How a group of AFL heroes are back at the grassroots making other dreams come true
GLENUNGA Football Club seemed to be slowly fading when a powerful coalition of former stars went to work. What they achieved may just be a blueprint for lifting grassroots footy, says Michelangelo Rucci.
DAVID Pittman had a pretty good run in football.
Two AFL premierships as a player at Adelaide; another as an assistant coach with Port Adelaide. More than 100 games in the big league. Five calls for State-of-Origin duty. And, clearly not for fun, a stint on the AFL tribunal. It is a fair resume of service in Australian football.
“For (the past 20 years),” says Pittman, who put up his boots at the end of 1999, “I’ve heard the crack, ‘When am I going to give something back?’ ”
He is not alone.
And then the moment happened. On a Saturday afternoon as Pittman drove past the seemingly desolate Glenunga Football Club, he thought: “What has happened to that football club; why is it in Div. 5?”
By chance — or was it destiny? — the Rams were in the care of a new football director, one of Pittman’s former Norwood teammates, Richard Kelly.
“Glad you called,” Kelly responded after Pittman opened with the acerbic question: “What sort of club are you running?” Or words to that tone.
“Want to get involved?” added Kelly, hitting on that long-running challenge others had put on Pittman to give something back to the game.
So Pittman is now back in the game. He is the A-grade assistant coach (and a club sponsor) at Glenunga in the SA Amateur Football League (this year to be known as the Adelaide Footy League). The senior coach is former Richmond (AFL) and Port Adelaide (SANFL) player Brian Leys.
The coaching roster is a Who’s Who of Australian football — Brownlow Medallist Mark Ricciuto, Dale Lewis (ex-Sydney), Duncan Kellaway (Richmond), James Thiessen (Richmond and Adelaide), Ben Nelson (Carlton and Adelaide), Justin Staritski (Collingwood and North Melbourne), Dale Fleming (Hawthorn and Fitzroy), Chris Threadgold (Sturt) and Simon Dennis (Richmond). Plus the Crows’ long-serving physiotherapist, Kev Whitford.
It is quite an ensemble ... giving back to the game after many were initially reluctant to step back as yesterday’s heroes.
“You create an environment where people learn from coaches who have built up a strong understanding of the game,” says Leys, a 110-game player with Richmond and four-time SANFL premiership winner with Port Adelaide. “On-going development — and success — becomes a consequence of effective teaching ... and learning.”
But this extraordinary gathering of football experience and wisdom is very different to the usual script at the local footy club of “the boys” getting the gang back together to find more glory on the field. After all, this story begins in Siberia.
Seven years ago, Simon Austerberry was in the Russian province — for work while filing through Hong Kong — answering a call from Kelly to help the football club where Austerberry’s son was training for a place in the under-age teams.
At the time, there were about 50 players at Glenunga, a club that — because of its limited on-field success — was not an attractive drawcard. The Rams last played in the amateur league’s top division in 1961 and last won a senior flag in 1995.
“Now we are one of the fastest growing clubs in the nation, let alone the state,” Austerberry said.
This season, the Rams have 450 players — male and female — with teams in every age group from under-7s to under-16s, seniors and an over-35s team. As a revival, this is a model for more than Australian football.
“If there is a kid who wants to play, we will find a spot for him (or her),” Austerberry said.
The Glenunga Football Club is a template for community sport at a time when the SAAFL this week underlined the importance sporting clubs play in society, particularly to families.
Glenunga may take — Austerberry and Kelly certainly hope so — the always much-debated question on development programs in Australian football to a new level.
But it is the way Glenunga’s band of volunteers in the committee room has revived the Rams — and brought so many experienced football minds together — that overrides any manual on sporting club administration, development programs and coaching.
“Good structure. Good coaches. Good people,” Austerberry says. His mantra is to make Glenunga “a country club in the city” — with emphasis on community, the theme the SAAFL board has underlined for its core values after a searching review in the summer.
Austerberry’s vision for Glenunga — “What we stand for,” he says — works off the club’s Rams nickname: R (for respect to all), A (attitude), M (mates) and S (success).
The way Austerberry made mates of “old” footballers who were once rivals on the SANFL and AFL playing fields and now colleagues in Glenunga’s coaching panel is a story in itself.
