Ingram, who went straight from Northern Territory league’s Pint Football Club to the Gold Coast-based club after winning a Darwin summer league premiership, has had an injury-interrupted season and missed eight games during the middle of the season.
She returned a month ago with a two-goal game and featured among her team’s best players.
Ingram was part of the team that lost by eight points to Aspley on the weekend after her team lost the qualifying final match with Bond University by 22 points a week earlier.
Southport finished the season with only one loss from its 14 matches, two games clear on top of the ladder, ahead of the second-ranked university team.
The only team the Sharks lost to was Bond University midway through the year, and Ingram did not play in that game.
Ingram was a member of the round-four Sharks team that allowed Bond just one goal for the match, winning by 34 points.
The 23-year-old Rochester product had a brilliant season with Pint in the NTFL before joining the Queensland team.
Instead of returning to VFL club Carlton, where she had spent two seasons, she decided to spend the winter in Queensland as she continued her osteopathy studies.
Ingram, whose sister Grace plays netball with Rochester, played nine games with Carlton in 2022 before making the move north to play back-to-back seasons.
This would have been her third grand final in the past 12 months, as she also played in a losing grand final team with Golden Square in the Central Victorian Football League.
Ingram first attracted the attention of talent scouts when she kicked 21 goals in 16 games and was regularly considered among Golden Square’s best players.
Southport had only 39 points scored against it in the opening five rounds of the season and, during this time, Ingram has twice featured in the best players.
Gracie Champion, the daughter of former Brisbane Lions star Richard, was part of the team humbled by Southport in the opening round of its season.
It is a second disappointment for Southport, which lost last year’s grand final by seven points to University of Queensland.
Southport had several former AFLW listed players in its ranks, including captain Jessica Malouf, who played at Carlton in 2018 — three years before Ingram arrived at the Blues.
