Brett Ratten loves coaching again and says his son Cooper will always be with him
St Kilda coach Brett Ratten will never truly get over the death of his teenage son, but leading the Saints offers him — and the club — a fresh beginning, Mark Robinson writes.
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It’s as vivid as it is gut-wrenching for Brett Ratten.
His son Cooper died aged 16 in a car accident, his mate behind the wheel.
The learner driver, was speeding, on drugs and had drunk alcohol before the crash on a foggy country road near Yarra Glen. It was August 2015.
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Brett Ratten had only been in bed for a couple of hours.
Then an assistant coach at Hawthorn, he had helped manufacture a win over Geelong at the MCG by six goals.
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Cyril Rioli kicked six and Luke Hodge four. It was a professionally satisfying night and there was a lot to like about the Hawks.
“I got to sleep about 1am,” Ratten says.
“About 5am, 5.30am, the doorbell rang. It was a policeman and he said Cooper had been in a serious car accident and that he (the policeman) was on his way to Box Hill.
“I went back to the room to get changed and head straight to Box Hill, and then he came back and said Cooper had passed away.
“We lived in that house for another six months and every time that doorbell rang I wanted to blow it up, so we moved house. We had to move.”
Every kind of pain imaginable has ripped through Ratten since that fateful day.
It still does. He has bad days, and bad moments, and the tears come.
“When it’s your child, if you’re upset, you’re upset and that’s OK. You can’t get over it,” he says.
“There will be days where you’re bogged down and it consumes you. But you know Coop would want you to do this or that. That’s the language I try to use. He’d be at me to do this, he’d want Tanner to do that, he’d want Jorja to do that, want Tilly and Will to do these things … so let’s do it.
“Can I say I’m over what’s happened? No way at all. Some days I can’t say Coop’s name without crying or I’d be on the freeway and I’ll see the car that was involved or the brand of the car involved, or hear a song, and it will remind me.
“There are situations day to day I don’t cope with at times, but I just know the people around us as a family are very supportive and I’m very grateful of that.”
Ratten speaks often about his children. Their devastation of losing a brother is absolute and Ratten had to be there for them, amid his despair.
“To be in that position, it’s so gut-wrenching,” he says.
“The tragedy for us as a family and then you look at Coop’s brother Tanner, the younger kids in Jorja, Tilly and Will, and how they’ve got to cope with it and get over it. And being the leader I suppose of the family, you try to be the role model and that’s what men do. I suppose that’s a bit of a stereotype, but we’ve got to lead from the front and be supportive of them as well.
“There’s moments where you’re off by yourself and get upset, but really it’s about trying to move forward because if we keep looking back we’ll never get over it.
“And for me to have footy …
“It has helped a lot. I’m very lucky. If it finished tomorrow I could say football has helped shape me as a person and given me so much joy in my life, and actually helped overcome the worst memory in my life.”
What also helped was finding forgiveness for the learner driver, who was sent to prison for five years.
“I have. People make mistakes. There’s still an element of why did you drive so fast and certain aspects to it, but I do forgive him,” Ratten says.
“That’s the hardest thing to do. Just the why. Why put yourself in these situations? Why? You just think, you put yourself in a high-risk position and sometimes the outcomes are disastrous.”
Just how anyone picks up the threads of life after such a cataclysmic tragedy is a question without an answer.
You simply have to.
For Ratten, now 48, football has been the constant thread in his life since joining Carlton at 14 and it was in football that he searched for an outlet.
Not entirely the game itself, but the people within it. Weeks after the accident, Ratten returned to the Hawks to help secure the three-peat.
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“It gave me a goal to get back to work and drive to win a flag for Coop, not win a flag, to help be a part of a premiership in his memory,” he says.
“As soon as that season finished (he takes a deep breath) we went to Bali and that’s when the grieving started even more.”
He reeled off names at the Hawks, including Al Clarkson, Stu Fox, Chris Fagan, David Rath and Adam Yze.
“They are a family club and I got to see it first hand,” he says.
The players also were terrific — Liam Shiels, Isaac Smith, Luke Breust, Hodge and Sam Mitchell. He remembers Mitchell not giving flowers, instead he gave a present to Tanner. “Little things make a big difference,” Ratten says.
Support came from former teammates at Carlton. Fraser Brown and Craig Bradley “have been amazing”.
Others stand out, too.
He says Cooper’s girlfriend Jasmine Williams, who has a new boyfriend, and her family visit on Cooper’s birthday and at Christmas.
“She’s got a partner now and she’s grown up a lot. They are great people. I think that’s pretty special. Jas will come around, go to the cemetery, yeah, it’s bloody fantastic,” Ratten says.
He briefly sought professional counselling and spoke to other parents who had also lost a child.
“About their experience and what they’ve done. Through tragedy you talk,” he says.
“But I haven’t reached out a hell of a lot. I’m pretty open in that space, I’ve tried a little bit, but I haven’t felt outstanding to go and talk about, it’s made me more upset, it’s lingered for longer. It’s made it harder to move on to the next thing, the next day.
