AFL draft: Why I loved coaching junior footy with Mt Martha
WORKING with young players who were later picked up in the AFL draft was just one of the reasons why Tony Dunphy got a big kick out coaching junior footy on the Mornington Peninsula.
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I REMEMBER the day vividly.
Mt Martha Under 13s were playing at Balnarring and the entire ground was ankle-deep in mud. The conditions for junior football were terrible.
I was taking stats for the coach, Terry De Koning, and it’s fair to say a kid named Hunter Clark kept me busy.
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He took 27 marks and had more than 40 possessions; it was an outstanding display.
He’d already shown he was a talented player but it was on that day I started to think he could go on to the highest level.
A few years later here we are days out from the AFL draft and Hunter appears to be a top-20 selection. Mt Martha would be absolutely thrilled for him, as we were when other boys from the club were drafted: Jacob Weitering was taken by Carlton at number one in 2015, Lachie Whitfield went to GWS at number one in 2012 and Bill Hartung was claimed by Hawthorn with pick 24 in 2013. That’s a fair record for one junior football club.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Who was the best VFL/AFL player to come from the Mornington Peninsula in the past 50 years? Tell us below.
Mount Martha Junior Football Club product Hunter Clark chases big league dream
The year after that game at Balnarring I coached the Under 14 Mt Martha team. My son “Tex” was in the team and so were Hunter, Tom De Koning and Gus Paterson.
Hunter, Tom and Gus played at the Dandenong Stingrays this year. As Under 14s they were all good kids and all quiet; if you put a bunch of boys together they’d be the three who wouldn’t have much to say.
But they were fantastic to coach. You’d never hear a complaint, you’d never heard a peep out of them, you couldn’t push them hard enough. It was a pleasure to have them.
I was a bum seconds footballer from Carrum and came from a time when there was no problem in pushing a kid a bit harder than they needed to be or what they thought they could do.
I always had the clichés to push out. A few of the boys would run around for 30 minutes and tell me they were tired. I’d say “the mind is weak, but the body is strong”. When they told me they couldn’t do any more I’d say, “I’ll guarantee you that if I put a Mars Bar or a $50 note on the other side of the ground you’ll sprint over and get it”.
It’s the old story: what you put in, you get to keep. And it wasn’t always about the boys’ footy. It applied to their schoolwork, their relationships, things outside of sport.
Let me go back to Hunter. There are plenty of good junior footballers around but do they have that passion, do they have that commitment, are they resilient enough to take a knock and get going again?
Particularly with the younger age groups, if you say boo to them they want to pack up their ball and go home. I’d bellow at them across the oval, “Come on, push harder”. A lot of boys don’t respond to that.
But you couldn’t push Hunter hard enough; he’d soak up whatever you threw at him.
Passionate, committed, resilient ... he was all that.
Yes, that Under 14 team had some talented lads but they weren’t lucky enough to get the ultimate because Rye had a boy named Luke Davies-Uniacke, who was big and strong. You’d think you had Rye knocked over and then Luke would get the ball in the middle two or three times and kick goals and get his team over the line. No surprise he’s being touted as the potential number one draft pick this year!
I was involved at Mt Martha as a coach, assistant coach or runner for 21 years. From my point of view, there was no real science to it, nor any glamour.
Quite often you’re there by yourself on a wet night and moving cones around. In a lot of ways you’re herding cats. You just want to get the players in line, get them to do what you want and have them touch the ball as often as possible. It has to be fun too, because training can be a bit of a grind.
I suppose one of the rewards is seeing boys like Hunter and Tom and Gus go on to the Stingrays and maybe get through to the draft.
But that’s only part of it. I really enjoyed watching them enjoy the game of football and improve and maybe take some lessons they could use in life.
Some people thought I was a bit old-fashioned but a spade was always a spade.
“Not good enough” is very rarely said to kids these days but I never had a problem saying to a kid: “Listen, your effort isn’t good enough”. I could put up with lack of skill, lack of speed, lack of aggression, but never a lack of effort.
I see a lot of my former players now and they’re young men. They stop in the street to have a chat. That’s a nice reward for having coached them.