Played at Pride Park, the new-look side found it hard to crack the visitor's defence, something Vipers coach Marty Lynden pointed to.

"I take nothing away from Bathurst. I thought defensively they were excellent," he said.

"We're a new team and we haven't had a whole lot of training sessions together and I think that showed. We got to the last quarter and we started clicking a little bit, but it will come."

Although they are the defending premiers, Lynden said they'd lost close to ten players from the 2021 side.

"It's a bit hard to compare to last season," he said.

"All teams are the same in that they're quite different. I wasn't really going in with any sought of ideas of what we'll be like. I hadn't set any expectations until we played out first game and now we can see the things we need to work on."

With a new-look team featuring players from rugby union, league tag and soccer, Platypi coach Ken Grimshaw wasn't expecting much from his team, so understandably he was thrilled with the opening round win.

"I said to the girls in the warm up, we've not got expectations on our team," he said.

"It's a brand new team, so we thought we'll see what we can do when we're out there. They turned out really good in the end.

"Obviously Vipers are a really good side and they've won the comp for the past two years are we were expecting a tough battle.

"The score didn't really expect how the game was played. It was a really good contest from both teams."

Grimshaw also pointed to his side's defence.

"I was really happy for the girls. You could see the pre-season training, as far as our defence, worked 100 per cent. So it was really pleasing for them," he said.

"We had a lot of good early ball. I think they had a good couple of shots at us but we defended it. Soon as we went up the other end, we scored.

"That was a really good mindset for the girls. We knew that if we work really hard in defence, once we get up the other end, we can do something with the footy.

"I think Molly Kennedy charged over for the first try, taking two or three players over the line with her. That really inspired the forwards because [Vipers] are really strong in the forwards.

"But our girls matched it with them in the middle, which made it easy for our outside backs to run some footy. They looked really good when running the ball."

In under 13s Vipers lost 30-28, but the next three matches all went to the way of the home side - 22-18 in under 15s, 56-4 in under 17s and 70-0 in under 19s.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: