Sarah Perkins keeps hers on her bedside table. It is also photographed in her mobile phone.

"It's the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I see before I got to bed," the Adelaide forward, a star of the inaugural AFL women's league season, said this week.

Each letter has the same sign off: "Love from Bec."

Bec Goddard, who won the prize post of first coach of Adelaide's first women's team is in so many ways a very modern coach. A new-wave thinker who sports thick-rimmed glasses, a cropped asymmetric hairdo, shocks of colour on her fingernails and hot-pink socks with her team uniform. Goddard plays piano, trumpet and guitar and this year will complete a degree in Persian dialect Farsi.

She also has an old-fashioned belief in the power of words and has drummed many mantras into her squad since it first assembled last November.

"We're not nervous, we're ready" is a favourite line of the 38-year-old Aussie rules coach, former player and umpire, who has put an Australian Federal Police career on hold while steering her Crows to Saturday's landmark AFLW grand final.

At the 2017 kick-off event for both the male and female Crows' sides, Goddard borrowed some words from a very famous Australian. John Farnham.

"We have the chance to turn the pages over," she said before an audience heavily represented by suited men.

"We will write what we wanna write ???"

And she does.

The taxidermy wing in the South Australian Museum was an unlikely setting for a gesture that would set up an unprecedented football season and quietly change lives.

The date was February 3, 2017. The occasion was the Adelaide Football Club's season launch.

But it wasn't until after the suit brigade dispersed that Goddard assembled her 27-woman team out the back. There (against a slightly surreal backdrop of stuffed animals from the museum's collection) she did something unexpected.

To the player list - geographically split between Adelaide and Darwin - Goddard distributed personalised letters. Each of them carefully folded.

Spool forward seven weeks, before the biggest footy match of all their lives. As Goddard's players awaited Gold Coast-bound flights in airport lounges ahead of their grand final against Brisbane they recounted, verbatim, lines that have guided them daily.

Perkins, who famously lost 35 kilograms after the infamous day she was overlooked at the main draft, doesn't share the contents of her pre-season message from Goddard. Not word for word. But she says: "it's along the lines of me needing to have confidence in myself. That she had confidence in me and that she believes that fate brought us together.

"Basically, I have that last line: 'fate brought us together', just constantly ticking in my head for when I get a little bit nervous and doubt myself."

Jess Sedunary, 25, openly shares the contents of her letter which, like Perkins, she reads daily:

"Dear Sedge,

You are a magnificent player and you are meant to be here. Play like you were born to.

Love from Bec"

Sedunary takes her note to every game, reads it before her goal-setting and team match reviews, and also has a copy photographed in her phone.

"Bec has given me the confidence to believe in myself and to be the player that I know I can be," she said.

"That note really enforces that. You know sometimes you can get really worried about what everyone thinks? The note really reassures me that I'm in the right place and on the right path ??? it reminds me that my coach really believes in me so I should really believe in myself."

Has she ever had a coach like Goddard?

Sedunary takes less than a split second to respond: "Never. Never."

Sally Riley is a Crows' vice-captain, Darwin-based and "veteran" of the team at 26. She is also a full-time physical education teacher who says she's learning mountains from Goddard's methods.

Riley doesn't share all the contents but fondly recalls the night in the museum when she remembers Goddard saying: "I've got a love letter for you all."

Riley keeps her original hard copy tucked away in her phone case.

"It has not left there since that night," she said this week.

"I pull it out and read it weekly. It finishes with: 'Enjoy everything that's about to happen. Love from Bec.'

"It hasn't left my possession, really. It's something I'll treasure forever.

"I'm a person who, at times, probably doesn't have the best self-belief. That's something I've got to work on. But even if it's just for a couple of seconds I can read that and think: 'Well, if my coach can say these things about me and she's got trust in me then it's about time I had the trust myself and my ability.' "

For Perkins, 23, who moved from Melbourne to Adelaide dreaming of opportunities that have since materialised, the relationship she has struck with the coach that made it possible has been life-changing.

"My mum has mentioned to me a couple of times that it's probably the happiest I've been in years ... So I'd say that moving to Adelaide is the best thing I've ever done."

"She just makes you feel at home," Perkins says of Goddard, "and as if you've got someone looking out for you."

WHO IS BEC GODDARD?

• 38. From Canberra, former football player, umpire, NEAFL coach, turned AFLW coach.
• Day job outside of AFLW: member of Australian Federal Police since 2001. Currently posted in anti-child exploitation unit. Goddard is on 'recreational' leave while she coaches in AFLW. 15 years with AFP and deployed to Bali after second bombings.
• Will graduate with Farsi language degree from ANU in July.
• Music: sings in a cover band, play guitar, trumpet and piano.
• Used to busk outside Manuka Oval when AFL came to town, singing St Kilda theme song.
• Other: had a media advisor role in Labor government in Canberra.
• Routines: paints nails to prevent nail biting. Wears hot pink socks day before AFLW game, has game day shoes. *
• Favourite sayings: "magnificent", "We're not nervous, we're ready." *
• Other football points: played for three clubs and coached eight clubs (women's and men's) before her AFLW appointment. Including: former assistant coach of Queanbeyan Tigers (men's); dual premiership coach of Eastlake women's team; assistant NEAFL coach (men's) for Ainslie; assistant coach SANFL women's state program and, assistant coach (men's team) SANFL Centre of Excellence Woodville-West Torrens Eagles; AFL football woman of the year 2015.
  * according to her players.