The AFLW season ended suddenly with three games remaining in the finals series, but 2020 remains a year worth celebrating despite being cut short.
This season brought with it the expansion of the league to 14 teams, but despite the sharp increase in total players, the standard of the game continued to rise.
With that came some of the best games we’ve seen in the short four-year history of the competition and vindication that the next generation coming through will carry the competition for a decade.
Here are some awards and thoughts to commemorate the season that was:
Biggest season ‘what if’?
The biggest unanswerable question (aside from who would have won the flag) is what Conference B would have looked like had the final two rounds been played.
Fremantle fans and players have voiced their displeasure at not being crowned premiers given their 7-0 record, however their two biggest tests went unplayed.
They were set to face Melbourne (in Perth) and Carlton (in Victoria) in the final two weeks of the season, and were coming off a fixture that saw them leave Western Australia twice in six weeks - comfortably the easiest draw in the competition.
The biggest scalp they claimed during the season was against Collingwood in Round 3 in a game where they were outplayed for the majority. Their other wins came against Geelong, West Coast, St Kilda, Brisbane and the Bulldogs.
Would Collingwood have overtaken Melbourne for the last spot in finals given they had Geelong and St Kilda left to play? Would Carlton have won the Conference altogether, defeating Fremantle in the final week to clinch it?
We’ll never know, but we can speculate wildly!
League MVP: Jasmine Garner (North Melbourne)
Jasmine Garner reinvented herself in 2020, going from one of the top forwards in the game to an elite midfielder.
She averaged career-highs in goals, disposals, marks, tackles, inside 50s and clearances and was ranked among the top players in the competition in most of those categories.
The 25-year-old will likely receive three votes in four of her six games and will still poll in the other two matches. The only thing that could sink her is teammates taking votes off her, with fellow midfielders Emma Kearney, Ash Riddell and Jenna Bruton also set to be heavy vote-getters.
Garner will likely edge out the likes of Carlton’s Maddy Prespakis, Collingwood’s Jaimee Lambert, Fremantle’s Kiara Bowers and Melbourne’s Karen Paxman to claim the award.
Rising Star: Isabel Huntington (Western Bulldogs)
It might be unfair giving the award to a third-year player, but Isabel Huntington is eligible, got a nomination and deserves recognition for her season.
The number one pick in the 2017 National Draft has had her career cruelly impacted by knee injuries to this point, but she got a clean run at it 2019 and grew as the season went on.
Moving into defence, Huntington became one of the game’s best intercept marking defenders and was ranked second in the competition for marks per game and first for contested marks per game.
Her best remains well and truly in front of her too, whether it’s down back or up forward.
It is unquestionably the tightest and deepest Rising Star class of the four years, with Georgia Patrikios, Kalinda Howarth, Caitlin Greiser, Grace Egan and more all worthy of mentions.
Most underrated player: Brittany Bonnici (Collingwood)
Bonnici took her game to a new level in 2020 and thrived in a loaded Collingwood midfield.
She went from averaging 13 touches per game in 2019 to 20 this season and often carried the load for the Magpies when Jaimee Lambert was pushed forward or Brianna Davey was out with injury.
The likes of Lambert, Davey and Steph Chiocci are all known stars who get a lot of deserved credit through that midfield, but Bonnici’s elevation from mid-tier midfielder to ball-winning star has flown under the radar.
Most improved player: Rebecca Privitelli (GWS)
Collingwood ruck Sharni Layton is the obvious choice, but Privitelli deserves some recognition.
The equal number one contested mark player in the competition wasn’t even on an AFLW list last year.
Privitelli has been around since 2017, playing a season for Carlton before moving to the Giants for 2018. She spent both years playing as a defender and never found a consistent spot in the side.
However, she returned in 2020 after a year away and was swung forward, where her marking prowess became a great asset for the Giants.
She kicked six goals for the year, including three against West Coast, and hopefully can build on this breakout performance next year.
Most improved team: Collingwood
Collingwood was a basket case in 2019. There’s no easy way to say it. They very nearly went through the season winless and were coming off a year where key players defected to expansion clubs and injuries crippled them early on.
So to come into 2020 and go one kick away from making a Preliminary Final and knocking off North Melbourne makes them comfortably the most improved team.
The addition of Brianna Davey and the return of Chloe Molloy gave them a huge boost in star-power, both capable of dominating anywhere on the ground.
They were complemented with huge improvements from their role players as well. Bonnici as mentioned above, Sharni Layton went from a player learning the game to an All-Australian calibre ruck, Jordan Membrey suddenly is one of the best contested marking forwards in the game, Jordyn Allen had a strong season and Sarah Rowe became a serious threat inside 50 among others.
Had the Pies been drawn into Conference A, you could argue they would have kept pace with North Melbourne at the top.
Best expansion side: St Kilda
What St Kilda showed in 2020 was that they are a team to be taken seriously in the next few years.
They didn’t sell the farm for superstar names, they built a core of young, talented players and put leaders around them under the watchful eye of coach Peta Searle.
The first-year players they brought into the system – Caitlin Greiser, Georgia Patrikios, Rosie Dillon, Olivia Vesely, Nicola Xenos, Molly McDonald, Tarni White and more – are all going to be quality players in this competition for a long time to come and will only get better as more talent gets put around them.
They have proven themselves as a team that has its core in place. If they can now lure a star player out of another club to be the final piece of the puzzle, anything is possible for them in 2020 with some injury luck.
Coach of the year: Daniel Harford (Carlton)
It’s easy to forget Carlton was (until Richmond this year) coming off statistically the worst season of any AFLW team ever before Daniel Harford took over as coach. They finished dead last in 2018, losing five straight games and finished with an ungodly percentage of 54.1.
Harford was brought in as coach to clean up the mess and his leadership, coupled with picking the eyes out of two straight drafts, has completely turned this team around.
They went on a run late in 2019 and ended up making the Grand Final, but their 2020 season was actually more impressive.
Carlton lost their star player and captain in Brianna Davey to Collingwood and it did not matter at all because Maddy Prespakis, Georgia Gee and Chloe Dalton went to another level, Grace Egan and Lucy McEvoy stepped straight into the starting midfield roles and Katie Loynes reaffirmed her status as the club’s best ever leader.
Harford made positional changes, throwing Nicola Stevens and Gee forward, Dalton into the midfield and gave Darcy Vescio license to roam the entire ground.
He also trusted young players with key roles like McEvoy and Egan in the midfield and Vaomua Laloifi and Charlotte Wilson in defence – all decisions that paid off.
It is clear from spending any time around the Blues that the entire club has completely bought into Harford and his ways and that is a credit to him for rebuilding the club and turning them into a genuine premiership contender.