SA Weekend cover story: Crows coach Matthew Nicks reveals one of his biggest worries in the years ahead — and it isn’t just about what happens on the footy field
He led Adelaide to its first ever wooden spoon, but Crows coach Matthew Nicks has revealed one of his biggest worries this season isn’t just related to what happens on the football field.
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Matthew Nicks stops to compose himself. He is midway through his speech at the Crows’ club champion award night and has come to the moment he knew might trip him up.
“We were all challenged by the footy bubble protocols and, on behalf of our players and staff, we give thanks to our partners,” he says. And there, in front of hundreds of the Crows faithful, players, staff, officials and, most importantly, his partner Courtney, he stops. For nearly 10 seconds. To fight back the tears.
When he had been preparing his words beforehand, he had anticipated that his emotions might overflow as he tried to vocalise the gratitude he felt to the families who supported the players and staff through one of the most extraordinary AFL seasons on record.
He had been right. Eventually though, he pulls himself together.
“I can sometimes go there,” he continues after scratching his face.
“Our partners, our children, our families – you have made an emotional sacrifice and been an incredible support. I get the chance to thank Courts in person, who has been amazing this year. I know you are looking forward to the day and a half I have off between the 2020 and 2021 season.”
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The room at the Convention Centre laughs at the last bit, but Nicks is only half-joking. He admits that he needs to work on his work-life balance. But more on that later.
After spending nearly all of his adult life in and around the blokey world of football clubs, Nicks, now 45, had long promised himself that if he ever won a senior coaching gig he would institute one major change. He wanted to make the footy club a place where wives and children were welcome. A place where players and coaches would feel comfortable bringing their kids to work with them.
And then, in his first year in the job, COVID happened. The world changed. And all AFL players and coaches were forced to live in a bubble. They couldn’t even go to shops, cafes or restaurants, let alone invite their families to visit their workplace.
Nicks couldn’t even take his children Ethan, 6, Isla, 5, and Harry, 2, to the playground. Courtney, his fiance of more than eight years, was left to bear the bulk of the family duties.
“We had one of the greatest blow up castles you would have ever seen in the backyard and part of that is because of what we couldn’t do last year,” he says.
“It was incredible that Courtney could take the kids to the playground and go around to people’s houses and spend time there but I wasn’t allowed. So I missed birthday parties for some of the other kids from kindy and so on, and that’s stuff that cuts you a bit when you aren’t able to go – I’m genuinely just sitting at home on the couch thinking ‘What am I doing’.”
Nicks and the Crows are no longer hemmed in by the COVID bubble, but the concerns about just how much time he spends with his kids remain.
“My partner is a genius, she works so well with our kids,” Nicks says. “I’d love to spend more time with them. My job, as it’s called, is an interesting one because it isn’t a job for me. I love what I do and Courtney and I often talk about that. So I know when I get back at 7.30 at night she understands that there are things that I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve had to work through and make sure I’m on top of everything.
“I’ve worked long hours. Even as an assistant coach (at GWS) I worked long hours, and when I was a line coach (at Port Adelaide), because I just love it.
“I’m one of those people who is lucky enough to have a job that I love so coming to work is not a chore.
“The one thing I probably worry a little bit about is the time that I’m able to spend with my kids. I do a lot of reading about more experienced and older coaches that just say ‘Make sure you spend time with your children’.”
It is something Nicks concedes he has to work on more. His children are not yet playing competitive sport, and he wants to be there on the sidelines supporting them when they do. He knows that will be a challenge as he tries to get the best out of his other “44 kids” at West Lakes. Still, he’s adamant both he and his fellow coaches need to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
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“I saw a quote from Bruce Arians (coach of Superbowl winners Tampa Bay in the NFL) the other day. He told his staff that if they ever missed a kids’ footy or soccer match, a sporting event or a recital, anything like that (because of work), he would sack them,” Nicks says.
“And I’m a little bit of the same. I talk to my coaches all the time about sharpening the saw; make sure you aren’t just hacking away with a blunt saw.
“You have to get a rest and get away and spend time with your family because we need you at your best. We do a lot of work in that space but I need to work on it more than most though.”
So on the stage at the Convention Centre, as Nicks thanked others for their efforts in 2020, his own worries hit home.
“I think it was probably a culmination of that,” he says.
“I think about the footy/life balance and it concerns me because I read so much. I love looking at other sports, and I look at the best coaches all around the world and they drive home the family, family, family part. I drive it myself with my staff but I don’t know if I live it, so there was a bit of a build-up there. It was a long season that was draining and that speech almost completed that season to say, ‘Right, now let’s move on’.”
Nicks came to West Lakes from the senior assistant position at GWS to mend a club accused of lacking culture after it had fallen from grand finalists in 2017 to consecutive seasons outside the top eight.
