Affectionately known as “Ant”, Antoni Jagarinec is a significant figure in the landscape of Canberra women’s football. Currently in his second stint with Canberra United, Jagarinec is perhaps best known for a stellar ten years as Belconnen United’s NPLW coach, steering them to an unprecedented eight grand final wins, seven Federation Cups, and nine consecutive premierships.
Still playing in his late 30s as a central defender for Capital Premier League side Burns FC (the tier below NPL), Jagarinec once played at the elite local level.
“I was part of the National Youth League squad when Canberra Croatia had a Youth League team and also kicked around with ACTAS (the ACT Academy of Sport). I played until maybe 25 at a local elite level and continue to play now but more as a social kind of thing, when coaching doesn’t intersect, [maybe] a third or two-thirds of the season.
“Playing for me now keeps the love of the game going forward, if that makes sense. There’s no pressure for me to rock up, there’s no sessions that need to be designed, there’s no balls that need to be pumped. It’s just turn up and have some fun with my mates.
“It’s a very intelligent, not too physical league. A lot of the team are ex-first graders from various clubs in that 35 to 45-year-old age bracket. The legs don’t always do what the mind wants [grins].”
Jagarinec was a teenager when he took his first steps into coaching.
“When I was maybe 17 or 18, my brother’s under-10 team needed a coach. This was my first taste of coaching. It was more keeping the kids on the park, rotating them, trying to set up like a first-grade training session with eight or nine players. I was in the junior boys space for maybe a year or two. I can’t remember exactly the transition [to coaching women/girls] but I remember – while playing at the first grade level – going down to watch my little sister play.
“At BelNorth, maybe the under 9s or 10s, there was a father there and he was giving it a red hot go and so passionate. I’m sitting there and I was wearing my Canberra Croatia tracksuit and he asked ‘Do you know a little bit about football, can you help me run the warm up?’ And then a couple of weeks later [I was back] to watch her play again. And it was ‘Do you want to help me with this again?’. And then before I knew it, I was essentially deciding [between] should I be going to play today or do I want to go and help out coaching?
“A year after that, I was asked to take a team and it was during a crossroads in my playing career. Like I said, I was a decent player but was never going to make a living out of playing football, and [had] started my apprenticeship as a carpenter. Being on the tools all day and then trying to get to training really took a toll, so I took a year off playing football, and that allowed me to coach.
“My first official gig was the BelNorth under 10s or 11s [girls]. I hung out with them for three years, fell in love with coaching and being able to affect players, we had a pretty gifted team. They were asked to join Belconnen United when in 2006/2007 they wanted to have a few more feeder teams under the Belconnen umbrella. So we essentially had an Under-15 girls team playing State League 2 at Belconnen. Then after that, it was State League 1, and the following year in 2009, I’m halfway through the season when the coach moved on, and [all of a sudden] I’m in a first-grade role. I wasn’t looking for it, kind of fell into it.
“It was an era of football where there were probably three extremely dominant teams in Canberra and Belconnen wasn’t one of them. An era where you turned up playing one of those three teams knowing it’s going to be a tough day in the office.
“The quality of coaches was there [in the local women’s competition], just few and far between. There were those things that were not being taught, because people didn’t know [them]. There weren’t enough coaches dedicated to the female game.
“Then in 2010 I decided that I’m going to give it a bit of red hot go, and three people turned up to the first training. And I said, this is not me, we’re changing things. The rest is history from there.
Read here for Michaela Thornton’s memories from her Belconnen United days
“I reflect on [that time] a lot … I came into a space very much as a first-grade male player at a club like Canberra Croatia where we always had the best and got paid to even sit on the bench. When I shifted across to coaching the female space, I was very realistic but went and had a chat with the club. Historically Belconnen United always had a women’s team but was very heavily a men’s club. I didn’t make many friends on the board, I’ll be honest about that. But I never went in there and demanded to be the same as the boys either. Nor did I give expectations about what we were going to do you know, but there were baseline [issues] that I wouldn’t and didn’t accept.
“[For] the 2010 season I was handed a strip for the first-grade women’s that was four or five years old from under McKellar stadium and had mould on it. 3XL shirts, and that’s one of a million stories. Fortunately, at the time Mark O’Neill, former President of Capital Football, was at Belconnen. He was heavily involved with BelNorth too, he was probably one of the guys that kind of shifted me towards Belconnen. I think on reflection, he did see something in me as a coach and as a leader and someone that wanted to effect a little bit of change in that space.
