Hodyl disappointed yet optimistic in how 2023 has gone

While disappointed Swan Districts won't be taking part in the finals in the WAFL for a second straight season, President Peter Hodyl is excited by the trajectory the club is heading and already can't wait for what 2024 has in store.

The Swans board led by Hodyl did take the decision to not reappoint Adam Pickering when the league side didn’t make finals in 2022 with a view to getting back to contending for a premiership for the first time since 2010 with the appointment of Andrew Pruyn.

Hodyl still makes no secret that he expects Swan Districts to be competing for a premiership every season and that's whether it's the WAFL league, reserves or colts teams, or the WAFLW league and Youth Girls outfits.

However, sometimes things happen that make that not a genuine possibility and that's how Hodyl sums up the 2023 season for Swan Districts.

Finals are out of the equation with Swans having won eight of the 17 matches and while Hodyl will never be happy about seeing his team not playing finals, when there are genuine reasons, then he can overlook the final result.

Firstly, Swans lost the first three matches of the season by a combined 12 points. There were also losses to Claremont and Subiaco by a combined six points in Rounds 6 and 7 so five defeats inside the first seven games came by a combined 18 points.

Those results could have so easily gone differently and it isn’t a stretch to suggest three of those turning into wins and Swans are playing finals in 2023 despite the other hurdles that have been thrown their way.

At no point all season have Swan Districts had what would have been seen as the best 22 out on the park, and more often than not at least one player has suffered an injury during the game robbing them of a rotation on the bench.

In the end, 2021 fairest and best winner Frank Anderson didn’t play a game this season, 2020 Sandover Medallist Sam Fisher played three and then Seb Bright has been limited to five, Will Collins four, Jarrod Cameron 10, Brandon Erceg seven, Greg Ottaviano nine, Chris Jones 13, Tony Notte 12, Nathan Blakely 12, Josh Cipro 13 and Aidan Clarke 13.

All would be considered part of the best 22 and have missed anywhere from four to every game of the season, and while Hodyl never wants to use excuses, it's fair to say in this circumstance it's legitimate.

"We're bitterly disappointed with the season to be quite honest. We sort of had our sights set on definitely finishing in the five and a bit further up in the five, and you never like to blame injuries but we virtually lost our whole midfield in those first four or five games," Hodyl said.

"To lose so many of those early games by such a small margin as well was very frustrating and if we picked up only a couple of those, and our season could be looking a lot different.

"It was an absolute credit to the boys to be able to do what they did in the circumstances, but everyone's hurting and feeling disappointed and let down because we had set our sights on going deep this year.

"But anyway, that's the way it goes and we're still on track for where we want to be over the next couple of years, and our reserves are gearing up to play finals.

"That tells us that depth is right and we've been building that for a number of years, and have been putting a lot of work into our developing players to get to that point so we have the depth that we want."

The biggest reason why Hodyl is optimistic already looking towards 2024 for Swan Districts is that he feels simply not being able to get the best team on the park in 2023 is the major factor behind not reaching the targets.

It's realistic to think that full seasons out of Fisher, Erceg, Clarke, Collins and Bright especially could have significantly changed the fortunes of the team. Still it's a side who hasn’t missed finals by much and has won four of the last five games with one more round to play.

In reflection, Hodyl is comfortable that the recruiting was spot on for 2023, he can't fault the preparation from his team, he can't fault the game plan and the efforts of the coaches, which is why he's optimistic looking towards 2024.

"You do have a certain amount of player turnover every year and already we've been investigating options to supplement our list for next year so there's always going to be some changes," Hodyl said.

"You need to be a step ahead of all that and see where you're at, and find out what we need to do to try and improve our list. We'll try to retain as many as we can obviously but then you go from there with topping it up and hopefully we have a few more things go our way next year, and we can start to achieve the things that we've set out to."

In the bigger picture, Swan Districts' reserves team has made finals highlighting the depth in the senior program at WAFL level while the colts were young this season and will be expected to dramatically improve in 2023.

The WAFLW league team also put together a tremendous back end of the season to play finals once more and the Youth Girls are developing nicely. So in the whole scheme of things, Hodyl is comfortable with where Swans are tracking looking towards 2024.

"Especially over the last five or six years, we've built ourselves into a position as a club where we can invest in our football program. We've also heavily invested into our social impact program which also creates more opportunity to invest into our football as well," Hodyl said.

"With our WAFLW program, we've got a really young side and that's been quite a deliberate move and we fully understand the challenges surrounding that.

"We're trying to move into a high performance structure and culture with our women's program, and we're trying to guide it into being more of a high performance outfit and that's going to take a bit of time.

"WAFLW will take a bit of time in general to catch up to where we want it to eventually get to, but we think it's on track and we're really happy with how our WAFLW team is going.

"Our colts can just depend on the age group coming through and we've got a lot of low age players this year but we expect to be up there a lot more next year," Hodyl added.

"Our goal is for all our grades, in both WAFL and WAFLW, to be top three year on year, and by having that as our strategy, we try to reverse engineer that to work out the best way for us to be able to challenge for premierships.

"That's what we're endeavouring to do, we're investing into our football program to give us the best chance with our strength and conditioning, sports science and all sorts of things. We're more than happy with our progress, but maybe we hoped for too much next year and now we'll regroup and battle on."