Trilleen Pomare says she wasn’t expecting anything at Friday night’s Force Awards Night and humbly paid tribute to her teammates for her Rebecca Clough medal and Members’ MVP gongs.
The long-time Force skipper capped an excellent 2025 SMARTECH Super Rugby Women’s season with the top individual award for the Club’s women’s team at Optus Stadium’s River View Room on Friday.
Pomare (74 votes) finished narrowly ahead of Anneka Stephens (71), with Tamika Jones in third.
“I'll be honest, I wasn't really expecting to get anything tonight,” Pomare said on Friday night.
“I just really enjoyed my season. I think I played alright, to be fair, but I just think I really enjoyed it which translated to the field.
“I think we had some good performances as a team, so stoked for sure. But I just think some of my teammates had some great seasons too.”
Pomare reflected on her 2025 season, where she lived alongside Wallaroos Cecilia Smith and Ashley Marsters who moved to the Force ahead of the new season.
“I think the culture that we built, we had a competitive nature at training,” she said.
“Positionally, we're fighting and competing against each other.
“But it's even better when you have healthy competition, where you have a friendship, or a teammate or a roommate, even, where you just get to go home and have a laugh.
“Leave footy at the footy field. And then when we go off, we just connect and try to have some fun.”
“We just have the funnest group. Honestly, if you get to be amongst these girls, you'll have a laugh. You'll figure out that they're pretty funny people and great human beings.”
Pomare has already been involved with the Wallaroos this year, ahead of the World Cup in England in August-September.
The inside-centre is hopeful of going to a third World Cup, but wasn’t getting ahead of herself with the internationals against New Zealand and Wales to come next month.
“I think if you look too far ahead and you think about World Cup, we’ve got Test matches before that, we’ve got camps before that,” she said.
“So I’m just taking it one day at a time, trying to get to the first camp, prepare as best as I can. I think one thing for me is I never really looked at international footy.
“I just look to try play some good footy here and bring as many friends as I could to that Wallaroos platform. I think we've done that well.
“You know, we've got Sammy (Wood), we've got Hera-Barb (Malcolm Heke), who got capped last year. That's probably my biggest achievement is bringing our local girls to that platform and getting them exposed.
“It’d been so long that we haven't had Wallaroos in the state. Now we go like 10 or so plus. We've got people who want to be here, want to be in our environment.
“I think that's a credit to a lot of these girls who aren’t up there getting an award, but they're here every single day training.”
