Erin Phillips has already kicked off her white sneakers by the time we start walking south along Tennyson Beach in Adelaide. She casually leaves them behind on the sand as we dodge seaweed and dead crabs marooned by the morning tide – this is her local, after all.
“I’d say I’m here at least five mornings a week, whether it’s running to Grange Jetty, or I go with the dogs,” she says, squinting into the golden sunlight.
Phillips retired from professional competition in 2023 after two decades, five countries, 12 clubs, and two sporting codes. But despite hanging up her AFL boots, the two-time basketball Olympian still likes to keep moving – she says she’s a better person after exercising.
“Some days I’ll get up and I could run to Grange and back – other days I’d have to walk it, because my knees would just be like, ‘not today’,” she says, periodically bending to ruffle the wet fur of passing dogs that bound around her knees, both of which have undergone reconstructive surgery.
“I’m actually OK with that, because I’m at peace with what my body’s been able to do for my whole career, what I’ve put it through.”
We’re not far from West Lakes, the beachside suburb where Phillips went to school, first started playing footy and watched AFL and SANFL matches at Footy Park, the former home ground of the Adelaide Crows. She also remembers the day the old stadium was demolished – and tearing up as history was torn down around her.
“I was actually training with the Crows when they were pulling the stadium down, and I couldn’t watch. I could picture a thousand spots where I’ve been sitting in the stands.”
Football was always more than a spectator sport for the Phillips family. Her father, Greg, is an Australian Football Hall of Famer who played nearly 400 games in the SANFL and VFL and won eight SANFL premierships with the Port Adelaide Magpies. Erin was born in Melbourne, during her father’s three-year stint playing for Collingwood in the 80s.
Occasionally, people in her extended family and the footy community would lament that Greg and Julie Phillips’ three daughters spelled the end of a promising football dynasty.
“You joke about it too many times, you believe it,” she reflects.
Her parents, however, never let Erin or her sisters feel like consolation prizes.
“Dad never stopped teaching me the game of football, even when he knew that there was no pathway. It was as if he was preparing me to become an AFL player – for a future that, at the time, wasn’t even whispered about.”
Unsurprisingly, when Phillips started playing junior footy with a local club in West Lakes, she immediately felt at home.
“When I was on the footy field, I was me. That was just my happy place. It was when I could be free.”
But that freedom came with a hard use-by date: her 13th birthday, the age at which girls were no longer allowed to lace up alongside the boys.
“It was a tough time, because I was a kid, still 13, and I loved the game. I just had to be a fan, really,” she reflects. “I think the saddest part is the fact that that’s just what was accepted – that’s just the way it was.”
Phillips instead pivoted to basketball, and within a few years of making her Australian WNBL debut at 16 she had carved a promising international career with stints in the American WNBA and European leagues. She also joined the Opals, Australia’s national team, making two Olympic appearances at Beijing in 2008 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
But Aussie Rules kept pulling her back, and in 2015 she learned that the AFL was finally launching a women’s league. Her father’s old club Port Adelaide had missed out on a spot, but their crosstown rivals the Adelaide Crows wanted to recruit her before the first season in 2017.
“I was in a horrible place after Rio and how we performed, and I wanted to do something that gave me joy again,” Phillips says. “Basketball definitely started becoming a job … I just wanted to do something that brought joy back into me being an athlete.”
The opportunity meant taking a big punt. She hadn’t played football competitively in 15 years, and had to convince her WNBA club, the Dallas Wings, to let her spend the off-season playing a strange and famously brutal contact sport.
“When the Crows sent me a football over, a guernsey and a running program, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is insane’. It was a huge risk.”
There was another big factor: her WNBA career provided a paycheck and health insurance, not just for Phillips, but her growing family too.
Back in Adelaide, while playing for the Lightning in 2006, she had met a tall, talented Texan import named Tracy Gahan. After several on-and-off years while playing for different clubs around the world, they married in Hawaii in 2013 – which at the time was one of few English-speaking territories where marriage equality was legal.
By the time the AFLW came knocking the pair had settled in Texas, and Gahan was expecting twins via IVF – they now have four kids. Despite being a red state, Phillips felt more comfortable about her sexuality and relationship than back home, where the AFLW’s new high-profile recruit made headlines for her family life rather than her on-field prospects.
“When I got back to Australia, I knew it was still behind, but probably didn’t realise still how far behind we were.
“I wasn’t scared to tell Australia or Adelaide about Tracy or our kids. I was so proud of our family, but I was also very protective of them. I was probably a little bit annoyed – why is it such a big deal here? It was baffling.”
It all became worth it when she ran out on to the field for the first game, and saw huge crowds full of kids – especially young girls.
“It was like looking at yourself over the fence from the field.”
Looking back, Phillips is proud of how the AFLW made diversity and acceptance part of its story from the first bounce – one area where the men’s league, with its deep history and entrenched blokey culture, has yet to catch up.
“There were so many gay footballers, but they were never open and [they were] afraid to come out,” Phillips reflects of her male counterparts. “But I was never prepared not to come out, or show my family, or [to] be secret about who I was married to. And I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to be able to do that.
“I hope that any male player, if that is a barrier, can feel what I did when I came here; of being comfortable in your own skin and being proud of who you are.”
Phillips retired from the AFLW in 2023, having led the Crows to three premierships and won numerous best and fairest and MVP medals. Fittingly, she saw out her career at her dad’s old club, Port Adelaide, where she captained its first AFLW team for two seasons.
With her playing career behind her, Phillips has spent the last few years working on a memoir, Inside and Out, with sports journalist Samantha Lane. After 22 years of elite-level sport, the book posed a different challenge.
“I’m close to 40, but my memory is shithouse,” she laughs. “Writing a book literally was like therapy; recalling memories, going through old photos with Mum and Dad, even just talking to aunts.”
Over long Zoom sessions with Lane and conversations with Tracy, Phillips let it all out; from how the Opals’ skintight bodysuits fuelled anxieties about her body, to fraught relationships with former coaches, to returning to Australia in the midst of the 2017 marriage equality plebiscite.
“The biggest asset and also biggest negative for me, is that I’m always on to the next thing – I can’t live in the moment for too long because I’m ready to do something next,” she reflects.
“So even in hard situations, I don’t let myself ever go deep. Many times when writing this book and looking back, I just actually felt awful – like, I was genuinely, really struggling at the time. But in times that I’ve struggled, it’s always [been] like Dory [from film Finding Nemo] said, ‘Just keep swimming’. You know, that’s just how it’s been.”
These days, Phillips tries to appreciate every moment. Last year, she coached her daughter’s team against another club that had never fielded a girls’ under-8s side before. It was another small but meaningful breakthrough that coaches and team managers on both sides all understood – even if the kids had no idea.
“We were really emotional, because that’s all they know,” Phillips reflects, shoes in hand as we head back from the beach.
“They don’t know how hard it was to get to this point, but they don’t need to. Now they can just live and follow a passion and a dream the whole way through.
“I love seeing their little brains, and the passion and joy they get from running around with a footy. That’s what footy is – that’s what it should be.”
Inside and Out: A story of sport, family and self by Erin Phillips with Samantha Lane is out on 1 April, through Hardie Grant.
