Ken Hinkley hails fresh start at Port Adelaide as player power drives team on pre-season camp
There is a “freshness” and “newness” about Port Adelaide, says coach Ken Hinkley — but that’s not to be confused with a rebuild because the Power still very much sees itself as a contender.
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Ken Hinkley is sitting inside the Noosa Tigers clubrooms, one eye on the cricket on TV, the other on his phone checking the weather to see if the 120mm of rain forecast for Sunday was still coming.
It’s hot, humid and sticky in Noosa and Port’s players are feeling every bit of three days of brutal training designed to send them into their Christmas break as fit and strong as possible.
Right now rain would bring relief. It would also go well with the feeling that has emanated from Alberton in the most significant off-season of Hinkley’s six years in charge.
There is, he says, a “freshness” and “newness” about Port Adelaide, but that’s not to be confused with a rebuild because the Power still very much sees itself as a contender after missing finals from an unmissable 11-4 start this season.
There is a new senior assistant coach in Michael Voss and new coaches across every line — Nathan Bassett (forward), Jarrad Schofield (midfield) and Brett Montgomery (defence) and by February the Power will have a new captain as well.
The playing list has 11 new faces since last season finished, taking the total number of recruits to 22 in two years.
This is still Hinkley’s team but they are doing things differently and the largely player-driven plan has become clearer after a series of team meetings on camp this week.
“There’s a newness about us and an ownership about the group that some decisions have been made that will give us an opportunity to own this and do it together,” Hinkley said.
“In today’s age it’s no good telling young people what they should be doing, you’ve got to make them inclusive to the decision making then help guide them and stay on track to what they want to be.
“This group wants to be good and my job and the coaches’ job is to guide them to be the people they say they want to be and the football team they say they want to be like.”
When Hinkley returned to work for his seventh pre-season, one of the things he was most excited about had nothing to do with football at all.
He learned that eight of his players and coaches had started a cricket team together and were playing a T20 comp on Tuesday nights.
While some clubs or coaches might put a stop to that, worried that one of their well-paid, highly valuable players might break a finger or roll an ankle, Hinkley was thrilled.
“That excites me that they are together in a social setting,” he said.
“It’s important they do that away from footy as well, I love that.”
By extension that’s a big reason the team finds itself in Noosa this week. With such significant list turnover and the new coaches arriving, Hinkley and Voss wanted the team to bond.
“We’re still training hard, doing solid beach and gym sessions, but we wanted to bring the group together because there are 22 new players in the last two years so that’s a significant churn and freshness to your football club,” he said.
“We want them to understand and get to know each other a little better and we’re not frightened of saying we need to build our connection as a football team.
“We all want to be on the same page and understand that if one part breaks, it reflects on all of us.
“But if we all agree — and we’ve been really inclusive with our build of the football program and the plan — it’s about having everyone connected.”
Hinkley is excited about 2019 but it took a little while for the pain of how 2018 finished to go away.
Immediately after Essendon put Port Adelaide out of its misery in Round 23 at Adelaide Oval, Hinkley described feeling “as wounded as I’ve felt in my time in footy”.
It was a big call from a man who played in three losing grand finals in four years from 1992-1995 but Hinkley is a straight-shooter who says what he thinks and feels.
“From my playing time which was 20 years ago you do heal, so maybe you’d be feeling something similar (at that time),” he said before Port’s afternoon training session on Friday.
“But in my time in coaching that was as wounded as I’d felt, we’d worked incredibly hard to get where we’d got to two thirds of the way through the season but we just couldn’t sustain it.
“We took some hits through that back five or six weeks of the year and that’s what I mean by it felt like we were really wounded by the end.
“And if we had of made our way in there (finals) we probably wouldn’t have made much difference because we were banged up and had taken a few too many.”
Perhaps why Hinkley felt such acute pain was because as a coach he is emotionally invested in every player.
“You feel responsible for the whole club,” said Hinkley, who has a 74-57 record at 56 per cent as an AFL coach — the exact same strike rate Mark Williams had in 12 years at the helm.
“As a player in my day you were individually focused — your outcomes were certainly about the team — but your focus was on getting yourself up week to week to perform.”
But he also stressed that he wasn’t dead and would do everything possible to work out why the season had “broken”.
“We spent significant time going through it, as you should, but we’re moving forward,” he says with stopwatch around his neck and hat and sunglasses by his side.
