Girls team added to Phoenix academy
The Wellington Phoenix are still determined to have a team in Australia’s semi-professional W-League women’s football competition.
And they know there’s a need to ‘‘raise the bar and raise the standard’’ when it comes to player development, so New Zealand can ‘‘produce better female players more often,’’ and boost the Football Ferns.
Which is why their academy has introduced a girls-only team for the first time this winter.
As academy head coach Paul Temple further explains: ‘‘We’ve got some good [players] around the world, but the numbers are not huge, and so we can help in this space.’’
The Phoenix came closer than ever before to having a team in the W-League during the season that ends tomorrow, with a grand final between Sydney FC and Melbourne Victory, who have two Ferns – defender Claudia Bunge and midfielder Annalie Longo – among their number.
Their plans were brought to a sudden halt last November when Football Australia wouldn’t make an exception to its player eligibility rules and allow the potential Phoenix to count New Zealanders as local players and therefore field an unlimited number of them without what it called ‘‘a meaningful process of consultation’’.
But the Phoenix’s desire still burns, and it’s something general manager David Dome has been working on while he has been in Wollongong – where the A-League team has been based this season with the Covid-19 pandemic making regular trans-Tasman travel impossible and where the W-League team is set to be based if and when it gets up and running.
The end of the current W-League season is likely to accelerate discussions about the make-up of the next one and put the Phoenix’s hopes and desires front and centre, but in the meantime, they have cracked on with laying foundations in their academy, in conjunction with Capital Football, the local federation.
Anna Green, a Football Ferns veteran, and Michaela Robertson, who has twice been called up to the Ferns, but is yet to play for them, were the first two women to join the Phoenix academy, training alongside some of its older boys, with Danja Grunwald, Olivia Ingham, and Nika Kondo the three younger girls now in with its boys teams as well.
Then there’s the under-15 team (for girls born in 2006 and 2007), which will have two female coaches in Maia Vink, Capital Football’s National Women’s League coach in
2020 and its assistant development manager, and Katie Barrott, one of its development officers, with other Phoenix academy staff, including Temple, involved as well.
The team will play in the under13 Capital Development League, which starts today and will consist mostly of boys.