AMID the stresses of a winless season, pregnant former St Kilda skipper Hannah Priest has been putting her heart and soul into special presentations for milestone games.

There was the parody performance for Nicola Barr's 75th game, which involved rewriting the lyrics of Sweet Caroline to "Sweet Nicola", and included the line "Lloyd (her partner), loving Lloyd, preaching climate, tackling me, tackling you… Sweet Nicola, Barr Barr Barr…".

Then a "vinyl album" for Tyanna Smith's 50th, made up of reworded song titles, transforming "Lean on Me" to "Lean on T", among others.

"It's tough times, no one ever wants to be in this position, but the group's doing a really good job of turning towards each other, and really trying to support each other through this, and focus on ways we can be better as players," Darcy Guttridge told AFL.com.au.

"There's so much care within our group. Our girls really look out for one another, and Hannah obviously has a really creative side. For T Smith's 50th game, she got out some vinyls – T loves older music – and created a play-on-words with song names to involve T Smith, so she's been doing such a good job in that space, bringing us together off the field. 

"It's absolutely frustrating. We own the fact that we haven't had the year we wanted to have, but like I said, every week we go back to the drawing board and we try to focus on things throughout the week to be better, and we do that this week."

Guttridge's first AFLW season was back in 2018 with Collingwood, and she joined St Kilda in 2020, taking up an opportunity to play alongside now-fiancée Bianca Jakobsson.

She's seen how the celebration of Pride and the queer community – who were instrumental in supporting and promoting women's football prior to the creation of the elite league – has grown over that time, from a single game to a two-week acknowledgement.

"It's kind of crazy – AFLW and women's football in general has felt like quite a big space for queer people. In that aspect, it doesn't feel like much has actually changed," Guttridge said.

"But in saying that, it's really cool that we can celebrate Pride and the fact that all teams are involved in the two rounds of Pride, it's really awesome.

"I've always felt comfortable. It's the first thing I noticed when I started playing at 15 – I was able to show up as myself, and I was always accepted.

"I think AFLW do such a great job in a Pride space and trying to create a community where everyone belongs, and these two weeks celebrate that. The club have been so supportive in this space and continue to support us all and celebrate Pride. 

"They organised for Mitch Brown in yesterday to come speak to us, which was awesome. Obviously Mitch has had a big 12 months – we were lucky enough to have him and (VFLW veteran) Caitlin Bunker come and speak to us from Pride Cup to talk about his experiences with Pride and what it means to him, and how special the W competition is in that space."