Lugg, 27, had played senior football at the highest level that existed before the national women’s league began last year – alongside Crows co-captain Chelsea Randall at Swan Districts and representing her state – but when the Crows began their premiership campaign last year Lugg was in the wilderness. Literally.

Lugg left football behind after joining the Army, being based near Albury-Wodonga on the Victoria-New South Wales border on the Murray, and when the AFLW was played her intake was shut off from the outside world while spending three months surviving in the bush.

Lugg returned to football when she was back from the months-long test of isolation, playing for the Riverina Lions in the Canberra league and it made her realise how much she loved the game.

Her training was limited to Wednesday games with the men’s Army team on the dedicated sports day and on Saturdays she had to either drive herself to Wagga, where her club was based, or Canberra.

Every second week she’d be up at 3am to drive to the nation’s capital to make it to a 10am game of football.

Lugg has a chuckle at the amount of driving when she looks back at it, but it brought more rewards than just playing the game.

One of her team-mates knew Adelaide coach Bec Goddard, who flew up to watch one of her games and liked enough of what she saw to take her in the AFLW draft.

“I was pretty lucky that Bec jumped on a plane and came over to a game in Canberra,” Lugg recalled. “At the end of the game she came over and said, ‘I can’t guarantee anything, but I think you should put your name in for the draft.’

“So I chucked my name in for the draft because that was my dream, to play in the AFLW.”

Lugg, who is an electrician by trade, is grateful to the Army, which helped her transfer to the Edinburgh base in South Australia for the eight weeks of the AFLW season.

“The Army’s been really good to me,” Lugg said. “They pulled some strings to help me so that I can work and play footy at the same time, and they let me finish in time so that I can make it to training.

“I had to kind of sacrifice a year of footy to join the army but I was prepared to do that to get a real good job.

“I knew that once I had settled in I could go back to football.”

She made an immediate impact when she arrived at West Lakes: Lugg won the 2km time trial on the club’s first night of the pre-season.

Lugg also impressed during with her skills and in the trial match against Fremantle, playing as a pacy winger.