Inside and Out
Archie Mac |Published: 2025
Pages: 312
Author: Phillips, Erin and Lane, Samantha
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Rating: 4 stars
Erin Phillips achieved something that is becoming almost impossible for men and more and more difficult for women. That is to play at the top level in two sports. In Phillips case basketball and Australian Rules Football.
If you purchase Inside and Out, expecting a brief outline of her sporting dreams as a kid and eventually how she reached them despite setbacks you will be only half sated. Inside and Out, is a raw account of Phillips entire life, from ambiguity about her sexuality to body dysmorphia, to her decision to start a family in a same sex relationship. The latter traces the heartbreak, cost, and repeated disappointment that process often entails.
The honesty in this autobiography is something that I was not expecting and a rare commodity especially for an elite sports star. Phillips’s is open about her identity when a young girl, often being teased by her peers for her boyish appearance. This possibly led to her suffering body dysmorphia as an adult. Despite possessing a figure most would aspire to, Phillips writes about her fixation about not having a six pack. This led to expensive diet pills, the thought of cutting her stomach to ensure a ‘tummy tuck’ and eventually seeking cosmetic surgery. Thankfully the doctor she approached in the US for the ‘tummy tuck’ declined to operate, stating there was nothing to tuck.
Despite Phillips playing basketball around the world at the highest level and representing her country at two Olympics, you always have the feeling Phillips would have traded it all in for a long career in the Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW). By the time the opportunity to play in the inaugural season of the AFLW presented, Phillips had already had numerous knee operations and was rapidly reaching the end of her professional basketball career. In the end her age and knees proved no impediment, with Phillips dominating the AFLW and winning every award on offer. From All Australian Selection x3, to best player in the competition x2, and best on ground in two of her three flags with the Adelaide Crows.
I thoroughly enjoyed the AFLW chapters as well as her life long love affair with the game of Aussie Rules. Phillips’s father is a footy legend of the Port Adelaide football club, and in her last two seasons of AFLW, Phillips was able to transfer to Port and don her father’s famous number 22 Guernsey. Still, if truth be told, Phillps’s basketball career in world terms is probably where her fame rests. Phillips played in the toughest basket ball competition in the world – The Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL). Two titles and three WNBL Top Five selections indicate the talent Phillips possessed in that sport. Phillips, as most sports stars do, had some regrets, but the one you can still sense, from reading her book, was being left out of the London Olympics. So upset was Phillips with this rebuff, she was unable to watch any part of the London Games.
Basketball provided Phillips with a lot. World travel, fame, meeting a president – Obama, it could have been two, but Phillips declined the opportunity to meet Donald Trump. Perhaps with hindsight, the biggest positive for Phillips was meeting her life partner.
This is a great read for everybody, but especially should be read by all young women wanting to peruse a sporting career. Don’t miss it!
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