“But maybe I might have to go down the track. I don’t know.”
Most importantly, his wife, Jo, he says, has been “amazing in strength and support”.
“She was supportive of whatever I wanted to do,” he says.
Which, of course, was football.
“I think getting back to footy and being around people, taking your mind off it really helped. That’s why I said winning the Grand Final … in a way it was good to get back to work, because it consumed me to think of other stuff, sitting at home and going over and reliving every second, the doorbell and all this, so footy took away those thoughts.
“For me to have a love and passion in my life, that’s been super lucky for me. I’ve been able to put energy and focus into that. If I didn’t have a passion I think it would’ve been a lot harder to get out of bed and get back to work.”
In some ways, football had taken Ratten from his children — the lament of many coaches.
And coupled with a divorce from his first wife, Ratten acknowledged there wasn’t enough time to spend with Cooper.
“When you lose a child, there’s a lot of things that I would’ve loved to have said to him and maybe changed, there’s no doubt about it. I would’ve liked to have changed some things, which happened,” he says.
Does it beat him up?
“Yeah, some things are right and wrong. When you don’t have somebody you love in your life — I would swap this role tomorrow to have Cooper back, I’d change so much to have him back,” Ratten says.
“But we can’t change that. There’s always regrets with certain things.”
Coaching senior football again was never supposed to be an option after Cooper’s death.
Ratten stayed at the Hawks through 2016-17 before joining Alan Richardson at St Kilda for the 2019 season.
He was appointed interim coach after Richardson’s departure and he won the role full-time.
He’s the first second-time coach without winning a premiership in his first stint since Terry Wallace.
That he was able pick up his life and return to the top-flight of football is a remarkable case of resilience and achievement.
Because that period after Cooper’s death was maniacal for its emotion.
“Coaching again wasn’t as important,” he says.
“After what happened, the kids tried to get back to the school, they didn’t want to go back to school, so we had that.
“Even the following year there was an accident at Jorja’s school and it brought back memories of Cooper and she didn’t want to go back to school. Things tested the family. In the first year it was about getting life back on track, normality, routine, get back to work.”
When he arrived at the Saints, insiders say Ratten had a genuine thirst for football.
But even when given the interim role, he had yet to convince himself he wanted the role full-time.
“When I took over as interim coach, I said to Jo, ‘I think I love the job, but do I just like the job?’ When you’re coaching you have got to love it, you can’t just like it. After a week or so, I said to Jo, ‘I love the job, the passion was back’,” he says.
Still, Cooper is always with him.
Ratten was interim coach last year and coaching against Carlton at the MCG on the anniversary of Cooper’s death. It was a harrowing week.
“Yep, it was,” he says.
“We played the Blues, so you reckon that was emotional? It was a hard week. ‘Gears’ (skipper Jarryn Geary) spoke up during the week. You know, the birthdays, Christmases, even Father’s Day, I know one of the kids is missing. And even when one of the kids have a birthday, they’ve got one of their brothers missing. There’s so many times you look across and you have that void of not having Coops.”
Asked if he had told Cooper in his own way that he had the Saints job, Ratten says: “I do talk to him, whether I speak out loud or do it internally. We’ve got a place at home, which we have set up for him.
“I go up to the cemetery on his birthday, the day of the death and Christmas, but I don’t believe he is there. That’s where he was buried, but I think he’s with us all the time.
“We’ve got a place for him at home, so I find it more comforting being around him there, his things, not where they put him in the ground. It’s a place where we go for respect on certain days, but I don’t find that’s the place for me.
“This year will be his 21st, March 6, so that will be pretty tough.”
Ratten will be a different coach from when he was at Carlton.
A David Parkin student, he wants to empower the players and work more with them, leaving the likes of former Hawthorn colleague Rath — recruited from the AFL — and Brendon Lade to work on the football program. Not that Ratten will be absent on that front, but relationships are key.
“With my life experiences, I think it makes it easier to talk to players about anything,” he says.
“If they talk death, or experiences, or separation, I could talk to them and say I’ve been through that.”
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Will he be a better coach or a different coach?
“I would be different. My coaching views have changed. I’m a lot more relaxed, maybe the technical aspect I’ve tried to pull back on slightly. I know if you’ve got a great game plan and you haven’t got the players you’re in trouble. But if you have not a bad game plan and you’ve got the players on board, you’re half a chance,” he says.
“Relationships are the most important, and connection at the football club. Bringing in six new players, new coaching staff, trying to get that connection will give us a great opportunity to push forward.”
Today, he has spoken about unspeakable pain, but he has spoken with energy and excitement about his second chance and St Kilda’s future.
Fun is the buzzword.
“There was an element of me in my first time as coach, not in the last year, but you think there’s a way you have to coach. You have to have a hard edge,” Ratten says.
“But, you know, we have to live in the moment. We talk about the destination, but we can’t forget about the journey and the fun and memories and the people. They are our life stories.”
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Originally published as Brett Ratten loves coaching again and says his son Cooper will always be with him