Cardiff Hawks: deep in rugby league heartland, Isaac Heeney’s junior club is searching for the next AFL superstar
Isaac Heeney has become the first AFL player from the Hunter to make the All-Australian team. His junior club is hoping he won’t be the last.
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Cardiff, NSW, is unlikely to register in the minds of many AFL enthusiasts. And equally so, for a long time the AFL was unlikely to have aroused much interest in Cardiff.
Sitting just to the northern shore of Lake Macquarie and around 20 minutes by car to Newcastle’s city centre, the suburb has long been associated with rugby league and soccer – the Hunter region’s most celebrated pursuits.
Home to rugby league clubs the Cardiff Cougars and Cobras, and soccer clubs the Cardiff Tigers and South Cardiff Gunners, the little suburb is deep in Newcastle Knights and Jets country.
However, in recent times a new kid on the block has started to attract some affection.
Just last week the Cardiff Hawks, the local Australian rules football club, celebrated a slice of footy history when their local product, the Sydney Swans’ superstar Isaac Heeney, was named in the 2022 All-Australian side.
Heeney’s story is one of the more celebrated in the AFL. Growing up on his parents’ farm in Stockrington, on the outskirts of Newcastle, the 26-year-old is one of the few players born and bred deep in rugby league heartland to truly ‘make it’ in the sport, with his success a key story in the AFL’s quest to grow the game beyond the Barassi line.
An athletic prodigy, as a kid Heeney starred in just about any sport he took part in.
One season he famously scored 68 goals in 12 games of soccer, while he averaged more than 200 with the bat while playing junior cricket.
He also once scored five tries for his school rugby league team in the grand final of a tournament in Sydney.
When it seemed like he would have taken a conventional sporting route for a typical Novocastrian kid, a twist of fate and dash of good luck (or bad luck, depending on where you sit on the footy code spectrum) pushed him towards Aussie rules.
One of Heeney’s childhood friends – a boy by the name of Will Quade, whose great-uncle was incidentally Rick Quade, the Swans’ inaugural coach when they moved to Sydney in 1982 – suggested they give Aussie rules a go.
As it turned out, Will’s cousin was Charlie Dixon, then just a teenager, but who has now played more than 180 AFL games for the Gold Coast and Port Adelaide over the past 11 years.
And just like he’d done in other sports, Heeney was quick to impress with the Sherrin.
“From an early age he was just a weapon,” says Callan Buchan, the current vice-president of Cardiff seniors, who was a reasonably fresh Aussie rules convert in his late teens and early twenties when the young blond-haired kid called Heeney first started making waves at the club.
“His athleticism and more so his coachability as a young kid was impressive. You’d tell him to do something – ‘this is what you need to be working on’ – and he pretty much did it straight away.”
These attributes didn’t go unnoticed by the Swans, who signed him up to the club’s academy as a 12-year-old.
As local rules prohibited anyone from playing senior competitive football – but not trial games – until they turned 16, Heeney kept dominating in the youth age groups for the Hawks. Then one pre-season he finally got a sniff in the top grade, in a game against Sydney club Pennant Hills, which featured none other than former Swan Jason Saddington.
“He made his debut in a trial match as a 15-year-old kid and he absolutely dominated,” says Buchan.
Although clearly in the club’s top-18, Cardiff was then forced to patiently wait for their prodigy to come of age.
“I think his birthday, May 5, might have been a Friday, and he was in the starting first grade side the very next day,” Buchan laughs.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
The King of Cardiff
While the club is immensely proud of Heeney, who they stress still makes it back now and then to the Hawks’ new headquarters – now 10 minutes up the road in the suburb of Cameron Park – to chat with his old friends and even run water for some of the junior sides, they are doing their best to make sure he’s not the last AFL superstar to come out of the club.
In fact, the Hawks have a number of up-and-coming footballers who are charting their hero’s path.
One of these is 15-year-old Max King. Already standing at 6’3 (192cm), King, who plays as a centre or centre half-forward, is seemingly made for the sport – or any sport, for that matter.
Just like Heeney, the blond-haired King was a talented soccer player – playing two years above his own age group as a junior – and was an Australian champion long-jumper in primary school.
But with a dad who had played Aussie rules when he was younger – a rarity in the Hunter – and an older brother, Billy, involved in the sport, at nine years old Max decided to sign up with the Hawks.
“I just enjoyed my first game so much that I kept coming back and just fell in love with it, I guess,” he said.
While identified as a talent from early on, joining the Swans’ academy at 12, King has experienced an almost unbelievable rise over the past few months.
In May he captained the Hunter Colliers, the regional rep team, to a historic victory in the NSW state championships.
Outlining the scale of the victory, the Hunter – which featured five Cardiff Hawks – had never before even made the semi-finals. However, driven in large part by King’s MVP of the tournament performances, the Colliers overcame the established Aussie Rules region of Riverina South-West in the most thrilling of finishes in the final.
“It was a draw and we had a set shot after the siren to win the game – our player kicked a behind and we won by one point,” says King.
A student at local public school Warners Bay High, King then captained the NSW CHS team in the state all-schools championship, helping the public school boys to a tournament win and himself to another MVP award.
He was then selected in the NSW all-schools team, the Blue Dogs, for the national championships in Albury in July. And while it was a difficult time on the field for the NSW boys, who lost all bar one of their games, King said it was a great experience to come up against more esteemed opposition.
“It was good to see where I need to be,” he said. “Just to see how skilful they are and how well they know the game, because that’s all they play down there.”
While the team might not have won too many games on the field, the 15-year-old’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed.
Just as his idol Heeney was last week being announced in this year’s All-Australian team, King created his own little slice of history by making the All-Australian under 15 team.
