ESSENDON strength scientist Suki Hobson isn't exaggerating when she says the Bombers' fitness department faced a hugely challenging year.

Hobson, along with high performance manager Dean Robinson and their team, was confronted with an unprecedented amount of soft tissue injuries that simply wouldn't go away.

Every time the Bombers seemed to take a step forward, they lost one - or more - players to some sort of muscle strain.

The club is now reviewing what went wrong, and has been since January with evidence suggesting the injury problem ran deeper than this season alone.

"We've had four times the amount of injuries you'd normally have so we've had to work essentially four times as hard in lots of ways to get that done," Hobson told AFL.com.au.

"Nothing stopped it. We're all at a loss. This is none of our first jobs - we've all been around for a decent amount of time and we just couldn't stop it so we had to ride it out and get through it.

"I think we had our first game a while back where we didn't have an injury, and our runner did a calf. It got to the point where it was like, 'What can you do?'

"We did absolutely everything and it drove all of us absolutely crazy, as you can imagine."

This season wasn't the first time Hobson and Robinson worked together.

Before Robinson took up a role at Gold Coast for season 2011, the two worked together at Geelong where Hobson had her first full-time job at an AFL club.

Hobson, who has been nominated for the Football Woman of the Year award, which will be announced at Thursday's Grand Final Comedy Debate at Crown, has been involved in the sports fitness industry since 1999.

She is the only female in any code of football in the country working in her role.

Born in the United Kingdom, Hobson studied a degree in sports science and physiology at the University of Leeds before taking a keen interest in a module on the scientific principals of training in her final year.

She spent a day at Super League team Leeds Rhinos, where she saw how the aspects of her sports science education came together in one role. 

"It encompassed everything I was studying, all my interests," she said.

She was keen to pursue a career in the sports science industry, and got her start when tenacity paid off.

She rang Leeds and boldly asked to speak to the coach - a request that surprised both herself and then-coach Graham Murray when she was actually put through to his office.

"I was 19 or 20. Today, it would be like ringing up Essendon and asking to speak to James Hird," she said.

"I got put through and he asked, 'How did you get put through to me?', and I told him, 'Maybe you should ask your secretary'.

"But he had a good laugh and said I could come down for the day."

It was there she met strength and conditioning coach Edgar Curtis, and where she sat in the corner of the gym and realised that sort of job was what she wanted to do with her life.

She was given the opportunity to turn up at the club each day at 6am to work with the younger players, which was something she relished, before she served "basically an apprenticeship" with Prozone, a performance analysis company in Leeds.

While she was there, she was also volunteering in a range of coaching roles and spent all her spare time with strength and conditioning coaches from various sports.

Hobson worked with athletes from sporting clubs such as Manchester United, Arsenal and the English soccer team in the days before GPS tracking really became prevalent.

From there, it was off to the English Institute of Sport (EIS), where she worked with athletes from a range of different codes.

But a decision to pursue warmer pastures saw her seek a job in Australia, and after contacting Kelvin Giles, "the godfather of strength and conditioning", Hobson was offered the chance to relocate.

"He had ignored my first email so I emailed again … he responded with, 'There's a job for you if you're good enough'," she said.

"I had no idea if I'd be good enough, but I thought, what's the worst that can happen?"

"I'll have a fantastic holiday in Australia and travel around."

Giles was the head of strength and conditioning at the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS), and Hobson had been advised by a triathlon coach at the EIS he was in the top 10 of his field in Australia.

"I had asked him to put together a list of who he considered to be in the top 10, and I researched each of them and chose Kelvin to contact," she said.

"It's rare you find practitioners who have achieved in both Olympic and professional sports, and he was the standout to me."

The QAS was where she would remain for the next seven years, after earning a role there.

"Institutes are wonderful because you've got coaches from all over the world," Hobson said.

"I worked with the Chinese speed skating coach. We caught one word in three.

"But, it was amazing, and I was just so sure that all her athletes were going to break because they were doing so much work and they didn't.

"Those are things you just don't know until you see them."

Her work at the academy saw her delve into the rehabilitation of athletes to have undergone knee reconstructions.

Carlton forward Jarrad Waite was one AFL player who sought her counsel as he worked his way back from surgery in 2009.

She presented on her theories and experiences in knee rehab at a strength and conditioning conference in 2008, which is where she first met Robinson. 

"We just talked and talked. You find people you have parallels with and you share the same principals and philosophies," she said.

"He's very clever, a smart man. He bought me down to Geelong to work with Josh Hunt and Adam Varcoe, and then it was quite simple."

Hobson joined Geelong at the end of 2009, and then Essendon last year.

She's weathered the storm that was the Bombers' injury-hit year, and believes the review that is looking at the depth of the crisis and statistics ranging back over the past decade can only be a positive thing.

"We're looking at pioneering things to help with how we're going to deal with this problem because the main probability of having a soft tissue injury is having a previous one," she said.

"We've got to do things better than everyone else, and we've all got thoughts and ideas on that.

"I'm very excited to see how that unfolds over the next year and whether that works."

Other nominees for the Football Woman of the Year include Jo Del Prete (chair of the East Perth District Football Development Council), Belinda Duarte (director of the Korin Gamadji Institute), Cheryl Cates (president of the South Australian Women's Football League as a volunteer), Diana Taylor (director of the Geelong Football Club), and Peta Searle (assistant coach for VFL team Port Melbourne).

Previous winners of the award include the late Jill Lindsay, Sue Alberti, Irene Chatfield, Debbie Lee and Lesley McGrath.

Jennifer Witham is a reporter for AFL Media. Follow her on Twitter @AFL_JenWitham
 

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or its clubs