EIGHT months on from launching an internal review into its AFLW program, Carlton is preparing for its eighth season in the competition with new faces in key off-field posts.
Replacing Brett Munro as the Head of AFLW, Ash Naulty has spent time with the club's VFL program, with his current role his first foray into women's footy.
"I've come from the men's program and have had not W experience," Naulty told womens.afl.
"But you get into this program, and you have an instant love for this program, because the athletes, the product, they just want to get better, and that's what drew me to it."
The internal review was strong in its findings that the AFLW head coaching position needed to be made full-time, something nearly all clubs have now achieved.
As a result, then-VFL senior assistant coach Mathew Buck was appointed to replace Daniel Harford.
"Being able to have full-time resources is a massive game changer … we needed to play catch up on that," Naulty said.
Carlton has also appointed two assistant coaches on year-round contracts to support Buck in his full-time role.
"There are trade-offs in what you prioritise when you're making decisions on your staffing … by and large what our players wanted, it was game planning implementation and skill development that was so high in terms of feedback.
"So, how do you resource that? It's coaches, no brainer."
With Buck and Naulty himself without women's or girl's football experience, that connection to the women's game needed to come from elsewhere.
"The directive was to obviously have that bit of experience in the W, but that was just one of them," he said.
"But once we started getting a bit more secure on some of the positions and some of the pieces of the puzzle started to fit it started becoming a little bit more like, 'Oh, we actually do need a little bit more W experience here' and that definitely helped shape the decision-making process."
Christina Polatajko, who is taking control of the forward line this year, was one piece of that puzzle. Polatajko has been on the coaching panels of St Kilda's AFLW side, Hawthorn's VFLW team and the Calder Cannons' girls team.
Former Geelong and Western Bulldogs ruck Aasta O'Connor also remains as a development coach, while Tom Couch (head of development and midfield) has experience within the Women's Tennis Association tour, working with the likes of Ash Barty and Danielle Collins.
Finding support from above was also part of the review's findings.
"It was public that we had not been doing what we wanted to in terms of our overall football program… and the board, there's been a bit of change around there over more recent times. I don't think it was ever that (there wasn't) value on the W program, it was probably more just the different personnel, they've got difference experiences in football," Naulty said.
"So, the visibility changes, from different people, from different board members. That's not to say that they don't have any care or any real demand for high performance in our W program. But now, spotlight's on and they want to see us do well."
Another focus has been on a high-performance attitude within the club, with some specific decisions made throughout the summer to ensure it is achieved.
Appointing a full-time nutritionist to work across both the women's and men's programs was step one and ensuring the availability of a sports psychologist for the AFLW players.
"Nutrition was probably one of the lowest hanging fruits that we could bite off, pardon the pun … being able to have the players educated around that, fuelling for performance and fuelling after performance. We need to educate our players because we want them to be really prepared," Naulty said.
"Accessibility to a performance psychologist, they have high accessibility, high visibility within our program. That's one thing that we identified as really important.
"We hope that the game gets more performance pressure, I hope the game continues to elevate, so we want our players to have the toolbox to be able to navigate that."
But now it's about patience. Necessary changes have been made at the Blues and improvement isn't always linear.
"Ultimately (patience) is so important. We're asking our players to have a high level of consistency and with that obviously comes patience to be able to see results and see them flourish. We have to do that as a staff and as a club.
"We've had so much change, we just don't know what the expectations are until we start getting to the season, but the effort and intensity has been there. So, we need to have patience to be able to go out on the park and deliver."