“It was just a good confidence booster,” he said. “When I went down there it just showed me that I am good enough to make it and that I am one of the best around Australia in my own age, so that does give me that extra bit of confidence to keep training.”
In addition to being part of the Swans academy, back home King plays in the Hawks under 15 team in the local Hunter-Central Coast competition.
And while not yet old enough to play senior football, King had a taste of playing against the big boys in the pre-season – and in doing so cast his vice-president’s mind back to about a decade ago.
“We played a trial game again this year in the seniors – they’re allowed to play the trial games – and he took a ‘specky’ on one of our senior guys,” says Buchan. “That was pretty embarrassing for him (the senior player),” he laughs.
From Hawks to Swans
But Max certainly isn’t the only one making waves at the Hawks.
Indeed, Cardiff clubmate Tameka Chambers joined King at the national carnival in Albury, representing the NSW under 15 girls’ team, the Blue Birds, and putting in a best-on-ground performance in the team’s match against Western Australia.
“It was a really good experience to go through, I made heaps of friends and met people from different states,” she said.
“I was pretty nervous because they’re known to be pretty good and tough, but it was so much fun.”
Chambers would have been joined on the field by another Hawk, Jassmin Daymond, however in a cruel twist of fate she cruelly suffered a horror MCL, ACL and ankle injury just one week before the carnival, and accompanied the team on crutches rather than in her footy boots.
Aside from the national championships, Cardiff has a healthy array on talent already on the Swans’ radar.
The club currently has 22 players and/or local products in the Swans’ academy, headlined by the likes of Billy King, Max’s older brother, and Lachlan Macnamara, who have this year both represented the Swans in the under 19 NAB League, seen as a key recruiting ground for AFL clubs.
On the women’s side, Danika Spamer, Hayley Hawkins, Beth Martini and Nelita Sherrin-Bob have all been part of the Swans’ under 19 summer and winter series, while Eliza Shrume, Holly Cooper and Matisse Murray featured in the under 17s, with Murray selected to captain the Futures team.
Indeed, much of the success and indeed the growth in participation in recent years has come from women and girls.
“From when I started there’s been at least 10 new girls every year in my team that haven’t played before,” says Chambers, who moved over to the Hawks in 2020 after a childhood of playing netball.
Complementing this, the establishment and expansion of the AFLW has also provided young girls with a direct pathway towards high-profile sport.
“Before it got big I thought that I’d have to have another job and it’d just be (something to do on the weekends),” says Chambers. “But now it’s getting bigger and it’s more of an idea, more of a goal that I’m going to try and achieve.”
Cardiff’s success in producing talented young representative players is also all the more impressive when you consider that they aren’t even the biggest Aussie rules club in the area. While nearby clubs Newcastle City and Warners Bay have more juniors and thus a healthy amount of rep players, Cardiff seem to punch above their weight on this front.
“In the ratio of representative kids, I think we’ve got the largest amount, which is very impressive,” says Sally Newton, the club’s junior president.
In addition to the structures and pathways associated with the Swans’ academy, a large factor in this, according to the club, is the coaching. A number of Cardiff coaches have been involved with the Swans’ academy over the years, with the women’s head coach, Liam Gibson, previously in charge of the Swans under 16 teams.
And while the talent pool in the Hunter might not compare to that in heartland states like Victoria, South Australia or in the West, Buchan says the club is doing all it can to give its young charges the best shot at progressing.
“They do the pre-season with our senior men, and that just allows them to close the gap between juniors and seniors, but also shows those kids how to do the basics right: learn the talk, how you’ve got to play as an adult,” he says.
“And Isaac will confirm this: playing up here and playing against men at an early age hardened him up. So once he went to Sydney and went to the Swans, it wasn’t a massive step up playing against men.”
The Heeney effect
The rise in talented Aussie rules footballers in the region reflects a broader increase in the sport’s popularity and profile over the past few decades.
“When you go to a pub, you would only ever really see rugby league on TV,” says Buchan. “But now you see that at least one of the screens has got the AFL on. There’s some good support for it. People are starting to enjoy it more with more exposure.”
This has also translated into participation. While Hunter-Central Coast officials don’t have long-term participation data, Newton says that in her seven years with the Hawks junior participation rates have grown “probably three-fold”.
And while there are many factors behind this, there is no doubt that Heeney – almost the archetype of the affable, easy going Newy surfer – is a contributor.
“I think it’s massive that people realise there is that opportunity now,” say Buchan.
“The young kids love it. We have posters up, the kids will get photos next to the poster at the ground, and if Isaac ever comes to home games we chuck a post on Facebook and next thing we’ve got 30-40 kids rocking up to the home games to get a photo with him. He’s pretty popular up this way.”
While the code’s progress has been impressive, it’s important to see it in context. Rugby league and soccer still reign supreme – both in terms of participation and cultural attachment.
“There’s no one really who plays AFL at school, at least out of my mates,” says King. “It’s pretty much rugby league.”
Highlighting the cultural attachment of the 13-man game in the region, Heeney himself has said in interviews that he was much more interested in the Steeden than the Sherrin growing up, despite going through the Swans’ academy, and that he idolised the likes of Newcastle Knights star Andrew Johns and Sydney Roosters fullback Anthony Minichiello long before he started putting up posters of Ryan O’Keefe.
But nevertheless, his presence, along with the good work of local Aussie rules clubs, is no doubt having a positive impact. And as the Swans prepare for another shot at the flag with their blond-haired, born-and-bred NSW superstar leading the charge, the Cardiff Hawks will be watching on, dreaming of a day when there is not just one, but a whole team of Isaac Heeneys running around in the AFL.
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