The Crows were openly talking about their first ever rebuild.
The fallout from a 2018 pre-season camp splintered the playing group and created a level of distrust between them and the football administration.
A club that had been admired for the way it handled the tragic death of senior coach Phil Walsh in 2015 was being labelled as arrogant, and players such Eddie Betts, Hugh Greenwood, Alex Keath and Josh Jenkins left for other clubs.
Comments from club legend and board member Mark Ricciuto that disgruntled fans who didn’t agree with the club’s process “don’t need to barrack for the footy club” had supporters raging.
Nicks was appointed just days after AFL Hall of Famer Jason Dunstall, Fremantle great Matthew Pavlich, high-performance expert Tim Gabbert and psychologist Jonah Oliver delivered a report which found a culture of self-survival had taken over at the club.
“If we are looking at our number one philosophy and value, I maybe felt coming in it wasn’t our teammates,” he says of West Lakes when he arrived. “I felt our guys were very professional, a lot of them worked very hard on their craft and what they wanted to do. My philosophy is different to that. I believe we will get better as a group by helping each other get better and by putting time into others. What happens with that is everyone connects and you go together. I think it is a lot easier to work together than work on your own.”
But working together became difficult in 2020 when the AFL enforced strict social distancing regulations. Players were only allowed to train in small groups, sometimes as few as eight to a group. During long periods of time, the biggest contact sessions were four-on-four and captain Rory Sloane went weeks without training with his predecessor Taylor Walker.
“The biggest challenge was something you’d never, never predict coming in as a new coach,” Nicks says.
No-one expected the rebuilding Crows to do too much in 2020. Not a single AFL captain picked them to play finals. But few would have predicted the Crows to go 0-13 before finally claiming their first win under Nicks – in September.
Before the season started, Nicks and his leadership group contemplated what they would do if they started the season 0-5.
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If they ever got to that point, they reasoned, they would take stock and try to understand how, if at all, they could remedy the situation.
“Because it is not necessarily you doing something wrong,” he says. “It might be on a game day that you are getting a few things here and there just not quite where you need it.
“You are playing against high quality teams and the competition is so even. But no, we would never have picked to be 0-13. As a new coach coming in I had ways that I knew we were going to train and work on our philosophy and values, and what style of footy we were able to play – we were unable to do that.”
Contributing to this inability to work on their game was the fallout from a highly publicised protocol breach in the Barossa as the league prepared to end its COVID hiatus. Sixteen players and assistant coach Ben Hart were in quarantine at the Novotel Resort and players were only allowed to train in pairs. But a group of eight players formed during a kicking drill at Tanunda Pines golf course and an eagle-eyed groundskeeper reported them.
The AFL found the breach “inadvertent” but slapped Hart with a six-week ban and the players with a suspended one-match sanction.
“We are a big club and with that comes a lot of support but also a lot of scrutiny,” Nicks says. “Would I change that? No. I wouldn’t think what we did was the best for our playing group.
“Unfortunately, a mistake happened which was blown up into something that was a lot larger than it was.
“What it did do – it put us on watch. We were on notice from that and in the end we went above and beyond any protocols to make sure we were doing the right thing.”
Nicks says a running joke is that they “don’t want to win COVID again” this year.
“We finished last in the footy and maybe won COVID,” he jokes. “We want to turn that around this year.
“We want to get our on field performance back to where it needs to be whilst also looking after the community.”
After Walker missed a shot on the siren which would have given them victory against Sydney in Round 1, the Crows were smashed by 75-points by Port Adelaide and then recorded a 53-point defeat to Gold Coast, the first time they had ever lost to the Suns.
The losses kept coming and they hit rock bottom with a humiliating 69-point loss to 17th-placed North Melbourne in Round 9.
That loss ensured the Crows would go more than 12 months without a win, and when he fronted the media post game, Nicks felt compelled to apologise to Adelaide fans.
“I have a line that I use a lot,” Nicks says. “It’s one that I strongly believe in: you are never that good and you are never that bad. We play in a competition that is designed to be an even competition; we have a draft that evens it up and a salary cap in place so one team can’t pay more than another team.
“So there is that fine line from being a strong side and struggling. I know that you are never that far away from being super competitive or getting up towards the top of the tree.
“At some points last year it might have seemed that we were miles away. After that North Melbourne game you think ‘How far away are we?’ and I’m apologising to our supporters for the performance we put out there, and it was a genuine apology because even as a playing group we were looking at each other and it was not what we were about.
“And three or four weeks after that we are putting out an amazing performance against Geelong, who are a top side. So it shows how close you can be and, even more importantly, how far away you can be as well.”