When Ricciuto went to Glenunga — bringing his son Nick to be part of the junior teams — he was not introduced as a Brownlow Medallist or the former Crows captain or an AFL premiership player. He was not overwhelmed with hero worship.
“He was (just) Nick’s Dad,” said Austerberry. “And when you get people comfortable, they want to be involved in your football club. They want to pass on their knowledge.
“Too often in under-age football you have the best football minds on the sidelines watching. We’ve created an environment to get the best football brains back in the game.”
Ricciuto is coaching Glenunga’s under-12 girls team — which includes his daughter Sophie — this season. He has joined his Crows premiership teammates, Thiessen and Pittman, in giving back to the game’s grassroots.
And this Glenunga model may just change how Australian football nurtures its nursery of young footballers.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
I’m sorry; I’m a referee, not a coach.
French rugby referee ROMAIN POITE to the English players who, on direction from coach Eddie Jones, protested about Italy’s innovative ruck tactics in the Six Nations clash at Twickenham this week.
REALITY BITES
Silk road
(An open letter to Port Adelaide president David Koch)
Dear Kochie,
Please tell us it was a publicity stunt.
All this fuss about the Gold Coast boys wearing their “traditional” red-and-yellow jumper — the one that resembles the Chinese national flag — when history is made in Shanghai on May 14 surely was conspired with your old mate, Suns chairman Tony Cochrane. You wanted to get some attention while China seemed out of sight, out of mind? Surely.
While you certainly pushed your way into the media cycle — and even found sympathy (never a good thing in this case) from a Crows diehard such as David Penberthy during your regular radio gig with FIVEaa breakfast — the saga has reached the point of doing more harm than good to Port Adelaide and the “China Strategy”.
It is not good to pick a fight you cannot win (more so when the rival is a franchise of the AFL’s creation and has had headquarters parachute league football chief Mark Evans to Gold Coast as the Suns’ new chief executive. And Port Adelaide is not Collingwood that, by president Eddie McGuire’s huffing and puffing, can win any battle on jumpers).
Now let’s consider what this red-and-yellow jumper the Suns are adamant on wearing will do in Shanghai.
First, it seems there will be more Australians “on tour” than Shanghai residents when 16,000 file into the Jiangwan Sports Centre on May 14 to take their seats for the first AFL game played for premiership points outside Australia and New Zealand.
Will the locals be more focused on the red-and-gold jumpers worn by the Suns (because they are similar to the Chinese flag) or will they be trying to understand the ways of this Australian game that baffles so many off our shores?
Second, the “China Strategy” is built heavily on repeating the NBA basketball story of securing lucrative rights on Chinese television. Should there be a rule that demands every time an AFL game is exported to CCTV in Beijing there be a ban on Gold Coast home games because the Suns would have a “leg up” with that red-and-yellow jumper?
Third, is the move to China about finding fans — who may be moved on club colours — or signing corporate backers who invest on far-more meaningful grounds (as you have often said about sponsorship deals in Australia)?
And if you do close the book on Gold Coast after this historic game, who is the next pony to cough up a home game for $500,000 while Port Adelaide cannot sell any game from Adelaide Oval? Greater Western Sydney? With the Giants in a premiership window, it may be better to deal with Gold Coast in red rather than GWS drowning the Power in red numbers on the scoreboard in Shanghai.
See you on the Bund — in black, white and teal — Kochie. And remember, Port Adelaide was once the champion of campaigning for home teams to wear their home jumpers.
Big hit
KELLIE Gibson will not forget her return to Perth at the weekend for her first game in the AFLW. The Crows “marquee” player may well wonder if she had been labelled “Public Enemy No. 1” for the reception and attention she took from her Fremantle rivals.
And, as a meaningful example that the AFLW does not get the same attention as the AFL, very little has been made in the media of the off-the-ball incident that sent Gibson into a rage in the third term.
As one Fremantle player said at the end of the match in a boundary line interview with Fox Footy: “What happens on the field, stays on the field.”
This may explain why Gibson’s revealing note on Twitter on Tuesday disappeared very quickly: “Still winded from Sunday’s (punch) #behindtheplay”.
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au