Erin Phillips was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame in 2025, again breaking new ground, this time becoming part of the first father-daughter induction, alongside her father, Greg Phillips.
Erin Phillips seems in possession of an intuition that has guided some big life choices – an auspicious quality for such a public figure.
Given the continuity of pulls and pushes for high profile athletes, finding a central truth offers some valuable stability.
In 2008, the Opals basketballers walked from the stadium in Brazil, utterly stunned by having just witnessed the unthinkable – Russia defeating the USA – in the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup semi-final.
The Opals would now be meeting the Russia in the gold medal game instead of their Achilles heel, the USA. Trying to keep it down low, they were consumed by a powerful sense that World Cup victory was now in their hands.
And so it would be. On Saturday 23 September 2006, Australia with Erin Phillips in the company of legends, Lauren Jackson and Penny Taylor, stood on the dais with a FIBA World Cup gold medal around her neck.
Having had huge success in Adelaide in the Women’s National Basketball League, she sensed it was time to look beyond – to the highest league on the planet – the WNBA.
She didn’t know it then but Barack Obama, the US President of the time, was waiting for her at the White House after Indiana Fever won the 2012 WNBA title. Sporting success seemed to follow her every footstep.
But when the Adelaide Football Club came calling prior to the 2017 AFLW season, she sensed she could still play the game she’d loved as a youngster, even as a toddler.
And so it would be.
Phenomenally, she took over the league, giving a masterclass in a woman’s capability to play this game called Australian Rules Football. She won the league’s MVP in its first season and again in 2019.
Her reading of the ball, quick-footed evasive skills, goal sense and competitive will, alongside that of her co-captain Chelsea Randall, led the Crows to three premierships in six years.
But the “best club in the world” in the eyes of Erin Phillips, would eventually lure her back to the home club of her father Greg Phillips and her family’s football heartland.
Port Adelaide entered the AFLW in 2022 and Alberton was calling. Erin Phillips’ life seems to present a series of enormous successes and completed circles.
While torn to leave a tremendously successful environment at the Adelaide Football Club, her intuition and deep desire led her back to Port Adelaide and of course the captaincy, mirroring her father’s SANFL captaincy of Port Adelaide precisely 30 years later.
With such a powerful presence in the fast-growing field of women’s AFL, it was unsurprising but nevertheless an immense achievement, that Erin Phillips was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame in 2025, again breaking new ground, this time becoming part of the first father-daughter induction.
The childhood dream, which had been abruptly slammed shut at age 13 with the comprehension that football wasn’t for girls, had finally and ultimately been realised in its fullest manifestation.
