Why this AFL power couple uprooted their lives to chase premierships with different clubs

3 weeks ago 13

Breeanna Brock and Murray Davis live 2000 kilometres apart, yet they remain one of the most influential couples in AFL clubland.

They never actually got around to getting married although Brock, an AFLW pioneer who set up the Brisbane Lions women’s program a decade ago, calls Davis her husband to simplify matters. She has been known, when stretched with work pressures combined with motherhood, to demand of her football superiors: “Are you going to pay for my divorce?”

AFL power couple Murray Davis and Bree Brock

Their enforced geographic separation took place at the end of last season when the Adelaide Crows, for the second year running, approached the longtime Brisbane assistant coach Davis to cross the country to help Crows coach Matthew Nicks, this time in a newly created and elevated role of coaching director. The second time around he took the job.

Davis had been coaching at Brisbane through the tenures of Michael Voss, Justin Leppitsch and Chris Fagan. The lure of the promotion and mentoring Nicks and his assistants Nathan Van Berlo, Scott Burns and Jack Hombsch after another disappointing Crows season was too good to refuse.

Brock chose to remain at the Lions as their AFLW boss alongside coach Craig Starcevich who she describes as an “accidental feminist.”

Son Zach, 12, remained in Brisbane and the family reunite - largely at the whim of the football fixture - on average every fortnight. It is not unusual for AFL coaches to live away from their families - three of the GWS Giants’ assistant coaches do the same - but Brock and Davis are unique in that her football role also played a major part in the decision.

“The call [from Adelaide] came early in the finals last year,” recalls Brock. “We just kept putting that phone call off. We’d just sold our house and bought a new house but things kept moving deeper and deeper and then we were between his grand final and my grand final and he decided to take the job.”

The Crows’ offer to Davis caused rumblings outside the family, too. Lions coach Chris Fagan caught wind he might be losing his valued forwards coach and called Adelaide CEO Tim Silvers during last year’s finals series to demand clarity. (When the two teams played each other in the 2025 pre-season, the Lions players noted their Crows’ opponents had adopted a significant number of their team terminologies and plays.)

The Lions women’s team - which has contested six of the eight AFLW grand finals for two premierships - lost to North Melbourne in last year’s decider, and Brock told Davis she was unwilling to walk away from the club and risk moving Zach from his school and local football community.

“I said to Murray, ‘What if they [the Crows] are shithouse and they sack you at the end of the year? I didn’t want to put all our eggs into the Adelaide basket.

The Crows are gunning for their first flag since 1998, and have thrived since Davis joined coach Matthew Nicks.

“But he’s loved the new role of coaching director and it’s nice in a way. Our roles our quite similar and my house is tidy and his house is tidy.”

Davis is credited with a significant role in the Crows’ rise from 15th in 2024 to this minor year’s premiership.

The prevailing view is that the position of head of women’s football at the Crows could become available in the coming years should Phil Harper choose to retire, but Brock is circumspect about her future beyond this AFLW season. Crows boss Silvers said a thorough process would take place should Harper depart. However, the Lions appear resigned to the prospect of losing their pioneering women’s football boss.

She has already followed Davis once, in the early days of their relationship back in 2010. The two had moved in the same circles and were both heavily involved in their local club Zillmere (where Zach won the under-13s best and fairest on Tuesday night with father Murray watching via Skype).

Davis moved to Darwin in 2009, initially as high-performance manager and then coach of the NT Thunder, replacing Michael McLean and coaching the Thunder to the NEAFL premiership in 2011. Brock had just turned 30 and took the role of regional manager for girls’ football in Darwin. “I thought I’d better see if this guy was seriously the one for me or not.”

The pair returned to Brisbane after the Thunder flag victory. In an extraordinary sliding doors moment, Davis had travelled to Melbourne to interview for assistant coaching roles at both Richmond and Collingwood - Nathan Buckley’s father Ray had recommended him, having observed his work in Darwin. Walking from the Tigers’ interview at Punt Road to Collingwood at Olympic Park, he crossed paths with then-Brisbane football manager Dean Warren, who urged him not to make a decision until he spoke with the Lions.

Brock took a role at AFL Queensland. Zach was born in 2013, and around that time Brock urged AFL Queensland boss Michael Conlan to expand the budget to employ a female talent manager or else “pay for my divorce”. Peta Searle was offered the job but the AFL intervened, embarrassed that the highly credentialled Searle could not afford to subsidise her coaching dream. Searle moved to St Kilda as the game’s first woman assistant coach. Enter Starcevich, then working as a regional manager in Far North Queensland.

With $25,000 in annual funding – $2500 per region according to Brock – increased at the end of 2014 to $100,000, AFLQ women’s participation jumped from 40,000 to 75,000 in 18 months. When the Lions won an inaugural AFLW licence, the Lions’ then-CEO Greg Swann recruited Brock and then Starcevich.

Perpetual ladder leaders and perpetually raided for talent as the competition has expanded, Brock described Brisbane’s journey as “emotionally challenging at times because you get punished for being good.

“But we’ve been so stable off-field and Greg [Swann] was just a great mentor and supporter. He’d always say: ‘Just go your hardest’. Having Craig [Starcevich], my accidental feminist, we’ve been able to push the barrow so far so quickly partly I think because he’s opened doors for us.

“When you compare the AFLW staff turnover at head office to Brisbane I’m so proud we’ve been able to keep the band together. We’ve had the same coach, the same football manager, the same high-performance manager and the same doctor. It’s a huge weapon. Head office [the AFL] might come to us with an idea, and we’ll say, ‘yes we tried that six years ago’.”

In July, this masthead reported that AFLW was operating at an annual $50 million loss with the AFL pointing to skill errors and poor crowds as key issues for the fledgling competition, which had expanded too quickly.

Retorts Brock: “When you consider what GWS and Gold Coast cost the competition and what we’ve added to the game at grassroots and community level I reckon we’ve come cheap. I’m sitting in an $80 million facility which would never have been built if it wasn’t for the women’s competition.

“People making comments like that about our skills... You want better skills when the average wage for an assistant coach is $15,000? How are we meant to improve our skills? We are doing our best with one hand tied behind our back.”

Brock’s parents worked in the foreign service - her father, John, had played football for Ainslie in the ACT - and she grew up as the daughter of a diplomat living in England, Greece, Pakistan and Kenya. They moved back to Brisbane when she was 15 and became a footballer along with her two sisters at the age of 25.

A fierce advocate for the women’s code, Brock turned her own devastation, after the Lions were denied a home grand final at the Gabba back in 2017, into action and fierce government lobbying, culminating in last year’s grand final at the Brighton Homes Arena at Springfield.

“It probably cost us a premiership, but we’ve secured our future and even though we lost last year that grand final day was such a proud moment.”

She applauds the CBA her players negotiated but not the women’s football department soft cap which she mathematically equates to woefully behind the men’s. “If we just give our girls $3 million in coaching and development per club that would allow us to deliver the bare minimum,” says Brock. The AFLW soft cap sits currently at $1.7 million.

With Adelaide’s finals campaign opening against Collingwood on Thursday night at Adelaide Oval, Brock and Zach will be watching from Brisbane before she travels to Adelaide herself two days later in preparation for the Lions’ September 7 AFLW clash against the Crows at Norwood.

Of her family’s plans beyond 2025, Brock says: “We haven’t got to that yet.” But given Davis’ transformational role at Adelaide it seems difficult to envisage him leaving any time soon.

“The thing about me and Murray is that we don’t see our jobs as jobs. We see them as our lives. We really just live and breathe footy.”

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