Now in this fourth season in charge of Fever, Ryan becomes just the second coach to reach the milestone. The other his predecessor and Diamonds Coach Stacey Marinkovich.
Asked this week how he reflects on that whirlwind first 12 months in charge, Ryan said: “It feels like a distant memory to be honest and a lot's happened since then.
“Coming into the club in my initial stages, it was really learning the lay of the land and appreciating how well resourced and how well structured the club and the systems were and that just gave me great confidence to be able to get to work and add value to whatever was already in place.
“The challenges in that first year were never ending with COVID and all of those different challenges that were around back in the day.
“Certainly, I have really fond memories of stepping into something that was well established and being able to bring my own unique flavour to it but also try and add value to something that was already in a really healthy spot.”
Ryan looks back on the memory of winning the Suncorp Super Netball trophy in 2022 and said it still felt surreal.
“When you dream for so long of that moment coming to life, it always is quite bizarre in the moment,” he said.
“I think in the last couple of weeks of the 2022 season, we were in a way really building to that moment. So, I felt like a natural progression for where we had we'd been in recent times.”
Since that magical moment, Fever has experienced two successive preliminary final defeats to the Swifts and Vixens, both by one-goal.
Ryan said: “The challenge of this job is never ending and this is the best netball league in the world and every game and every week is tough.
“To have the sustained success that we have as a club and compete in finals as often as we have is something that we're very proud of. We do want to be seen as a club that is feared and revered and putting ourselves in those positions at the end of the season to be in contention is something that is really important to us.
“We pride ourselves on being a club that has a winning culture and irrespective of personnel changes or whatever happens year upon year, we want to make sure that we stay in that place and that we're really committed to being a team that chases winning and chases success as often as we can.”
Ryan and the team have been clear that 2025 is about going that one step further.
“It's really important at start of the season that you have a vision for where you want to get the team to and what the processes are in place to actually bring that vision and that plan to life.
“We were able to reflect on 2024 as a season that put us in a really competitive position to win and potentially at our very best, we were as good as the next team in the competition to win it.
“It was really about just identifying those really small little key shifts in all different parts of our game, our program, our interactions, all of those types of things that you review thoroughly and ensuring that we put ourselves in those moments as often as we can to try and find those little shifts.
“It’s about having a clear vision and actioning those processes every single time you're together as a team to hope that your past experiences can be a great source of inspiration and drive to move forward.”
Ryan and Fever travel to Brisbane to face a new-look Queensland Firebirds for the Coach’s 50th Game. For the first time in Ryan’s reign, Fever enters Round Two having lost their opening game.
“It is a really important week for us in terms of we're not going to throw away the 22 weeks of pre-season that we had and think that we have to reinvent the wheel or start all over again.
“We really need to back in all of our processes that have led us to this point and simply be better at doing what we're good at and bringing our game plan to life is the first step. But just working harder for each other, working smarter with ball in hand and playing to the standards that we know makes us a very hard team to beat.
“We just want to get back out there on the court and play some netball that's the West Coast Fever style.”