“We have all that information on board and really importantly now we’re using that plus the new personnel and information that’s come into the club to build something slightly different to what we’ve been doing in the past.”
Port Adelaide was a top-two clearance team and top six for contested ball in the competition last season but couldn’t put it on the scoreboard to win games.
Hinkley wanted to add “finish mid-forward” and Port went to the national draft and took Connor Rozee with Pick 5, Zak Butters with Pick 12 and Xavier Duursma with Pick 18.
That was after the trade period netted it a trio of South Australians coming home in Ryan Burton (Hawthorn), Sam Mayes (Brisbane) and Scott Lycett (West Coast) who came in for Jared Polec and Jasper Pittard (North Melbourne) and Chad Wingard (Hawthorn).
“We’re excited by our picks, what our recruiting team, Jason Cripps and Geoff Parker were able to do for the areas we were hoping to improve, we look like we’ve managed to bring in the right types,” Hinkley said.
“But they’ve still got to go on and become the players that we want them to become.”
Lycett is the big one. For the first time in three years Hinkley will play two genuine ruckmen in the same team — one an All-Australian and the other a premiership player.
“It was a conversation I had with myself when I saw Paddy Ryder play fit and firing — we’re a pretty good side,” Hinkley said.
“When I saw us without a Paddy Ryder fit and firing we were very reliant on a strong ruckman.
“He’s going on 31 Paddy and we want him to play a bit longer, we’d like him to be around for a few years.
“Billy (Frampton) played the last game, he did well as a forward, he’s still developing his craft as a ruckman, and when someone who’s been a Port Adelaide player (Lycett) says ‘I want to come home’ and he’s won a premiership, it was almost too good to refuse.
“We saw West Coast win the flag this year with two rucks and three or four power forwards, our list base as the moment with Lycett and Ryder, Dixon available and Todd Marshall going through his best pre-season, Westhoff is still around, there is some height in our side that we would like to use a bit more of.”
If Lycett was the biggest in then Wingard was the biggest out and Hinkley spoke to the All-Australian forward after the trade with Hawthorn was done.
“My message to Chad was I was really disappointed we were going in different directions,” he said.
“People might not like to hear it but I wished him all the best. I still feel disappointed that he wasn’t able to do what we needed him to do at Port Adelaide, and I thought it was mature by Chad who felt at the time that the right move for him was to challenge himself.
“We live with that, we look at Rozee, Butters and Duursma, the future and we don’t look too far back. We wish Chad all the best but we move on.”
Part of the trade with the Hawks involved Burton coming to Port Adelaide, giving Hinkley a player who can genuinely go forward or back and has aspirations to play in the midfield as well.
“We’ll let that unfold as he goes through but he’s clearly played some really good football as a rebounding half-back, I couldn’t see why we wouldn’t be looking to use him in some similar position,” Hinkley said.
“He’s got flexibility, he can play forward as he did as a junior, and I would think he’d like to see some growth in his own game through the midfield, that’s a possibility for him, but the one thing I do know he has finished fourth in a best-and-fairest on a half-back flank so it gives him a chance to start there.”
Bit of beach boxing 🥊 🥊 🥊 #weareportadelaide pic.twitter.com/Gnxu8wS5TB
— Port Adelaide FC (@PAFC) December 13, 2018
Amid all the change that’s unfolding at Port Adelaide, one of the most significant will be the players hearing a new voice on game day after captain Travis Boak decided it was time to step down after six years.
But Boak remains so crucial to Hinkley’s plan for Port Adelaide’s team to gel, if not for what he now says and does but for what he has stood for.
“It was quite remarkable that when you go to a football club that was at a position we were when Travis became captain, I became coach and Ollie (Wines) came to the club,” Hinkley said.
“It was a football club that was pretty low, it had been through J-Mac (John McCarthy’s passing), had lost a coach (Matthew Primus), KT (Keith Thomas) was new to the club, Travis just seemed to be the gel of the playing group.
“I remember one of the early meetings we sat in and did some player feedback and Trav got some feedback that was ‘we know you’re going to lead us one day’ and he hadn’t even been appointed yet.
“It was before my time when Trav really acknowledged himself as a Port Adelaide person, that he was going to lead this club, when he decided to stay when Geelong came knocking.
“He put the football club in front of all the opportunities to go back home, to his mum, his family, and he chose to stay at Port because he was invested that highly.”
So much has changed in Hinkley’s time at Port Adelaide but like Boak he remains as invested as ever and is determined to take everyone else with him.
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