Essendon AFLW recruit Cat Phillips is spending pre-season in Alabama playing ultimate frisbee for Australia

An engineer who only a couple of months ago took up a new senior role at waste management company Cleanaway, Phillips, 30, also continues to juggle a pair of simultaneous elite sporting careers.

Late next month she is poised to be part of Essendon’s inaugural AFLW side, the winger having crossed to the Bombers after stints at Melbourne and most recently St Kilda, where she was a co-captain in the side’s first two seasons and finished third and fourth respectively in the club’s best and fairest over the past couple of years.

But before she dons the sash, Phillips is captaining Australia in ultimate frisbee, the niche sport which she has played for almost half her life.

While the nation’s attention will soon turn to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, it is a multi-sport event in a city of the same name on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean that has led Phillips to take a break in the middle of the Bombers’ pre-season.

She is leading Australia’s team at this month’s World Games in Birmingham, Alabama.

July would have been clear air for AFLW training. Then with little notice, the season was brought forward to an August start. But this was not an opportunity Phillips was keen to pass up. The World Games are in effect the Olympics for non-Olympic sports. Sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee, they serve as something of a testing ground for aspirant Olympic disciplines.

This was too big a deal not to be there.

“The tournament that I’m playing at is something that happens every four years. It’s like the pinnacle of what you can do. And I’m captaining this time,” Phillips says from the US.

“A year ago I got picked on the team and I’d committed to doing it. In terms of communication, I spoke with Essendon about it right off the bat, and they were great about it. They’ve been very supportive of me doing this and there are a lot of things that I can bring from ultimate into footy.”

For those not au fait with ultimate frisbee, the game bears similarities with the rugby codes or American football, with teams of seven aiming to score by passing the frisbee down field into the opposition’s end zone. The key difference to those sports is that ultimate is a non-contact sport, which should be the cause of some relief for any Essendon fans concerned about potential injury to one of their senior recruits.

“I’ve been playing for a long time, since I was in year 11,” Phillips says.

“I travelled to Canada to play at the World Cup in 2008. And off the back of that I just kept playing.

“You kind of have two types of players on the field, you have people who throw more, called the handlers, that handle the disc. That’s kind of like the quarterback role in gridiron where they just stand behind the play.

“Then you’ve got [cutters] who are downfield trying to get open.

“I actually kind of do both.”

Phillips would have merely been one of Australia’s best ultimate players. But then along came a national football competition.

“A bunch of the girls that I played ultimate with, when they had one of the very first AFLW talent days, we had training that day, and instead of training we just thought we’d go down to benchmark athletically for a bit of fun,” Phillips says.

“And then we all actually did quite well. Of the seven of us that went down, four were in the top 10 overall of the athletic testing that day, which was pretty cool from our point of view.”

Within months Phillips had been recruited by Melbourne, playing alongside Daisy Pearce. When the Saints entered the competition Phillips made the leap to Moorabbin, and then keen to start all over again, she joined the Bombers, now on the verge of being part of three different clubs’ inaugural AFLW teams.

Overall she will miss around a month of the pre-season but is hardly letting herself go, playing back-to-back-to-back days in 35 degree heat with 70 per cent humidity.

“The conditioning required is kind of different, but there’s a lot of overlap,” Phillips says.

“Playing on the wing in footy I’ll run further in a game, I probably run nine kilometres in a game of football, and in a game of frisbee I probably run five. But the intensity of running in ultimate is a lot higher.”

The physical demands are less of an issue than developing cohesion with new teammates. Phillips knows from experience the importance of cultivating bonds at an expansion side.

“I think the main thing for me has been making sure that I can still build a good connection with the playing group given that I’m not around for a fair chunk of time. And being a new team in particular it’s really important to do that. I had about three weeks [with Essendon] before coming over here, and in that time it was my priority to get to know the girls as well as I could, and really build that connection with them.

“While I’ve been away they’ve all been getting around me and the team. When I come back it’ll be a quick turnaround.”

She has managed to deal with alternating and overlapping seasons for years, and admits she is surprised the coexistence has lasted this long.

“I didn’t think that it would work,” Phillips says.

“I thought for a while that I would have to give one of them up. I feel very lucky that it’s worked out that I haven’t had to. If footy had been over winter every year it probably wouldn’t have worked out.

“I think it’s worked out because I already had this commitment, and a lot of the footy clubs are being more flexible right now because the season got moved at short notice.”

“I think one of the things that’s made it work is that I’ve played ultimate for so long that I can pop in and out of training. It’s kind of like riding a bike for me.

“Footy I find that a bit harder to do. Not so much like riding a bike. I’ve been lucky that all the teams that I’ve played for have worked hard to make it work for me.

Another thing to know about the incredible multi-tasking Phillips is that she has also led the charge from within the AFLW playing cohort for better pay and conditions. Having become centrally involved in messy collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2019, a time during which there was considerable division across the league’s players, Phillips worked closely with the AFL Players’ Association in the intervening years to prepare for the next deal. Again, there were some testy moments, but the players got a welcome result in the form of a 94 per cent pay rise, a huge step on what they hope is now a short road to full-time professionalism.

In that spirit, Phillips hopes that what she is doing now will very shortly not be feasible.

“For sure. I was very aware of that going through it,” she says. “A lot of the things that we were asking for and looking for and working towards achieving will mean that I won’t be able to do what I’m doing.

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“But I think my involvement the whole time with the CBA and the AFLPA has been around setting up the AFLW for the next group of players to come through and for them to have what I would have loved to have when I was a kid growing up. I’m very relaxed about that.

“I know at some point I won’t be able to do the five things that I’m doing in my spare time. And I’m OK with that.

“I think I will feel very satisfied when players are playing full-time and they can’t play another sport, or they can’t work full-time. I think that will be a great outcome.”