When the 2026 AFLW season rolls around later this year, it will be a vastly different looking Geelong outfit that takes to the field.
Seven new players joined the club during the off-season which included draftees, experienced trade acquisitions, free agency signings and even a new Irish recruit.
The changes were not limited to the playing group, with the Cats also reshaping their coaching panel with the likes of Sam Simpson and Ryan Pendlebury joining as assistant coaches for 2026.
But the most notable shift came right at the top, with Mick Stinear taking the reins as Geelong's head coach after a long and successful tenure at Melbourne.
Sitting down with Cats Media for the first time, Stinear outlined his goals for 2026 and gave Geelong supporters plenty to get excited about when the new campaign arrives.
"Going back to your question about what I noticed externally, it is the connection," Stinear said.
"The genuine care and quality people at the club and in particular the women's program, they are a pretty tight group. So we want to leverage off that, we want to take that and take it into high performance and the way we play the game.
"I think being unmistakably Geelong is something we want to be really proud of, so we want to build that in the off-season and then hopefully that is the product that our fans get to see come August when the season starts.
"We want to be back playing Finals, we want to be competing with the best teams in the competition and we want to be a team that our fans can rely on.
"We have got all of that ahead of us, we are going to embrace it as a team and we really want our fans to show up."
Stinear brings with him an outstanding coaching resume, as he looks to re-establish the Cats as a premiership contender heading into his first season at the club.
Across nine seasons and over 100 games in charge, the master coach steered Melbourne to an inaugural AFLW premiership and multiple Finals campaigns.
Overall, he finished his tenure with an incredible 73.7% win rate, which included 38 victories from his last 48 matches at the helm.
Looking to bring that same successful culture to Geelong, Stinear outlined the differences in the Cats' program that will hold them in good stead heading into 2026.
"Off the back of the Finals a couple of years ago, it has been a bit of a rough run with injuries and we had some inconsistency with staff," Stinear admitted.
"But now I feel like we are really well resourced, Dom Condo has done a fantastic job of setting up the program. I feel like we are in a really good spot now to lay a strong foundation, but emphasis on the little things like how we want to play.
"It might be as simple as our contest method and how we want to move the ball, how we want to defend, but be really clear with how we want to play and reinforce that. So that is our opportunity over the next couple of months, to just be really clear and deliberate with how we want to play and then the fundamentals, the basics that are going to allow us to execute.
"Also making sure that the players are clear and player to player they are keeping each other accountable, but coaches and players need to all be on the same page with the basics of how we want to play. When we are exposed to pressure in that high performance environment, we can actually execute because we have done it consistently for a period of time."
