2025 Flag Feature – La Trobe Uni’s long road to the top

Sam Greene began as a reluctant coach.

Originally from Warrnambool, she moved to Melbourne in 2009 to study Accounting & Finance at La Trobe and joined the inaugural women’s team, playing organised footy for the first time.

She would become a champion player for more than a decade, initially in the VWFL and then the VAFA, winning a premiership in 2011, multiple league goalkicking awards, and becoming the first Trober to play 100 games for the women’s team, on her way to a stellar 150-game career, before hanging up the boots in 2019.

Sam had remained around the club behind the scenes, but coaching was never on her radar until the club needed a new leader for season 2023.

“They’d asked me a couple of times, and I said no because I hadn’t seen myself as a coach, and I was starting a new business,” Sam recalls.

But the club she loved was in urgent need, so she stepped up to take the reins, knowing full well the long-term challenge ahead for her and the group, which had struggled to find its place in the VAFA Women’s competition since joining in 2019, with just 8 wins from 36 matches (including 2 win seasons in 2021 and 2022). 

“I knew what I was walking into, and my whole position about coaching was that I’ll coach until we can get someone better, or we can get the women into a position where better coaches are going to come and be attracted to us.

“Who wants to coach a team that’s won 8 games in 4 years?”

Sam’s first season at the helm saw the team begin its rebuild in Division 3, winning 4 games and offering a glimmer of hope.

“We weren’t a very fit team. We wanted to build some skills and at least a fitness base, so that when we get the chance to compete, we’ve got a framework to work with. But we couldn’t actually implement anything we learnt at training on game day because we were that weak in the competition, we had to be just so defensive – ‘The boundary line is your friend.’

“So, in the second year (2024), we didn’t know who we were. We didn’t know what our game plan or skillset was because we’d spent so long defending. But by the middle of the season, I kind of worked out what our strengths and weaknesses were, and we started going into games with a bit of a game plan. The girls just loved learning and translating it into a game.

“To be able to do that every week, and for it to either work well or not work well, then learn from that meant that by the end of the season, it had been quite an incredible transformation for them all.”

The result was an 11-win home-and-away season and the club’s first women’s finals win in 3500 days, when they defeated De La Salle in the Preliminary Final to book a Grand Final appointment with Therry Penola, who proved too good, winning by 6 goals. Nonetheless, it was an incredibly positive experience for Sam’s group.

“Therry Penola were too strong, and we were really proud to be the ‘best of the rest.”

The growth and development within Sam’s team over her first two years in charge had bred confidence and enjoyment, enabling them to keep their core group together, which is always a major challenge for University clubs that face the prospect of significant player turnover each year as students graduate and move on to life’s next chapter.

“I’ve ultimately retained 80-to-85% of my core group the whole way through, which has been really special to have so many players want to continue to stay and play with us.

“When I started, we had a couple of really, really good players, but we didn’t have depth, so we put too much responsibility on those girls, and as a result, we weren’t building our players up around them. We’ve spent a lot of time working on where a player’s ‘second position’ is, so we don’t just have the same three or four girls running through the midfield all day.

“To have such a beautiful spread has meant that we’ve become far more nimble and diversified.”

La Trobe’s 2024 Grand Final appearance raised expectations for season 2025 in Division 2.

“A flag was our expectation,” Sam admits openly.

“By Round 5 or 6, it felt like the premiership race might be between Old Carey, ourselves and Parkside. It was a super close season. The Top 3 were so close together, which was so exciting.”

The Trobers finished the home-and-away season in third place with 10 wins, one behind the Panthers and Devils. Their last loss had been a 3-point thriller to Parkside in Round 11, and they faced the Devils again in the Qualifying Final.

But this time, the result was far more clear-cut, with Parkside booting 8 goals to 3 after quarter-time to run out comfortable 28-point winners.

“We were missing two of our best six players, and we got a shock. That result was a big shock to us – how amazing Parkside played and how much we lost it by. They got the ball out the front of stoppages, and we couldn’t stop them, no matter what we tried.

“There was only a goal in it with about 5 minutes to go in the third quarter, but once they got a run-on, they were unstoppable. Incredible. They just played such fast, exciting football.”

