Sport
6 April, 2024
Finding Faith: Warmth at new home
FAITH Wattie-Reid is grateful that she is now home, among family. Her warm, loving football family. The 20-year-old aspiring AFLW player has done it tough growing up in Bridgewater, living with her loving grandparents since she was nine, and sport...
FAITH Wattie-Reid is grateful that she is now home, among family. Her warm, loving football family.
The 20-year-old aspiring AFLW player has done it tough growing up in Bridgewater, living with her loving grandparents since she was nine, and sport has always been a big and comforting part of her life.
She began playing cricket for Bridgewater at nine and stayed there until she was 15. That was when her football career began with Kangaroo Flat junior women’s team.
Like most girls in rural and regional areas, Faith found she needed to travel to keep playing football, with small towns generally unable to field women’s teams, especially at senior level.
Last year she joined Golden Square in the highly competitive Central Victoria Football League, but for a range of reasons the move was not a success.
Faith suffered a serious ankle ligament injury playing cricket early in 2023, which impacted on her football season. As well, her beloved grandfather died after battling cancer.
“I had to stop football to focus on myself,” she said. Then, after finding full-time work at an Inglewood café, she felt able to “go back to my footy, go back to my cricket … go back to my normal sports life”.
Fate then intervened to see Faith move to the football club she now sees as her second family.
“My housemate (Laura Stilo) was going to join Bendigo Thunder, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to join her yet. It was a hard decision to make, with everything that was happening in my life,” Faith said.
“But I decided to just go to one training session and see how everyone is, what their training’s like.
“The first training came, last November or December, and it went pretty well, so I decided to go there. And I’ve loved it – they’re like my second family.”
Among the things that made Faith fall in love with Bendigo Thunder was the club’s flexible approach to training.
“Working full time at the café, I’m just wrecked after work, so I couldn’t go to training a lot of the time last season,” she said. This made it difficult to win selection for Golden Square which, in Faith’s view, placed a premium on success. “With Thunder, we just want to have fun. It’s girls footy, everyone wants to have a go. We care about our teammates. We care about loving the game,” Faith said.
Her new coach, Mick McInnes, formerly senior coach of the Echuca senior women’s team, has been happy to give Faith some leeway in her preparation for the season.
“The coach is really good about it, because he knows I live pretty far away at Bridgewater, looking after my grandmother’s place,” Faith said.
“He’s happy if I can get to one training session a week.”
She also praised McInnes’ teaching ability as a coach who explains why he asks his players to do something, rather than just demanding it.
McInnes has given Faith a new role on the wing, who has played all her football at half-back: “New team, obviously new coach, and he decided to put me on the wing, and said I did a pretty good job at it. And he’s very supportive with what’s going on in my personal life.”
Bendigo Thunder finished fifth last season, with a 5-7 win-loss record, one spot below Golden Square.
The league will look quite different in 2024, with three new teams in Marong, Sandhurst and White Hills joining the competition and Strathfieldsaye dropping out.
Powerhouse club Castlemaine is looking for its third premiership in a row, and it shapes as the team to beat once again.
For Faith, the key to growth and success is getting more players into women’s football, including at Thunder, which has only about 20 players on its books for this season. “Not enough girls want to play,” she lamented.
But Faith does, and she’s looking forward to using her speed in her new role, as well as her favourite football skill, tackling: “I can be pretty quick, but overall, I really love tackling. Everyone says I just tackle people out of nowhere.”
And her hope for the future is a mixture of the simple and the ambitious: “I want to get healthier, fitter – and I just want to get onto that stage, AFLW footy. And I’ll be like, ‘Look, I got there’.”