Legendary country player and coach Jason De Graaf lands at Yarra Glen
Jason De Graaf had a brush with league football, but it was to be in the country game where he won acclaim as a player and coach. At 53, he’s back in the league he dominated with a fierce, uncompromising approach.
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When Jason De Graaf made a brief comeback to football this year, the clubs so central to his decorated country career were all around him.
It was a quirk of the draw, but it was as if time had taken him back to his prime years in the competition with which he is so synonymous, the old Yarra Valley Mountain District league, now Outer East.
De Graaf, 53, had cameos at two clubs at an age when he should have known better.
But the causes outweighed the inevitable day-after aches and pains.
First, helping make up numbers in the reserves, he filled in for three games for Warburton-Millgrove, where he had been named in the team of the century.
In the second match, he came up against Yarra Junction, where he had been senior coach.
Playing alongside the five Walker brothers in a tribute game, De Graaf also turned out in the seniors for Powelltown, where he was selected in the team of the half-century.
Again he encountered Yarra Junction. But he also lined up against Yarra Glen, where he was recently appointed senior coach.
“All these places I’ve got connections with and I saw them in the space of a few weeks,’’ De Graaf says. “Funny how it works out sometimes.’’
He was involved at clubs in a career that, remarkably, took in five decades of senior football.
But De Graaf is most attached to “Powelly’’ and “Warby’’; of his 380 games as a player or playing coach, close to 300 were at Powelltown and Warburton-Millgrove.
He played his best football with them, at a standard that elevated him to the top bracket of Valley and indeed Victorian country players.
Woori Yallock great Danny Ryan says De Graaf was one of the best he saw in the Yarra Valley Mountain District league.
“Great skills and very hard at it,’’ Ryan says.
“Just after his period, Gary Moorcroft came in and started playing for Silvan and he was as good as anyone I saw at local level. But before that, De Graaf was probably the best player I played against and I’ve seen play up there. It was a physical competition back then. He never shirked an issue.’’
De Graaf was tagged almost every week, at a time when tagging tactics were often crude. He backed himself to run his trailers into the ground, setting himself to get to 100 contests. It was common for him to handle the ball 50 times in a match.
As he piled up possessions, honours piled up around him.
He won the league medal and the grand final best-afield award in Warburton-Millgrove’s 2000 premiership season, eight club best and fairests and was a 12-time league representative.
He was also best-on-ground in the Burras’ 2006 flag.
“I saw myself as being disciplined to the cause,’’ De Graaf says.
“I trained hard, I played hard and I was super-competitive. I didn’t like losing one little bit. If I had deficiencies, I always worked on them. I worked my arse off to be able to do the best I could for the team. If that meant I needed to cover 20ks for the day and push through a tag, I did. I loved it. That was the main thing. I was passionate about footy, everything about it … the mateship, the training on Tuesdays and Thursdays…’’
A cricket pitch was the only thing that could stop him. When he was coach at Yarra Junction, he was tackled and dumped on it, suffering two broken ribs, a punctured lung and spleen, and ending up in ICU for two weeks. When he got out, his lungs collapsed and he caught pneumonia, necessitating another two-week stay in hospital.
“A good mate of mine, Tony Mitchell, was there that day and he goes, ‘I’ve never seen anyone like that before’,’’ De Graaf says.
“My face was white. I think I spent 16 weeks in recovery. It was similar to (Christian) Petracca at Melbourne.’’
For all his travels in football, De Graaf is proud of his association with Powellton and Warburton-Millgrove. He had big-money offers to play at or coach other clubs but rejected them.
When he did leave, it was for a challenge at a higher league, as when he had one-season stints at East Ringwood and Kerang. He admires players who played 400 games at one club. “I just couldn’t stay in the one place for that many years,’’ he says.
De Graaf grew up in Powelltown, played junior football at Wesburn and made his senior debut for Powellton when he was 16.
In 1995 he joined his mate Mark Tucker at Warburton-Millgrove, playing in a premiership.
In the following few years he would return to both clubs.
“Loved them,’’ he says. “Always will.’’
*****
Jason De Graaf was nearing his peak as a player when he started out as a senior coach, at Warburton-Millgrove in 1997.
“I was a glutton for punishment, because I was only 25 or 26 then,’’ he says.
It was the first of a few appointments: he coached Boronia in 2002, Powelltown in 2003-04, Chirnside Park from 2008-10 and Yarra Junction from 2013-14.
Before De Graaf’s arrival as non-playing coach, Chirnside Park had never won a senior premiership. It did in 2009, making up for a grand final defeat 12 months earlier.
The Yarra Junction job brought that serious injury and no success.
“Longest time of my life, coaching them!’’ he says with a laugh.
“That was a hard gig, that one.’’
In 2014 De Graaf took off to the NT in a game development role for the AFL. He headed north when he returned to Victoria, coaching St Arnaud.
He hasn’t coached since. But since coming back the Valley permanently two years ago to be closer to his two teenage children, he’s been watching football in the Outer East and thinking about getting back into the game.
When Yarra Glen called, he was keen. But he also took his time in accepting.
“Good club, good people,’’ he says of Yarra Glen. “They came knocking but I had to go away and think about it, just to make sure in my own mind that I was 100 per cent and that the club was going to get the best version of me, not someone half-arsed and coaching just for the sake of it.’’
