Life after AFL: Tayla and Nathan Broad head home for their next chapter

Tayla Broad can already picture it: coffee in one hand, a newborn snuggled in the pram and West Coast Highway stretching out ahead of their morning walk.

It’s a seemingly ordinary scene for some, but it represents a significant new chapter for the Perth-raised influencer and presenter who is moving back to Western Australia with husband and recently retired Richmond premiership player Nathan Broad and their three-year-old daughter Samara.

After years of squeezing family, friends and favourite Perth rituals into whirlwind visits home, soon there will be no strict itinerary to follow and no flight back to Melbourne waiting at the end.

“Every time we come back, we have an itinerary to see everyone and do all the things,” she says, while sitting in the glam chair at a special STM photo-shoot, her five-month bump on display.

“Whereas actually, just being able to live here and make decisions in the moment will be really nice.”

Coming home was never a question of if but when. It’s where the couple originally met through mutual friends when they were young, before reconnecting at the races in 2019. They’ve been inseparable since, and were married in the rolling hills of the New South Wales hinterlands in 2023.

They intended to return after Nathan’s football career and the plan became concrete when he signed what would be his final two-year contract with Richmond in 2024.

“Falling pregnant with my second cemented that decision as well. Perth has always been a place we wanted to raise our family, and I don’t think that was ever in doubt,” Broad says.

“We have stayed so persistent on ‘West is best’. Our friends are always like, ‘stop dishing on Melbourne!’ But they just don’t understand the pull you always have back to Perth. It has always felt like home.”

This time, she is coming back with a new appreciation for what having family close by can mean.

“I think I never really took it seriously when people say it takes a village to raise a family and a child, and it wasn’t until we had our firstborn Samara that I realised how much support would be beneficial,” she says.

Now grandparents, her brother and a wider support network will be close by. Her mum is wasting no time in putting in requests.

“She’s already like, ‘I’m taking this day off and I want Samara on this day’. I said, ‘You can have her every day’,” Broad laughs.

She has missed WA’s weather and ocean, too, which is a far cry from Melbourne’s four-seasons-in-a-day climate.

“I just feel most connected and most in my own body when I’m around the ocean and I’m around sunshine and pools,” she says.

“I’ve been to Europe and I’ve been to all these beautiful places, and I still say Perth has the most beautiful beaches in the world.”

The couple will only be a hop, skip and a jump from the sea once their new coastal suburb home is built. They purchased land in 2020 and have been sharing the journey through Instagram account @lynnbuild, with everything from mood board inspiration to ground level concrete slab pouring videos.

It’s long from completed, Broad says, and they will be living with her family in the meantime.

There are the big things she has missed — family, friends and warmer weather — but Broad finds herself equally excited by the ordinary rituals of living here.

She recalls a tradition with her mum, a hairdresser, who would mark the end of the frantic Christmas rush by booking several nights at Crown, where they would swim, relax and spend time together.

Now an ambassador for the hotel herself, Broad likes the symmetry of returning to a place threaded through her childhood memories while beginning another stage of her career. She plans to continue her influencer work and presenting in Perth.

Broad also co-hosts the Baby Talk Podcast with friend Lana Murphy, which they describe to be a judgement-free space to reflect on and navigate the raw, unedited reality of motherhood.

This pregnancy has been markedly different to her first.

Broad says it took longer to conceive, which is a conversation she’s willing to discuss in due course, and that a difficult first trimester left her violently ill and exhausted — sometimes with Samara holding back her hair as she vomited.

“There was this real pull between being so grateful that I was pregnant, but because I was so sick, I wasn’t really in the moment of enjoying it,” she says.

Now through the worst of it, she is finally enjoying the pregnancy, albeit with the more relaxed attitude of a second-time mum.

“You’re so excited about the first pregnancy. You go to all the scans and you check the size of the baby and what size fruit it is,” she laughs.

“And then by the second you’re like, ‘I have no idea what week I’m at. I just know that this child’s coming in December. I can feel him kicking in there. It’s all good’.”

In a spooky series of events, Broad and Nathan found out she was pregnant on his birthday, just as they had discovered they were expecting Samara on Broad’s own birthday. Samara had an inkling first.

“She woke up that morning and said, ‘Mummy’s got a baby in her tummy’,” Broad says.

Nathan tried to discourage her, conscious of how difficult the path to a second pregnancy had been, but Samara persisted.

“And then I took a pregnancy test that day and she was right. She knew.”

Now three, Samara has embraced the idea of becoming a big sister.

“I think she’ll actually think this child’s hers,” Broad laughs. “She’s already very territorial, and she’s like, ‘that’s my baby. My baby’s in that tummy’.”

For Nathan, the baby will arrive only months after the end of his AFL career, of which his retirement announcement was characteristically understated.

“He came off the field one day, walked over to me in the change rooms, and said, ‘Oh yeah, I just told everyone I was retiring’,” she says. “I always knew we were going home this year, but I just didn’t know he was just going to casually tell Triple M.”

While AFL shaped much of their life in Melbourne, and they’re very hush-hush on what is next career-wise for Nathan in Perth, Broad does not frame the move as an escape.

“We’re at a different stage in our life, Perth feels right,” she says.

Nathan loves being a “girl dad”, even sending her photos of the plaits he had done in Samara’s hair on the morning of the shoot. But soon there will be a new dynamic to learn.

“We don’t know how to change a boy’s nappy, so that should be fun to work out,” Broad chuckles.

Different, yes — but this time, the Broads will be figuring it out back home, with family nearby, the beach down the road and that West Coast Highway walk no longer something she has to imagine.