“So I had him in my corner, and we went into war a little bit together. We didn’t always see eye to eye, I promise you that as well. But the change wasn’t to get anything to where the women are now; back then I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Rather, drawing a line in the sand to say, ‘You guys can have your thoughts on this and that, but you will not bully me’. And that kind of was the first domino. With the shirts, I went into the supplier and bought them myself [but the club took notice].
“The first four or five years at Belconnen United cost me a lot of money to coach. And it’s not about money. Still to this day, I don’t do it for the money.
“So it was like [at board level], whoa, this guy wants all this stuff. It wasn’t stupid stuff, it was the same colour cones and a strip that fit the ladies. So we kind of had to back it up. And that’s where my biggest strength is, on the park, manipulating the chess pieces, getting people to perform at their best. [Together with] the [right] kind of setup, the dominoes started falling. It was exciting after that.
“I think at Belconnen United, we were one of the first clubs to pay female athletes in Canberra. But we’re talking $20. Caitlin Munoz, 55 cap Matilda, had to train twice [weekly] and play and we had to win, then at the end of the year, she got paid $50.
I think the first season we paid maybe $1100-1200 worth of wages in a 20 odd round season. [It’s so little when] we look back, but it was also why Belco is where it is now in my opinion and still has a talent train coming through.
“Going back to when there were two or three people at training, I needed to change that mindset. How can we make this a job? Or how can we make this where I [as coach] have got a little bit of [player] accountability? We’ve got to start somewhere.
“Yes, I put a lot of [emphasis] on making sure my sessions were great, in my opinion. Players felt like they were coming for a purpose and not wasting their time. But I still needed to get them to the first, second, third training, and Mark O’Neill was big in helping that.
Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong (Canberra Times)
“I’m a firm believer that in the women’s game, [having] spent the last couple of years in the men’s first-grade coaching space, is that is the women want to continuously grow. The men want to know what’s next and how to do it, but women want to know what’s next after that, and then after that. It wasn’t by design [at Belconnen United], but the sentiment within our group was ‘We’ve done ten things this year. All right, we still want to do ten more things and then ten more’. Having that kind of effect and mindset with the players, they want us to stick around too. So it wasn’t that we were doing anything special or anything that anyone else couldn’t do, it was more having dedicated, driven people who wanted to be there.”
As was the case with Melbourne City’s dominance when they joined the W-League, that kind of success puts other teams on notice, with the net effect of raising the standard of the entire NPLW competition. Along the way, Jagarinec had a direct hand in a number of his charges graduating into the W-League, something which also gives him great satisfaction (he and Njegosh Popovich are still doing this at Canberra United).
“There’s probably five or six, to be honest, that I was directly involved in. I’ve been fortunate enough over my coaching career at Belconnen, and in ACT and NTC teams [NTC is the National Talent Challenge, which offers U18 girls the opportunity to impress Australian national team scouts] to influence probably 15 or 16 of the A-League Women players’ journeys. Not a huge effect, but an effect. With five or six of those I had a good couple of years or more with them, and was fortunate to have had that.”
Jagarinec cites Lauren Keir (read her view on working with Jagarinec here) and Madelyn Whittall in particular as two players with whom he spent many years coaching and seeing them grow into national league standard.
“Lauren Keir and Maddie Whittall are the two main ones that I’ve known since they were babies. [Maddie] was an 11-12 year old at Belconnen – a little cheeky, loves a bit of banter, wears her heart on her sleeve. She came in off the back of a couple of years off [Whittall played for Canberra United in 2017/18 and 2018/19], she had a weapon of a season with Canberra Olympic, especially the back end of the season. The load in the A-League environment [initially] hurt her a little bit from a physical point of view. So we’re cautiously managing her loads to build her up to a level, but she’ll soon be featured on a bench or in a starting spot. Anytime now; physically and mentally she’s ready, so now it’s just waiting for the right time tactically.” (Whittall made her first appearance of the 2023/24 season against Sydney FC on January 3rd).
“Having been fortunate to have won trophies, success measures grow as I mature as a coach. Having Whittall in this environment with me gives me a great level of satisfaction [and is part] of why I continue to coach.”
Check back soon for Part 2, with Ant’s thoughts on the current Canberra United season!
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