De Graaf says he coaches as he played. He’s “big on respect’’.
“As a player, the big thing was earning the respect of your teammates and the opposition, and hard work is the only way you get that.
“My coaching is exactly the same. I guess I’m more an old-fashioned coach than a new and improved version with all the power-point presentations and that sort of thing. I’m not that type of coach. My attitude is, you put in the hard yards and you’ll get the rewards. You need to be fit. You just cannot get where you need to be if you’re not prepared to do the work. Fitness and discipline are the things you need to carry yourself through a season.’’
*****
There are what Jason De Graafs calls “ifs and buts and maybes’’ to his journey.
They relate to brushes with bigger football.
De Graaf played alongside St Kilda great Nicky Winmar at Warburton-Millgrove in 2000. “How you never played in the AFL is beyond me,’’ the former St Kilda champion told him.
His old friend Gordon Sumner, the former Collingwood defender who recruited him to Kerang, once made a similar remark.
When he was 17, De Graaf moved to the city to work as an apprentice fitter and turner and joined a mate in playing at Elmore in the Heathcote District league. He starred, winning the rookie-of-the-year award and coming to the attention of Carlton. But, being from Powelltown, he was zoned to Collingwood.
“We can’t touch you,’’ a disappointed Blues recruiter Neville Strauch told him.
But he encouraged De Graaf to play in the Bendigo league so the Blues could monitor him and perhaps stake their claim at a later date.
“I had no real direction,’’ De Graaf says. “I spat the dummy and said stuff it. I went back to ‘Powelly’ and pissed it up against the wall.’’
A few years later he travelled to East Perth in the WAFL and was shaping up well ahead of the creation of the Fremantle Dockers. But his father, a farmer, broke his ankle and he was needed back home.
“It’s nice when people say you could have gone higher,’’ he says.
“But I don’t sit down and bitch and moan about it.
“I look back on what I’ve achieved and the great mates that I’ve had and the clubs that I’ve played for … I got the best out of myself as a player and as a coach. It’s a great leveller, footy, so it’s kept me grounded.’’
De Graaf never became a fitter and turner, by the way.
“I was living with a mate who was a painter and he was getting home at three o’clock and living the life of Riley,’’ he says. “I thought, ‘That’s a fair job’, so I thought I’d become a painter. I’ve been a house painter to this day.’’
****
As much as he accomplished on football grounds, Jason De Graaf thinks his greatest achievements in the game relate to his work in remote communities, as a development officer for AFL NT and in sports and recreation in the Kimberley in WA.
He helped establish indigenous clubs and competitions for men and women.
“That was rewarding and valuable work,’’ he says.
He brought a few senior players to Victoria to play a few games and two youngsters to appear in a curtain-raiser in a Dream Time match at the MCG. They were awed by a crowd of 70,000.
De Graaf was also given permission to bring four 12-year-old boys to Melbourne to train and play with junior teams.
“They lived 12 hours from Darwin and had never even been to Darwin before and here I was entrusted from their families to take them 4000km away,’’ he says.
“Without footy being the driver and creating our relationships it would never have been possible.’’
*****
Jason De Graaf will coach against three of his former clubs in Division 1 of Outer East next year: Powelltown, Warburton-Millgrove and Yarra Junction.
His Riverpigs will be well prepared.
The club struggled last season, winning only twice and finishing with a percentage of 39.02.
“We’ve already done four weeks (of training). We’re into our fifth week,’’ De Graaf says.
“We’ve done it pretty hard. We have to. When I sat down with the club, they said they wanted a coach with old values. I’m pretty straightforward. There are no grey areas with me. It’s black and white, and they wanted someone like that. It doesn’t suit all clubs. Chirnside Park were the same. They needed that injection of truth and knuckling down and doing the hard yards. Yarra Glen is like that now. We’ve recruited pretty well but we need to get to work and get some respect back, because last season was pretty ordinary.’’
Yarra Glen football manager Richard Gurney interviewed De Graaf about the coaching position. He says his club needed someone of De Graaf’s stature to raise standards in fitness and professionalism.
Gurney talks about De Graaf’s ability to administer “tough love’’.
He’s an old-school coach?
“Yes, but he’s not old-school old-school,’’ Gurney says. “He’s not standing there yelling at blokes and ripping their heads off. He’s not a ranter and raver. It’s more honest feedback. If you’re not doing something right, he’ll tell you. I think the boys are enjoying that. There’s no going through the motions any more.’’
A few of the Yarra Glen reserves players got to see De Graaf close up this year, when he played for Powelltown.
They swear Jason De Graaf, at age 53 and a legend of the old Yarra Valley Mountain District, ran all day – and had 50 possessions.
DE GRAAF’S BEST
Best players played against
Trevor Ryan, Tyntynder
Craig Clarke, Gembrook
Andy Goodwin, Wandin
Paul Marshall, South Belgrave
Hardest players (stinking taggers!)
Tim Smith, Woori Yallock
Greg ison, Belgrave
Most respected teammates
Mick Walker, Warbuton-Millgrove
Terry Walker, Warbuton-Millgrove
Pat Merrin, Powelltown
Brett Mitchell, Powelltown
Originally published as Legendary country player and coach Jason De Graaf lands at Yarra Glen
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