ON HER induction into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, the last brick in the wall placed in front of the teenage Erin Phillips has now fallen way.
The slight, blonde girl, who only ever dreamed of being a footballer like her dad, had her true sporting love closed off to her at 13, just as she was ready to show the world what she could do.
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Instead, Phillips was forced to turn to basketball and ended up spending the next two decades as an elite international basketballer until she was called back to Australia with the formation of the AFLW in 2017. Out of hi-tops and into sprigs, Phillips found herself wearing a guernsey that a Port (Adelaide) girl should never be seen dead in.
Retiring in 2023, Phillips left the game as the most decorated player of the AFLW competition, with an honours list that stretches down the page. She now enters the Hall of Fame to sit alongside her father Greg as the first father-daughter pairing inside a decade, an extraordinary feat given just three father-son pairs have completed the achievement across 160 years.
"I was that kid who just loves football. I dreamed I was going to play at Footy Park and take hangers," Phillips said of her childhood growing up alongside elder sisters Rachel and Amy, mother Julie and father Greg, who was a core member of eight Port Adelaide premiership sides and spent a couple of years at centre half-back with Collingwood.
"Dad had three girls, but he included us in absolutely everything he did as a footballer and Port Adelaide made us feel welcome every day we came into the club."
With the legendary Jack Cahill as Magpies coach, little primary-schooler Erin would sit with the League team and listen to Sunday feedback sessions on yesterday's game, run the warm-up laps with slow-moving sore players, muck around in the spa and have a kick on the ground with the other players' kids.
"My sisters were really good netballers but there wasn't enough contact in that game for me to want to play," she said.
"For every Port game that dad played, I always took my boots with me in case the mini league didn't have enough numbers. I got to play a few times at half-time when they needed an extra. I was the kid who was always prepared and ready to play."
Without even knowing it, footy's intangibles of positioning, tactics and game IQ were seeping into young Erin every day, alongside hours and hours of skill acquisition from handling and kicking a ball over and over again. She was a junior standout and the best player on her all-boys' team, winning the Smosh West Lakes under-13s best and fairest. Cahill, even today, is happy to declare her the best junior he's seen through his seven decades at the coalface of footy.
"I still hear Jack's words in my head. He's been such an enormous influence in my life. 'Do what you love. Be your best every day. Run around the cone and run through every sprint as fast as you can'," Phillips said.
"I'd listen to everything he's telling the Port Adelaide players and take that into my under-13 games. I was a bit mad!
"Dad would have a full day at work and then be run into the ground at training. He'd come home tired, but he had this daughter who wanted to kick the footy and do handball drills with him the moment he walked through the front door.
"So, he kicked the ball with me and did the handball drills with me, even though he knew footy wasn't going to go anywhere for me."
Footy came to an end when Erin turned 13, just like it did for every other girl around Australia at that time.
"I think what I felt was emptiness," she said.
"But I just accepted it, because that's how things were, and that's probably the heartbreaking thing when you look back at it; all those girls who were stopped from playing, and so many who couldn't come back later like I did.
"There was sadness for a fair while because I missed it from the moment I finished playing footy, but I was able to have a decent basketball career."
A decent basketball career is an understatement. WNBL and WNBA championships both here and in the United States, along with more than 100 games for the Australian national team. The international high points were a historic gold medal at the 2006 FIBA World Championships, a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and WNBA Championships in 2012 and 2014.
Basketball also brought her together with wife Tracy Phillips (nee Gahan) and the couple now have four children – eight-year-old twins Blake and Brooklyn, five-year-old Drew and two-year-old Londyn.
"Going away to play basketball forced me to grow up and I was able to discover a whole new world," Phillips said.
"I didn't think that there would be a life here in Australia for us, until my sister rang me and told me they were going to start up a women's footy league."
In a sliding doors moment, Port Adelaide was focusing its efforts on China, while the Adelaide Crows determined they would bid for a licence in the new women's competition.
It was widely expected the Crows would be also-rans, with women's football in SA far less developed than rival states, and the club was casting far and wide for its initial list. So, the call was made to Phillips to test the waters.
"The Crows got the licence, and I thought that was the end of that, because I'm a Port girl," she said.
"I never thought in a million years I would play for the Crows, plus I was completely focused on the Rio Olympics at that time.
"Phil Harper, GM of the Adelaide Crows, reached out to me and I thought, well, I'm a professional athlete, so at least let's have the conversation. He was so genuine and caring of my situation and as soon I got off the phone, besides the fierce rivalry, I thought why would I not play for the Crows?"
Once the Rio Olympics were over and Phillips' WNBA season with the Dallas Wings had wrapped up, it was over to Adelaide with Tracy and their newborn eight-week twins, to put the footy boots back on.
