GARING RARING TO GO
BIG SUMMER BOOSTS GARING’S CONFIDENCE
STAR Geelong midfielder Renee Garing says completing a full pre-season will help her enter the 2020 season with even greater confidence than her first year of AFLW football.
Garing had a limited preseason last year after a back injury sidelined her during summer, but it didn’t stop her from being one of the players of the season for the Cats after a third-place finish in the bestand-fairest award vindicated her decision to switch codes from netball.
The 31-year-old said the sense of the unknown had long gone and her self-belief had increased from this time 12 months ago.
“I am definitely going in with more confidence,” Garing said. “With the fitness side of things, I was doing a lot of running in rehab but we have all developed with our strength so we are building on that every year.
“We are also trying to maintain our aerobic fitness at the same time so hopefully we are better, faster and stronger. Last year I hadn’t played from Round 5 in the VFL and the next game I played was AFLW, so it was a bit of an unknown as to how I was going to compare to the opposition at that level.
“It is very different but certainly I will go in this year expecting a lot more of myself. I think that is the same for all of us, knowing what we can do when we put our best footy out there, so that is exciting.”
Geelong flies to Western Australia for its first match in
February, where it will take on a Fremantle side that has also made some big strides during summer.
Garing said the Cats had vastly different expectations heading into their second season of AFLW following a finals berth in their first year of the competition.
“Everyone goes into the season wanting to win the premiership but each of us knows last year, in lots of ways, everything we did was exciting because it was the first time,” she said.
“So the wins, the losses and learning from those and the travel, everything was new, but this year we step into it and will expect more because we know what to do and we know what works.
“All of those things that were so new, we loved every moment of it, and we will love it still, but we can’t blame anything on being in our first year now. We have had a whole year under our belt and we all want to go further, so that is the mindset of the group at the moment.”