If the North loss was the low-point then just over three weeks later the performance against the high-flying Cats at Adelaide Oval, when Geelong didn’t kick clear until the last quarter, was the spark of life Nicks and his coaching staff had been looking for.
“If you spoke to any of our players, at 0-10 we were still positive about that we were actually getting better,” he says. “It wasn’t until the Geelong game (in Round 13) that we were able to click and that came off the back of actually being able to train as a full group.
“I didn’t see our game plan at all last year until late in the season so we were underperforming – but we weren’t playing the way that we wanted to play.
“So it wasn’t our game plan failing, it was our inability to coach that game plan and be consistent.”
The Crows ended a 16-game losing streak the following week against Hawthorn and gave Nicks his first win as senior coach. They then added two more wins for good measure, before toughing it out with eventual premiers Richmond in the final match.
This late-season change of form, plus the rise of youngsters such as Lachlan Sholl and Harry Schoenberg, has left the Crows hierarchy optimistic despite claiming the club’s first wooden spoon.
“Has it put us in a better position going forward? Yeah, I think it has,” Nicks says. “I think we have learnt a hell of a lot from last year. We were really humbled by what was a disappointing season. You could use the word ‘embarrassed’ at times and some of that came off the challenges that we were faced with.”
But surely the doubts kicked in as the losses piled up?
“To be honest, no. I never doubted what we were doing,” he says. “I’ve seen it work at more than one club as a player and as a coach. My beliefs are my beliefs. I’m not going to change those, I will always back them in. So I didn’t panic and there was no doubt. I guess if it gets to a point where we are again struggling to get results at some point, that is where the pressure comes and the outside noise gets louder.
“As a coach, if you get to that point and you don’t succeed I’m not going to change the way I coach because, ultimately, I’m confident in the game plan I’ve seen work elsewhere.”
Rob Snowdon drafted Nicks, who turned to football after breaking his leg playing soccer as a 14-year-old, from West Adelaide to the Sydney Swans in 1994. Nicks went on to play 175 games for the Swans, despite suffering another broken leg in his second training session.
“He is one of our extended family. He is one of our kids,” Snowdon says. “I just like his style. He’s a good young fella and in my time in footy I’ve met hundreds of them who are just good fellas.
“He is his own man and he has his own way. He is resilient, persistent and doesn’t give up, and I just like those people who don’t whinge and just get on with it.”
Yet Nicks admits he is a by-product of multiple mentors and is primarily influenced by coaches from other sports.
“That’s not taking away from AFL coaches. I have a massive amount of respect for every coach in the league at the moment,” he says, giving special mention to Hawthorn’s Alastair Clarkson and Sydney’s John Longmire.
Nicks has travelled extensively overseas and spent time in the inner sanctum of NFL side the Seattle Seahawks, where he admired the way coach Pete Carroll allowed the players to express themselves.
“Just these little small nuggets of gold you take from the places you have been to,” he says. “I really loved the way that he (Carroll) went about that and there are other parts of coaches that I take away as well. I had Ron Barassi as a first-year coach, although I didn’t do a lot under Ron. Then Rodney Eade, who was really strong tactically.
“Paul Roos, who was outstanding in terms of building relationships. So you sort of just learn a little bit. Ross Lyon was just really disciplined and put in the work. So I have taken a little bit from each.
“I also wasn’t the best footballer either so I had to concentrate on more than just playing, and I think that puts you in a better place as well.”
It is this ability to overcome the hurdles along the way that has Snowdon confident in Nicks’s ability to make the Crows’ rebuild a success.
“Last year was a very different year but forgetting the scoreboard and results, I’m more interested in the person and I think as a person I think he handled it really well,” he says. “It was a new environment for him so everyone inside the hubs and COVID bubble had to respond in a different way, and I think he had to build strong relationships and earn the trust and the credits along the way. As the season went away I think everyone understood what he stood for and responded accordingly.”
In an interview soon after getting the Crows job, Nicks said the three-year deal he inked with Adelaide wasn’t the only contract in his football life. The other was an open-ended deal with friends and family to ensure he didn’t “lose his way”. They had the blessing to call him out on any change.
“No, not as yet. Nobody has pulled me up as yet,” he tells SAWeekend. “A lot of that was around if performance was going really well and I was getting ahead of myself or if I wasn’t listening, I wasn’t being inclusive and open.
“Last year was such a challenging year I didn’t really get an opportunity to do any of that. I definitely wasn’t getting ahead of myself, so I haven’t had that contract pulled out yet, which is a good thing.
“It would be nice for us to get to a point where we perform really well as a group and I’m really pleased with where the group is at the moment.
“I know it is a matter of time but I’m confident you will see those performances come and hopefully I can still not have those contracts pulled out.”
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