Hawthorn defender Tilly Lucas-Rodd says the Hawks will aim to improve their game heading into Saturday night’s Indigenous Round match against Euro-Yroke in Cairns. 

Despite starting the season with three straight wins, the brown and gold still have room to grow to reach the heights of 2024. 

Speaking to the AFL’s Tagged show, Lucas-Rodd discussed how the side aims to continue its winning ways, while also touching on their own career journey so far, advice they would give to aspiring AFLW players and who they think are the biggest energisers in the team. 

We summarised the key points from Lucas-Rodd’s chat with Richmond’s Sarah Hosking and Collingwood’s Sarah Rowe below. 

On Hawthorn’s start to the season

“Three and zero, you’ve got to be stoked with that, and I think we are. I don’t think we’ve played our brand that we want, so we own that as a team. I think Batesy was on the mic and didn’t mince her words after the siren when she said it’s not good enough and it’s not the footy we want to be playing. I think going from Rounds 2 to 3, we really tried to focus on our ball movement, and I think you would have seen a little bit of that, I guess, trying to set the ground better as defenders and switch the play. Now I guess it’s about working on our forward entries and our front half game, so we’ll get to work on that this week. We had a pretty stern review that had about 25 clips from Webby, so we reviewed the game hard, and hopefully, you’ll see our front half game come to life soon.”

On their career so far

“The first three years of my career probably weren’t great. When I was at Carlton, I got delisted, so I think going through that, you kind of have to rejig everything, so I went back to the drawing board and asked, What are my strengths as a player? I think my footy IQ, my ability to run and then use the footy, so I think that was part of the reinventing myself was owning those strengths and trying to make them really foolproof, so then clubs could see that and want me on their list. I’ve been able to do that, and coming into Hawthorn, I think I just really rely on those strengths in each game to try and play my role.”

On their advice for aspiring AFLW players 

“I think my biggest thing is to always be a student of the game. I really love footy and I love learning about it, so even 10 years on, in the pre-season, I watched back every training footage, I clipped the whole thing. From a training session, I might make 30 to 40 clips and study them, so I think that helps me. Soak up everything you can from your teammates, like back in the day, I played with Bri Davey and Chloe Dalton, who are professional athletes from other sports, and you could take what you can from them, and then you’d play with really good football players and take a bit from everyone around you to try and get ahead.”

On Ainslie Kemp’s season-ending knee injury

“We call her our hype girl now. When they did team selection, she was at the top corner, and it had her name with ‘hype girl’. It was pretty tough. I think she went down in a training drill, like in a small-sided game, so half the team, we all saw it, and it went dead silent. You can’t shy away from the fact that it is emotional, and it does have impact. I would say she’s our most loved member of our team, so you have to acknowledge that. We used it as fuel for Round 2, so she was at the game, and I think a lot of us wrote her name or her number on our wrists and went out there to play for Kempy, especially as a fellow defender, we really felt that. I think you do have to acknowledge it and you do have to feel the loss, both emotionally and also as a player because she is amazing and really important to our backline. She wants us to be successful just as much as we do.”

On the liveliest players in the locker room

“Lavinia Cox and Grace Baba are probably our two. At Hawthorn, we have a gym floor and fake grass turf and there’s a window to the offices upstairs and they are running up there all the time and looking down on us and I don’t think anyone else from the whole program has ever gone into the offices because that’s the office staff but they love it, they’re running around and bringing energy so it’s really good that they take that role.”

Watch Lucas-Rodd’s full interview below