Women's Giants just getting started

Featured image: Madeleine Clark @madeleineclarkmedia

Jaymi Worthington is proud of how the Goldfields Giants have built themselves up to be a finals NBL1 West team, how the local community is right behind them ahead of a potential home final and having the raging MVP favourite showing the way too in 2026.

It has been a slow build for the Giants since joining the NBL1 West back in 2022 and even prior to that they had to prove themselves to earn a place in the competition, but they now have grown into a finals bound team in 2026 and coach Worthington has been at the forefront of it.

It's now at a point where the Giants women are the show to watch in Kalgoorlie and last Saturday night they played last inside Evolution Mining Stadium against the Joondalup Wolves because they are the main event in town.

And now having locked in a first finals appearance this season, they are on track to also host a final in the first week which would be another first. It would be a tremendous showcase of women's basketball for them to host a standalone fixture inside the new stadium with a packed house sure to turn out.

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Coach Worthington is now in her third season as head coach with the Giants and has done a tremendous job of finding high-quality imports Sierra Moore and Delaynie Byrne along with Hazelle Yam and Lexi Pana.

But there's also been shrewd recruiting like that of captain Rachel Pettit and then there's the young core led by the emerging Chloe Zorzi that are showing the way too.

She has proven herself a coach of quality too and has been nominated as Coach of the Year in 2026. While there's still a bit to fall into place, nothing would make her prouder than if Goldfields gets to not only play a first final next week, but to do it at home.

"If we win this week obviously it's set but it's going to come down to points if we don't and Lakeside will have a massive win and we'd need a massive loss for us to drop down so fingers crossed we can get over the line and not worry about any of that," Worthington said.

"Having a home final here would just be an amazing reward for all the effort that's gone into the season from the whole community.

"Our sponsors have been there from the very beginning and some we've had since the start of when I first started coaching, and there's sponsors who just love what the women's program is about in Kal.

"I'd just love to be able to able to reward the sponsors, the volunteers and all the crowd that have supported from ever since I started coaching. It would be massive for the Goldfields community if we can get a home final and they get to watch us play in the new stadium."

What it means to reach finals

It was quite the journey for the Giants to just get to have a women's team in the NBL1 West. Then in that first season in 2022, they finished impressively winning five of the last eight games to only miss the finals narrowly.

The past three years have been challenging with just the 11 wins from 60 games, but it was a learning curve the past two seasons for Worthington as coach and now things have all come together in 2026.

They made a blistering start to the season winning seven of the first 10 games. There has been some challenges since especially when superstar Sierra Moore suffered an ankle injury, but it hasn’t stopped them locking in a playoff spot.

They are now 9-10 with one game to go and sitting sixth and a good chance to stay there to earn a home final.

Just to have a playoff spot locked away is something that Worthington knows means a lot to the whole community in Kalgoorlie-Boulder.

"I think that our first and foremost goal for this season was to make the playoffs and ever since I've coached that's been our goal just to make that leap I guess to compete for the top eight," Worthington said.

"With our recruiting we knew that we needed to get some high quality imports and then sort of fill in those spaces around that and have girls that can play their role within the group.

"I think that this season particularly at the beginning, we probably surpassed even our expectations when we started really well and were sitting in the top four at one point.

"I guess it's just a lot of reward for a culmination of years of trying to get something that works and it's something that the whole of the Giants committee as well has worked with me in doing that.

"I guess it's nice that we're actually finally in a position where we can reward the committee members, reward all the volunteers that help us get here and reward all the crowd as well that has supported us over the years.

"Even though we weren’t really winning many games last season or the season before, we've always had people who want to come watching us because we've always had a fairly big local contingent in our squad.

"There's always people wanting to see those girls do really well so it's just so nice that we've been able to get into the top eight this season."

How important it is to have women's team

In the bigger picture, it might have come a bit later than it perhaps should for the Giants to have a women's team in the competition given the men were part of the start up of the SBL back in 1989 and went on to win championships in 2007 and 2008, and make Grand Finals in 1995, 2004 and 2006.

However, sometimes the best things come to those that wait and it was the hard work and persistence of a lot of people, and then the Giants having to prove they could field a competitive women's team that saw it all come about.

Eventually ahead of the 2022 they were granted the license to play in the NBL1 West. Rob Thomson was coach for those first two seasons with Worthington since taking over and currently in her third in charge.

While life wasn’t made easy for Goldfields to join the league with a women's team, Worthington knows how much it means to so many people that they are in and now starting to thrive.

"Even when our men's team were put in there could have been a push then to have a women's team in the SBL but I think it came back to the lack of funding and probably that belief that they wouldn’t pull the crowds because you need the money coming to support the program," Worthington said.

"So to see us finally be able to put in a D-League team was the stepping stone and I wasn’t directly involved in that, but the work that's gone in from previous coaches and people that were involved, I was lucky enough to get on board the last season that we were in D-League when we made the Grand Final.

"Rob Thomson was coach at the time and Ryan Hough had a bit of a history with the men's Giants and they put forward the application for us to go into NBL1.

