WRAPPING up the 2021 NAB AFLW Draft, Senior Coach Daniel Harford was very pleased with how the night unfolded.
Selecting four new Game Changers to join the Blues in 2022, Harford was keen to welcome the new girls to the Club and get them integrated into the group.
“We’re pretty pumped,” Harford said.
“We’ll try to integrate them slowly over the next few weeks, feel good about the place and be comfortable and then launch in September.”
Alongside Josh Hare and Brett Munro, the recruiting team spent months analysing the best candidates to slot into the side, with Harford noting that school will come first for a lot of their new players.
“Josh Hare our recruiting manager has done an enormous amount of homework and he and Brett Munro, the list manager, have put these pieces into place for the last couple of months, trying to make sure we can go into tonight and know what we were going to get,” he said.
“They’ve got school in that time so this is secondary to them at the moment, VCE is an important year for the kids.”
Narrowly missing out on finals last year, Harford was adamant that they were going to be developing into a stronger side in 2022.
“We worked out that what we did last year wasn’t very good, it wasn’t good enough,” he said.
“The previous two years we put on a really good show and developed really quickly, last year we stagnated a bit so we’re going to change the way we play a bit and our method of ball movement but also our method of defence.”
The reworking of Carlton’s structure is a project Harford is looking forward to, ensuring he can build a group that will stand the test of time.
“It’s going to require a bit of teaching, a bit of coaching, which as a coach is the stuff you love,” he said.
“I’m really keen to get my teeth into that and start to coach the girls into the new systems we want to play and work hard.
“We’ve got a really good group and a really energetic, young group now so we want to try and build this group to be the ones who hang around at Carlton for eight to ten years and be a really successful team and it starts pretty much now.”
