Scott Watters tried to confront St Kilda’s culture problems after a bizarre episode involving a dwarf being set on fire on Mad Monday. But he sparked a chain of events that ended with his sacking.
In hindsight, Scott Watters predicted his own demise as St Kilda coach with an eerie degree of precision.
It took a dwarf set on fire — the catalyst for a brutal appraisal of his players’ cultural values — to fast-track that process.
In his two seasons as St Kilda coach in 2012-13 Watters attempted football’s Mission Impossible.
No wonder he crashed, rather than crashed through, given the impediments in his bid to overhaul what he saw as broken culture within this football club.
In that space of time Watters tried to overhaul an ageing list he believed was headed for a “cliff” despite being told alerting fans of that task would spook them.
He tried to overhaul a culture he believed had serious issues, but had drawn public acclaim given the Grand Final appearance only three years before.
He did so with a board he didn’t trust, a football boss in Chris Pelchen with whom he barely had a relationship, and at a club that had just made a jarring move to Seaford.
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At the end of the Saints’ five-win 2013 season he didn’t just rock the boat, he deliberately capsized it.
Watters believed too many senior St Kilda players had begun coasting through their careers, stuck in the past mourning the 2010 Grand Final loss after the Sherrin’s freakish bounce away from Stephen Milne.
As a catalyst he used the bizarre Mad Monday controversy gone wrong to ram home his point that something had to change.
A short-statured entertainer hired to entertain the players had somehow been set on fire, yet only weeks after the fallout from his meeting it was Watters’ own career that had been torched.
“It is difficult when you feel your list is no longer potent enough to challenge, when you feel that window has closed,” he tells the Herald Sun’s Sacked Podcast.
Watters is now the CEO and founder of the LifeChanger Foundation, along with ironman Trevor Hendy developing mentors and programs for teenagers across the community.
He has never publicly disclosed the events of his sacking until now, but after six years of reflection has no regrets about his challenge to the players.
“I remember having a really strong meeting with the playing group towards the end of the second year. It was probably the most direct I had ever been,” he tells the Herald Sun.
“Prior to going into the meeting I remember saying to an assistant coach, ‘We either break this culture once and for all or I am done’. And I gave it to them pretty honestly as a group. I think the word used were: ‘You are still walking around in a fog’.
“I said, ‘Make up your mind. Those that want to be here and create a new future, step up. Those who don’t, the door is open to leave. Without that all you are is mercenaries accepting a pay cheque.
“It was pretty blunt but that needed to be broken in order for them to look forward and accept a new horizon. Or they would be forever looking back at the bounce of one ball.
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“With the cultural changes that had surrounded the club over three to five years with the St Kilda schoolgirl incidents, the playing group just needed to grow up and take responsibility. Repeat offenders just cripple the clubs. When that is episodic, then it is a cultural issue. Good clubs don’t go near that stuff.
“Potentially that meeting enabled some players to go to the board and say, ‘We have done this and that and we have got close (to a flag)’. That is the board’s call. They felt it was best to support some of those senior players. Which alludes to one of the cultural challenges (at) St Kilda. Strong boards set direction.”
The board backed the playing group, blindsiding Watters two months later when they sacked him in a hastily-arranged phone hook-up.
Watters accepts his decision to confront players was risky, but doesn’t have a single regret.
Even if now he realises how tough it must have been for St Kilda’s stars to move on from the heartbreaking consequence of that lost Grand Final.
“It is tough to go through as a playing group. You were one bounce away from creating history, and that always lives with you. As athletes you have to reconcile that. Do you ever really bury that? It’s part of your journey and it always sits there with you.
“But in all honesty it was never really a huge decision for me to make that call if it was right. The club needed to break the glass or you are continually living in the past.
“It was an opportunity to reset and within six months after my departure we had a new CEO, a new head of football, a new coach. So inadvertently I probably caused the changes that needed to happen.
“You can keep tiptoeing around it or you can challenge people. And it was a time of challenge because people can make assessments on where St Kilda is at and where they have got to since. I think there is still some work to be done at St Kilda.”
THE LIST ‘FIRE SALE’
Watters and football boss Chris Pelchen attempted one of footy’s boldest list overhauls.
Aware of the dramatic lack of young talent on a list after all stops had been pulled out for a premiership, they went bold.
The Saints would eventually trade young ruck star Ben McEvoy and allow popular veterans Brendon Goddard and Nick Dal Santo to leave, turning those players into an array of multiple draft picks to rejuvenate the list.
But Watters concedes the emotional toll of trading McEvoy (for Shane Savage and the pick that secured Luke Dunstan) was massive.