"I moved onto them to be an assistant coach and just the work that they put in even for the application was enormous and at that stage we had to prove that we were going to have to be competitive.

"We had to make the D-League Grand Final to show we could be competitive and now on the flipside, Geraldton are in a position where they're being told to have a women's team and that's the total opposite to a few years back when we had to prove that we could come into it.

"That shift is massive and it's so good for women's sport that there's finally that recognition that every club should have a women's side so that flip is pretty cool to see that we know that women's sport is being treated equally and getting promoted."

Stepping into role as head coach

Worthington was excited, honoured and proud when appointed coach of the Giants back ahead of the 2024 season, but it's been a steep learning curve as well.

After all, she's all of a sudden competing up against some of the best basketball minds not only across Western Australia, but the entire country including championship winners like Craig Mansfield, Vlad Alava, Russell Hann and Jonelle Morley.

She is constantly developing her coaching all the time and learning plenty along the way, but is thankful the Giants have put their faith in her and hopes that now they have qualified for the finals for the first time, that it's just the beginning of what's to come.

"Being able to take over as coach three years ago now, that was a very big learning experience for me and just coming from the background where I've coached a lot with junior development and locally," Worthington said.

"It's very much that I'm trying to learn on the run and get as much information as I can from the people around me, and Matt Van Pelt was great for me initially when he was coaching our men's team when I first came in.

"Anyone that I can sort of tap into and get some knowledge out of the guys that have coached at a high level, that's where I've been looking at and I just watch a lot of women's basketball as well.

"So just seeing the different styles and finally this year we've been able to get a team together that has been able to perform on the court. Even last season when we had Nici (Gilday), it was almost like we had to learn how to win because we hadn’t done a lot of it before.

"What Nici quickly saw that we had to learn how to win and she was a big part in helping our local girls get to that level, and now this year it's come to fruition a little bit and we're in this position where we're sitting sixth and now we're hungry for me.

"That's what we want, we want to just keep on improving and our goal was to keep on getting better even though it's tough when you're losing. Competing week in, week out was how we got to a point where we can now take it to the next level."

The presence of a genuine superstar

The missing piece that Worthington felt the Giants needed to make that next leap forward to be a finals contender was finding some genuine superstar level imports that they can then build around.

That did start last year with experienced point guard Nici Gilday willing to come to Kalgoorlie and help set things up for the future.

Then when Worthington had the chance to reach out to Sierra Moore, she knew she'd struck gold.

And as it turned out, the fact Worthington was the first coach in Australia to reach out to Moore after the feelers had been put out she would like to play in the NBL1, that planted the seed for what has now become quite the partnership.

Moore has fitted in perfectly at the Giants and should be crowned MVP come Saturday night having delivered a season made up of 24.0 points, 11.1 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.1 steals a game.

Not only that, but she's fully thrown herself into the community and wants to help the Giants win above everything else and Worthington can't speak more highly of her.

"It's really exciting because I think it's taken us a couple of years to even build a little bit of cred in that space to even be able to recruit the players that we want to be able to recruit," Worthington said.

"Obviously being in Kalgoorlie, it can be a hard place to recruit particularly the high-level Aussies just because of where we are. We need some guns to come and help us, and we need them at the start of the season because we can't afford to be playing catch up.

"We've been so lucky with Sierra where she's the type of player that doesn’t always come to a place like Australia because the money's just not there but it was such great timing for us where she wanted to play in Australia and I was the first one that reached out to her.

"Having someone of that calibre with all her experience, she's even teaching me things and it was similar with Nici last year. It's so important for us and it's just been such a massive get to have Sierra part of our group and we love just how competitive she is."

Having a cool-headed veteran

Another significant addition for the Giants over the past two seasons is experienced guard Rachel Pettit who has now stepped into the role as captain in 2026.

She's having a tremendous season on a number of fronts too including shooting the three ball at 37 per cent and having had three games along the way of knocking down five shots from the outside, and having hit 50 in total across the 19 games.

Having someone of her experience willing to move to Kalgoorlie to play with the Giants and then continue her teaching career too is another sign of how far the club has come on the women's front to Worthington.

"I did recruit her and we had her eye on Rach having had Jemma Gatti and Emma Klasztorny play for us in previous seasons and they'd always pinpointed her as someone who might come to Kal and it might work well with her teaching," Worthington said.

"I reached out to her and she sorted her job for herself, but she came to Kal to play for the Giants which was just the kind of players we wanted to attract who had been playing in the league for years.

"Just having that experience and someone that we knew was a great person as well so I'd only heard positive things about her and how she was as a teammate, and I've been so impressed with her ever since.

"Her shooting has improved out of sight this season and we've always known how well she can shoot, but she'll say herself that she didn’t shoot to her ability last season.

"But this year she's had some massive games and we can trust her to lock down a player defensive, to do all the one percenters and she's our captain this year too so you can see the leadership she's shown even coming to Kalgoorlie where she's slipped in so seamlessly."