if I can go to the next level and bring a new intensity on the court and see how far I can go, because I think one of the biggest challenges of doing both was being at that sort of rookie level, not quite making a team every week for footy and not quite being on the court with Vixens or with VNL.”

Despite stepping away from the Dees she still speaks very fondly of her time at the Dees, the friendships she made and the coaches she was coached by.