Olympic coach Paul DeVitis was thrilled to see Jemma House return to light training but is not expecting to have one of the competition's most dangerous players back in action for a few weeks yet.
The Newcastle Jets striker is playing her third season with Olympic. She was key to their premiership-championship success in 2020, when House earned the league's leading goalscorer and player of the year honours.
House was again pivotal as Olympic finished second to Broadmeadow in a COVID-shortened 2021 but has been stuck on the sidelines so far this campaign due to a fractured tibia sustained towards the end of the national league season with the Jets.
"Jemma has had eight weeks since the injury," DeVitis told the Newcastle Herald on Wednesday. "She came to training last night and just did some light running by herself and said it felt good.
"We're not looking at her until the next round - she will need at least three or four weeks of training before we think about playing her - but Jemma has started the process."
After losing just a handful of games in their first two seasons in Northern NSW Football's top-flight women's competition, Olympic were beaten by Charlestown (4-1) then Maitland (5-0) in a slow start to their third campaign.
They posted their first win of the season in the shape of an emphatic 16-1 win over New Lambton in round four but have had their round-three and round-five games with Warners Bay and Mid Coast respectively postponed.
House's has been one of a string of injuries that has hit Olympic early in the season but DeVitis believes the squad has turned a corner in the past few weeks and would take confidence into what he expected to be two "difficult" back-to-back encounters in fourth-placed Adamstown (six points) on Sunday followed by leaders Broadmeadow (12) in round seven.
"In the first couple of weeks we were struggling for numbers with Covid and injuries and it just felt disrupted, and not having Jemma is such a big loss for the girls," DeVitis said.
"But people have really stepped up training and the morale is really high, so I'm expecting us to play well. We've been doing a lot of work in attack the last three or four weeks and you can see the confidence is growing.
"It's still early but these are two important games, especially Adamstown, in regards to the ladder. We haven't played as many games as anyone else, so we really need to pick up points.
"Adamstown are three points ahead of us so, if we can beat them and catch them and have a couple of games in hand on them, that will be important."
Olympic are in sixth position with three points and, along with seventh-placed Mid Coast (0), have played the least games of the eight teams in the competition.
