The rapid expansion of the AFLW competition from eight to 18 teams in just six years frustrates Brisbane coach Craig Starcevich.
Four new sides – Essendon, Hawthorn, Sydney and Port Adelaide – will join for the seventh season, with a tornado of player movement set to hit once again.
The Lions were previously ravaged by expansion, losing 16 total players across 2018 and 2019.
Starcevich doesn’t like the fact that the four new teams previously turned down joining the competition and are now set to capitalise on sides that have put in the hard work developing players.
“The bit that sort of frustrates me the most is the four clubs that are coming in late now all had opportunities six years ago to put their hands up and declined two and three years in a row not to join the competition,” the Lions coach told SEN’s The Run Home.
“Now that they’re in, they’re asking the league to come up with all sorts of concessions to allow them to get their hands on players.
“We’ve been here from the foundation and a player (for example) like Emily Bates who has been with us since year one, the last thing I want right now is for an expansion club to come in, a club that didn’t want to be in the comp for a few years, and say, ‘We’ll just cherry pick now and take a handful of the best players off Carlton and a handful off Brisbane or Collingwood or Melbourne or whoever else’.
“That bit is really, really frustrating.
“In terms of growing the comp, yeah, you’ve got to have some sort of mechanism to do that, but from my perspective as a coach it absolutely drives me bananas.”
Starcevich wonders why the expansion sides haven’t been setup to follow a model similar to that of GWS and Gold Coast’s men’s sides.
“All I know is when the boys started with the Suns and the Giants it was draft picks starting with young players and having two or three years of grief and slowly building your list up to be competitive,” he said.
“That’s what they did for the men’s competition and it’s a little bit different in the women’s competition where they’re sort of just shuffling talent around and sharing talent around rather than asking the new players to build from the ground up.”
The AFLW signing period will commence following the season, with the Grand Final between Adelaide and Melbourne taking place on Saturday.
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