All the momentum the team had built up across the second half of the season was now at risk. Sam needed to consider how she approached the heavy defeat.

“The coaches reviewed the tape, but from a player’s perspective, we actually didn’t review the tape at all,” Sam recalls.

“We just said, ‘Hey, we want to earn the right to review that video against Parkside together ahead of a Grand Final,’ because we believed Parkside were now going to beat Old Carey. We genuinely believed we were good enough to get redemption. So, I don’t think we actually analysed it that much. We had to move on to the next week.”

A cut-throat First Semi-Final against UHS-VU was the next challenge, and it proved to be a very stiff one. The Trobers led by 10 points at the first change, 3 points at half-time, and 7 points at the last break on a blustery day at Preston City Oval.

“There was a couple-of-goal breeze, and UHS plays a game style that congests the contest. They play an extra kick behind, so we were mindful of that. In the last quarter, we were up by 7 points, but they had the wind. And I just said, ‘We are gonna sit a player behind the ball for five minutes just to stem any initial momentum they might have.’

“But then they kicked a goal in the first four minutes, and the scores were level. So now we had to score into the wind. We got one genuine opportunity three minutes later when Kate Bond got a free kick about 35 metres out, went back and kicked it straight through.

“And we more or less tried to kill the clock for the next 10 minutes, and we held on for absolute dear life! We were lucky. That was the game where I thought to myself, ‘We’re gonna lose.’

Parkside subsequently defeated Old Carey to win straight through to the Grand Final and send the Panthers into a Preliminary Final against La Trobe.

“Old Carey had been our hoodoo team. We hadn’t beaten them in the previous four or five occasions. They were probably a physically stronger team, and in previous seasons, our girls had been quite intimidated by them. I thought they were going to be the problem for us, because we just couldn’t navigate that.”

The two teams had met twice during the home-and-away season, with Old Carey winning by 11 points in Round 5, and 12 points in Round 10 after the inaccurate Trobers booted 2.10 to 5.4. But despite that eventual loss, it was a performance that had given Sam and her team some hope.

“The girls realised that we lost that game by ourselves. So, going into finals, we definitely felt that we were equal. The girls knew they were good enough.”

The lead-up to the Preliminary Final was an emotional one, after the passing of a much-loved former team-mate in the days leading up to the game.

“There was a lot of emotion in the room before the game,” Sam reflects.

“They spoke about her, and a lot of the girls were quite upset. I didn’t really know how they were gonna come out, because there was just so much emotion.”

But La Trobe harnessed their emotional energy and delivered a stunning performance, holding their bogey team scoreless in the first half, on the way to a comprehensive 27-point win that sent them into a second consecutive Grand Final.

“It was an incredible performance, but I didn’t do anything. It was driven by the players. They just had such a belief that they were the better team. What we actually learnt from the Round 10 game was to believe that we could beat them one-on-one and not to worry too much about stopping their best couple of players. We believed we were faster and had the skill.

“There was a really strong breeze, and we had just said, ‘let’s not muck around with the ball, let’s just kick it forward and don’t worry about being cute with it.’ Because we’d spent a lot of time over the past three seasons trying to be better footballers and knew what we were doing when we were putting it on the boot, it actually worked for us.”

Having slayed one dragon in bogey team Old Carey, La Trobe earned the chance to tackle another – the Parkside team that had belted them in the Qualifying Final three weeks earlier.

“I got home and got the Parkside video out and said, ‘Ok, let’s go to work now.’ We watched the video, and what I realised was that Parkside were good, but they weren’t 30 points better than us. It was really just a 15-20 minute lapse where they took full momentum, and we just couldn’t catch them from there.”

Having endured a seemingly endless run of injuries throughout the season, the wheel finally turned for La Trobe in Grand Final Week.

“I played my best team of the year for the first time on Grand Final Day. It was the first time I had the squad I would’ve wanted to play available.

“The message was, ‘back in our systems and our match-ups. Darren Wright – who’s my assistant coach that looks after the backline – and I spent a lot of time working on who would play on who. We had quite a few disagreements in a good, constructive way!