“Chris and I were both aligned on what needed to happen with the list and it’s why you are going into a position where it is a bit of a fire sale.
“Anything that has some value when you know the club can’t win a premiership in the next two to five years …
“We would have loved to have kept Ben McEvoy at the club. It was the hardest decision out of all the quality players we had. It was a really emotional decision for Ben and myself and it was a whole list management decision.
“But in the end the decision around Ben, a terrific character and great leader, was he wasn’t necessary for a premiership because St Kilda wasn’t going to get a premiership in five years.
“So what is the anatomy of that? It’s a conversation where he is in tears and I am in tears. I know how hard it would have been for Ben and maybe in 10 or 15 years he might understand. You feel betrayed. But you do it honestly. If I walk past a player in the street 15 years later I want to say hello and shake his hand. They might not like you. But for Ben I get solace knowing he has a premiership medal at home on his mantelpiece.”
Watters admits the decision to allow fan favourite and former No. 1 pick Goddard to leave for Essendon rocked the club to its foundations.
The Saints secured pick 13 as compensation, turning it into Tom Hickey and two later selections that became Spencer White and Tim Membrey
“It was very tough and in some ways it was really destabilising for the club. Brendon’s situation was very difficult. Brendon was a great guy. There is so much to love about the way he goes about it. He can be like sandpaper at times and half the team want to kill him, but you love the edge and competitiveness.
“At the time the club was prepared to go to three years (on its offer) and he wanted more money and a longer-term contract, and rightly so. The club wasn’t prepared to go to five years, which comes with inherent risk.
“It’s too simplistic to say Brendon’s decision was about money. He was within his rights to support a long-term career, but the club was also within its rights to think beyond Brendon.
“But when you have a club in the mix for a period of time and the club uses the rebuild term … it’s human nature to think, ‘Where do I sit in this picture?’.
“Nick Dal Santo was now approachable. You bring that into your yard when you make those decisions.”
THE SEAFORD MOVE
St Kilda moved 20km from its heartland in Linton St, Moorabbin to Seaford in a move that had disastrous consequences and took a decade to overturn.
The Saints left decrepit conditions for supposedly state-of-the-art facilities yet lost its soul.
“It was a decision made prior to me getting there and a board decision but it was a horrendous decision, to be blunt. It completely ripped the heart out of the culture,” Watters said.
“If St Kilda has a really powerful strength that has never been capitalised on, it is a groundswell of bayside heart that would love to attach itself to the club.
“Taking it out of St Kilda and relocating it with no connection to the community, it didn’t help the culture, it didn’t help performance, it didn’t help recruitment and the facility was B-Grade. Clearly they are back where they need to be now.
“I remember we were in conversations with Josh Caddy and it was Geelong or St Kilda at the time and if I am looking at a brand-new facility in Geelong compared to Seaford, it’s a factor.”
THE SACKING
Watters spent the months after the 2013 season believing he would secure a contract extension past the 2014 season after talks with the St Kilda board in early October.
But rumblings about his connection with players and deteriorating relationship with Pelchen continued with little public support from president Peter Summers to comfort restless supporters.
The whispering campaign began about the club’s direction.
On October 31, 2013 his decision to grant an interview with SEN Radio, during which he said he wouldn’t deviate from his plans, set in train an extraordinary series of events that would see him sacked within hours.
“I had already sat with the board and basically there was a conversation with my manager (Colin Young) and the board about renewing my contract in February. And then I got on to SEN that morning and the club was just not articulating where it was at. It was a pretty innocuous conversation, really.
“Our president was reluctant to speak, Peter had been there a while, He replaced Greg Westaway, who was a lovely man but very rarely had anything to say.
“Sitting and waiting and listening was causing a huge vacuum of worry for supporters. I have no regrets on that conversation at all.
“I would say that meeting (of the board) took place post that radio interview. From there you get invited to a meeting in the city. I remember actually saying to the head of football (Pelchen), ‘What aren’t you telling me?’.
“He rings me and give me some bulls--- excuse to go in and have a meeting about Dean Laidley as assistant coach.
“I said, ‘Mate, you are not making any sense, what aren’t you telling me?’, and he s--- himself on the phone.
“So you go into a meeting and, in all honesty, I was the calmest in the room. Peter Summers was shaking, visibly shaking, and the one-page document they gave me was riddled with errors. The funniest thing — and I should not laugh — is they asked me to return the car, and I said, ‘You have never given me one, so I am not giving you mine’.
“It was their call. It was up to them. But I rest very comfortable knowing my principles were never compromised and every decision was made was to actually give St Kilda a chance to achieve something that it has only achieved once in its history.”
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