The coach’s thoughts ahead of SANFLW Pre-Season

Norwood’s Senior Women’s Pre-Season for the 2025 campaign gets underway next week, and Coach Brad Ferrall said his squad was ready to hit the track.

The Redlegs finished the 2024 home and away season in fourth place, and after finals wins against Central District and Glenelg, they came up against the eventual premiers South Adelaide in the SANFLW Grand Final.

Ferrall said there was a lot of excitement amongst the group to get into pre-season with the lure of going one better in 2025.

“We are certainly prepared and ready to go. Sometimes it feels like the Grand Final was a week ago, and sometimes it feels like it was six months ago,” he said.

“We’re ready, we already have girls out doing extra skills and fitness sessions before pre-season’s started. I think that says they’re driven, a lot of players are doing extras that they aren’t required to do.

“We need to keep improving because we know the opposition is doing the same thing.”

2025 will be Ferrall’s second season as head coach.

“I know what to expect now which is a positive, but there’s no guarantee with all the work we did to get to last year’s Grand Final, that it just happens again,” he said.

“The competition is really even as we saw last year, we didn’t belt any teams, but we weren’t badly beaten either. We know that there’s a big challenge that lies ahead of us again, but I think we’re good enough.”

Despite the five-point loss in the 2024 Grand Final, Ferrall was proud of his group’s performance throughout the season.

“I said to the group after the Grand Final that I was under no illusions that the season was a success, of course it was. We lost a grand final, but we took another step forward and maybe we were a couple of minutes away from stealing a premiership,” he said.

“Last year was a massive success, but that means nothing when we start again next week. We are certainly capable, but we have to do the work like we did last year.”

Ferrall said he was happy with how the playing list was shaping up, not making too many changes over the off-season.

“We’re comfortable with what we have, we still have a few things in the works, but I am happy with the list,” he said.

“Last year we showed the depth of our squad, we probably never had our full squad fit at the same time and we covered that really well.”