“But he thought our Grand Final would be on the Saturday, so he’d booked a holiday to fly out on Sunday morning. So, he missed the Grand Final after being with us for the whole year!”

La Trobe’s ‘three teams, one-club’ mantra kicked in, and senior men’s coach Andy Castles stepped up to assist.

“Over the past two years, I think he’s been to every single one of our games, except for maybe one or two when he had to get to his own game. We’re a club with a lot of people who have come down from the country, so we don’t have a lot of family. Everyone volunteers, and everyone pitches in for each other’s teams.

“So, I spoke to him in the lead-up and said, ‘Look, this is what the game plan is. Do you mind just taking a line when we’re in our breaks?’ But Darren nailed the match-ups. He got every one of them correct, and we went from being a pretty compromised backline in the first final to a really strong backline. I didn’t have to change a single thing.”

A gale was blowing at Coburg City Oval on Grand Final Day, and Sam knew managing the conditions would be crucial.

“It was probably the worst wind conditions for football that I’ve been a part of. Sometimes it was going to the left, sometimes to the right. So, it was really hard to coach and be clear about how we wanted to use the ball.

“If we won the toss, I would’ve wanted to kick with the wind. But Parkside had been a slow-starting, fast-finishing team, so in hindsight, them starting with the wind was probably convenient for us. We were narrowly behind at quarter-time, but feeling really good knowing that our chance was coming.

“But the second quarter was frustrating. The ball lived inside our Forward 50, and we just peppered and peppered but kicked 1.5 or 1.6. The breeze was so strong that it was blowing the ball between hand and foot, and spraying it out on the full.

“The highlight of the quarter was Teresa ‘Swifty’ D’Angelo’s goal from the boundary 25 out. Nobody could score, and she went back with a drop punt and put it straight through the middle. It was such a good kick.”

The Trobers headed to the half-time break leading by a couple of points, but the vibe was positive after controlling so much of the first half.

“If we’d kicked straight, we would’ve been a couple of goals up,” said Sam.

“But we knew we had to lock in come the third quarter, because you were essentially playing two completely different games due to the wind conditions. I think there was a lot of calmness after having the Grand Final experience in 2024.

“I can’t really explain it, but I felt very calm this time. I probably got a little carried away in the 2024 finals series and overdid the information and messaging. So I just toned it back and made it even more relaxed than a normal game.”

Parkside responded with a couple of goals with the breeze in the third term, the first coming 5 minutes into the quarter and the second with about 30 seconds to go to open up a 9-point advantage heading into the final term.

“Our huddle was positive. I just said, ‘If I told you this was the script, there’s no way we wouldn’t have taken it. This is exactly where we want to be.’ We knew we could kick two goals to win it. It didn’t mean it would be easy, but we just had so much belief.”

First-year Trober Matilda Wilson, who had come down from Darwin for university in 2025, slotted a major from the goalsquare 10 minutes into the quarter to reduce the margin to less than a kick.

“She took about three steps, and just sort of pretty casually chucked it on the boot. I think I was having a stroke on the sidelines! Anyway, it went through! It was really interesting talking to the players because they didn’t feel anxious at all, which surprised me.”

Then another first-year player, Claire Wilson, who had relocated from Albury Wodonga for uni, nailed a set shot from 20 metres out – the Trobers were in front in the Grand Final with approximately 6 minutes to play.

“My heart was through the roof,” Sam admits with a laugh.

“They got it into their 50, but we won the ball back, and it essentially lived in our 50 for the next six minutes.”

The siren finally sounded, handing the La Trobe University women’s team their second premiership with a thrilling 3-point win. Club veteran Kate Bond was judged best on ground, which made the victory even sweeter.

“Kate’s probably the best player in the league. She’s won 6 or 7 club best and fairests, but she had a knee meniscus injury for a lot of the season and couldn’t train at all during the finals.

“Yet she kicked the winning goal that kept us alive against UHS, was best on the ground in the Prelim against Old Carey, then had 39 disposals in the Grand Final. She was everywhere.”