"Rio was a disaster, so I was more than ready and excited for something different," she said.
"I had no expectation on how I would go returning to footy. When I mentioned to Tracy that I might give AFLW a go, she simply replied, ‘Do you even think you'd be any good?'
"I knew I'd be the most professional athlete in the squad, and that I'd be a good teammate, but I hadn't been around football for 17 years. I didn't know any of my teammates, much less any of the opposition players."
Returning to football after nearly two decades, even a simple task like which boots to wear required expert knowledge. Luckily, brother-in-law Shaun Burgoyne was on hand for kicking advice and his boot deal also came through for the right footwear for Erin. She had already spent the recent period enviously watching his success across four premierships with Port Adelaide and Hawthorn.
A torn quad at her very first training session had Phillips kicking with her left foot all through pre-season. She was only confirmed to play the Crows' first game the day beforehand at the captain's run.
From the moment she took the field, she was so clearly the best. Phillips could read the play well ahead of everyone else, showcased outstanding skills on both sides with hand and foot, and routinely took a contested mark. Phillips was a one-touch player for a loose ball and always seemed to be in the right place for the big moment and then owned that moment.
Over and over again, in the early years of AFLW, Phillips would kick the big goal, win the key possession or bend a game to her will.
During the AFLW's inaugural season in 2017, Phillips not only became a premiership-winning captain, but she was also named the Crows' best and fairest, League Best and Fairest, All-Australian, Players MVP, won AFLW Goal of the Year and Best on Ground in the Grand Final.
In 2019, it was the same extraordinary clean sweep of premiership captain, Crows' best and fairest, League Best and Fairest, All-Australian, Players MVP, Coaches MVP and Best on Ground in the Grand Final, which was played in front of a packed house of more than 53,000 at Adelaide Oval.
"That was an amazing day, and a terrible day, as I did my knee late in the game," she said.
"But the thing I remember most of all is just seeing young girls hanging over the fence like I did when I was kid. So many women would come up and say they were watching because they'd missed their chance to play. It just meant so much to them."
Her ACL injury early in the third term silenced the crowd, but her first thoughts were with wife Tracy, who at the time was pregnant with their third child.
"When I did my knee, my first thought was that I don't want to finish like this and that I just had to come back, but then I was also thinking about Tracy who was six months pregnant with Drew, our two-and-a-half-year-old twins and returning to my job as an assistant coach in the WNBA during the AFLW off-season," she said.
"I had this enormous amount of guilt because I knew we had so much on our plate, but I felt that I was going to be useless. It was going to be bloody hard enough even without an ACL to rehab."
Champions fight through adversity and Phillips knew she would come back; she not only returned from her ACL injury, but ended up being named All-Australian for a third time in 2021, as well as winning a third premiership in 2022 during her final season with the Crows.
With Port Adelaide bringing a women's team into the competition in 2022, Phillips made the move to the beloved club she grew up supporting while watching her father play.
She was voted Port's inaugural captain and the video of her telling her father she would wear the No.1 as the club's skipper, bringing him to tears, remains an extraordinary moment.
"In that moment, I didn't realise how much it meant to him that I was playing for Port," she said.
"Finally, at the age of 36, I was living the dream I had always dreamed as a little girl. Now that I'm a parent myself, all I want is for my kids to achieve their dreams so sharing that moment with my dad was literally a dream come true for us both.
"He'd seen me for so many years as a young girl wearing Port colours, wanting so desperately to play footy. We both never ever imagined that it would even be possible after that dream had ended for me when I turned 13.
"There was a wall in front of me for nearly 20 years, and the wall was gone. I thought I'd never even play a proper game, much less get to play for seven seasons and win multiple premierships."
Two seasons guiding the young players at Port in their arrival in the big league would see Phillips out, still with a CV that remains beyond all her peers.
Tellingly, her heroes growing up were Scott Hodges and Andrew McLeod, because it was only male players that were visible.
Phillips is now the hero of so many girls across Australia, hoping to be just like her, and nothing stands in their way anymore.
Erin Phillips
Adelaide Crows (2017-22): 46 games, 50 goals
Adelaide captain Adelaide: 2017-20
Port Adelaide (2022-23): 20 games, three goals
Port Adelaide captain: 2022-23
Premierships: 2017, 2019, 2022
AFLW Best and Fairest: 2017, 2019
AFLW Grand Final Best on Ground: 2017, 2019
All-Australian: 2017, 2019, 2021
AFLW Players MVP: 2017, 2019
AFLW Coaches Champion Player: 2019
Adelaide best and fairest: 2017, 2019
Adelaide leading goalkicker: 2018, 2021
AFLW Goal of the Year: 2017
