West Coast's AFLW renaissance under Daisy Pearce is being framed as a textbook case study in resourcing women's high-performance, with AFLW Weekly co-host Georgie Parker pointing to the Eagles' fitness gains and late-game dominance as the clearest signal yet that money committed to the women's program shows up on the scoreboard.
Pearce, the dual-premiership Melbourne champion turned senior coach, has been able to install head of strength and conditioning Wesley Salisbury and recently added head of high performance Sam Batterson, prised out of a rival AFLW department.
"What I really like about it is that there is some clear return on investment in what Daisy Pearce has done," Parker said on AFLW Weekly. "She has now got two full-time either fitness or high-performance people in her team. She's got Wesley Salisbury, head of strength and conditioning, and then she's gone and stolen Sam Batterson for head of high performance. She stole them from Melbourne."
Parker said the on-field translation is unmistakable. The Eagles have piled on five-goal final quarters in back-to-back weeks, peeling away from opponents in the part of the game where conditioning is the deciding factor.
"You can see the clear difference in their fitness," Parker said. "Their last two weeks they've been able to run over teams kicking five goals in the last quarter, the last two weeks of their team, when you're coming into the meaty chunk of the season and feeling fit and ready."
The contrast with rival programs is sharp. The GWS Giants, who currently sit 18th, only this season committed to a full-time conditioning role inside their AFLW set-up.
"You compare that to the Giants who have only for the first time in their history had a full-time conditioning person this year," Parker said. "So it's nice to see that for me is great to see, and it's again just another reminder: you invest, you get outcomes."
The broader argument fits with what Pearce, who medically retired in part because of repeated injury and surgical setbacks, has said about the structural difference between AFL men's resourcing and AFLW. The Eagles women's program has historically run lean, but the recent additions of dual full-time fitness and high-performance specialists has aligned the squad with what is becoming the new baseline among competitive AFLW lists.
Pearce's coaching staff are also leaning on the AFL men's facility integration at Mineral Resources Park, with players able to access weights, recovery and shared performance data. "It's healthy for the boys to understand how much the girls do, and it's great for the girls to learn off the boys as well," Brendan Fevola told AFLW Weekly in a related conversation about Richmond's set-up. "You're getting front-row tickets to see how a premiership player goes about it."
For the Eagles, the next test is whether the late-game pattern holds when finals contenders begin attacking the program more aggressively, but the early evidence is that the once-cellar-dwelling West Coast women's team has built itself a fitness base capable of bullying the rest of the AFLW field.
With four rounds gone, Pearce's blueprint, two specialists, deep cardio reserves and fourth-quarter accelerations, is fast becoming the model rival AFLW programs will be benchmarked against.