“The reason I came back to coach was me fundamentally saying ‘yes’ to two of the senior girls who have given so much to the club but never had any success – Kate Bond and Swifty D’Angelo,” Sam said, with emotion in her voice.

“There’s a couple of hundred games of experience there, and just to know that they finally got the success… It’s what I was doing it for, really. We all wanted to win that flag together. We shared that goal as players, then I retired, and that dream faded for a while.

“So for me, it had felt like I had unfinished business. I strived to attain that second flag as a player and couldn’t, so this helped maybe close off a chapter of my career that felt unfulfilled, and doing it with a couple of girls who have been key pioneers at our club was really special.”

“There was just so much happiness for this core group of women. They’re all just friends and such really good people. It was sweet for it to be the same team that had been humiliated in Division 3 for four years in a row, then win a Division 2 flag.

“I won the flag in 2011, we played in the Grand Final the next year, and I didn’t really think that it was not gonna be happening again. But finals and Grand Finals aren’t a given. For girls who have been part of the club for 13 years or so, they never thought this would be possible, and for them to have that success was just so special.

“When I started as coach, I’d talk to the girls and all they knew was how to lose. We had to completely change our mindset from ‘we just lose every week’ to one that believes in ourselves.

“We weren’t very skilled, and we weren’t very fit, but they committed to each other. At first, it meant I was spending a lot of time yelling at them during training about the standards. We said, ‘This is how we are gonna operate going forward.’ So at the beginning, I had to hold them to that. ‘This is what you’ve said you are doing, so I’m gonna call it out when I don’t see it.’

“Then fast-forward to the training session before the Grand Final, and one of the girls brought the team in and gave them a dressing down for not doing the drill the way we would want it done. So it went from ‘Sam telling us what to do’ to the girls doing it for each other.

“Ultimately, it was a reward for the effort that the club had invested. The club had really invested heavily in the women’s program. When I started as a coach, President Andy Sutherland asked me, ‘What do you need?’ So, we got a skills coach, extra support for the women, and, wherever there was a need, they gave additional allowances to help us work through it.”

“This club is about community, connection and love. It’s about building friendships and feeling a sense of belonging. Everybody is welcome. When you’re really far away from home, it’s a comfort because a lot of our people – players, trainers, physios – have been part of sporting clubs before.

“The thing I’m most proud of is the way the club works with and respects its women. I don’t think there are a lot of clubs that do it as well as La Trobe. We don’t have a lot of older people at the club, so you end up in all these roles you wouldn’t otherwise be doing at other clubs.

“We’re not just trying to build footballers, we’re trying to build people, and you’re learning a lot when you’re 18 to 24 years of age. A lot of that time is when you’re at the football club. We’re trying to help nurture really good people into our community.”

“Who we were and who we are now is very different. We became a team that wasn’t dependent on any given person. We became a team that actually understood each of our teammates and what each of us can and can’t do, where our limitations are. And everyone backed each other in.”

Sam’s attention has turned to season 2026 and further growing what they’ve built.

“We’ve retained our playing group pretty well, even a lot of the girls that have finished uni. We’ve picked up one or two new girls, but for the most part, it’s a very similar squad at this stage. But we have no idea what’s still coming into our team until three weeks before the season, when uni starts.

“We’ve always been a club that takes on lots of people from the country who come to Melbourne for uni. We used to hear, ‘Oh, cool, women’s football. I’ve never played, but let’s have a go.’ Now all the girls from the country have been playing since they were 3 or 4 years old. The first time I got to play was when I was 18!

“We know this new season is gonna be really tough. We saw Therry Penola beat everyone in our division by 100 points in 2024, then go up and finish third last. But we have a framework we didn’t have before, so we’ve got something to build on with little adjustments, and we’ve got depth we didn’t have before.

“No matter what, we’ve got a premiership. We’ve got memories for life, too. Building on success is infectious. We’re grateful we won the flag and got to have 2025 as our moment. We’re now just hoping to reset and be in a position to play some competitive football.

“The players controlled a lot of the energy last year – the way they wanted to go about it and the standards they set. That’s our baseline now. We don’t go backwards from here and win or lose, that’s our baseline.

“This is who we are.”