Simon Goodwin talks about the challenges in his life that have shaped the person he has become

NOTHING about Simon Goodwin’s journey to the AFL and becoming a coach has been easy. But the man who will lead the Demons this season says he wouldn’t change a thing.

Simon Goodwin is ready to coach Melbourne. Picture: Getty Images

DAY one starts at 5.30am.

That’s the time Simon Goodwin rolls back the doona, like he does most mornings. He loses himself in the kitchen, and as the blackness of the night becomes a darkish blue and then a soft yellow, the family is asleep. Or so he thinks.

He makes his way down the hallway to the front door, thinking about the first to fourth-year players who will start their 2017 pre-season campaign — and the start of his senior coaching career. There is a holler from the bedroom.

“I wasn’t nervous until Maggie poked her head up from the bedroom and said, ‘all the best, darl’,” Goodwin laughs. “I thought something’s different here.”

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Maggie is Goodwin’s wife and mother to their three children — Lily, 15, Isabella, 12, and Eddie, 8.

First day done, Goodwin is home at 4.50pm. “I walked in and Maggie said, ‘How was the first day?’ I said ‘good’ and she asked if anyone came back in poor shape.’’

Goodwin laughs again. Coaching is a family affair, he notes.

At 5pm, Goodwin grabs two beers from the fridge and sits down on his back patio, while the kids shoot hoops in the nearby driveway.

Simon Goodwin works with Dean Kent on his first day as Melbourne head coach. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

“I feel as content as I’ve been in my life,” he says. “I just feel in a good place, I’ve got a good footy club, a great family, the kids have a zest for life. It’s probably as settled as I’ve been in 39 years of my life. I’ve got a really clear purpose with what I’m doing, both at the club and at home, which is good.”

It hasn’t always been so for Simon Goodwin.

Former Essendon coach James Hird once said Goodwin would be one of the great interview subjects. Hird didn’t expand. It was for Goodwin to tell his own story.

Asked why Hird would offer that, Goodwin says: “Probably because of my life experiences, the challenges I’ve faced away from the game, probably within the game as well. I probably haven’t had a traditional pathway in the footy circles from a playing perspective and there’s some life experiences I’ve had ... that’s why Hirdy said that I think.”

Life experiences. Everyone has them. Good and bad. Defining or fleeting.

For Goodwin, a champion footballer with Adelaide and now the coach of Melbourne, he probably had more experiences than most.

Without them, he says, he wouldn’t be coaching the Demons.

His challenges started young. At four, his parents separated and then divorced.

Simon Goodwin with wife Maggie, son Eddie and daughters Isabella and Lily. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

“I was a very driven boy and a lot of it revolved around the separation, about craving attention from your father,” he reflects. “Dad’s been fantastic, but only seeing him every second weekend, one of my avenues to get his approval was through sport.

“I certainly did things to get approval from my father.

“When you look back at your childhood, you don’t think it was difficult, but you know things happen for a reason.

“I was really fortunate because I had two caring parents.

“That real drive came from that seeking of approval. And that’s blossomed into other things as time has gone on.’’

Incredibly, Goodwin took forever to become a footballer and it took forever for someone to have faith in him as a footballer.

He was small and under-developed and reached puberty, he says, when he was late 16 or early 17.

“Through my childhood, I was quite small and I had to fight for everything I got. That was a little bit of that drive stuff. I just hung in there. I took a long time to grow. I was a real late developer. I was the smallest in my class in Year 10 and Year 11 and then I grew to be six foot and all of sudden everything started to change.”

The period pre-puberty was confronting. “There was a lot of knockdowns with that. You get knocked back from teams a lot. Being so small, I guess I did struggle with it a little bit. I nearly gave football away when I was 15 because of a lack of motivation. I was just tiny and I was a shy kid.

“But, as I said, things happen for a reason and I developed other skills through that period which in the end held me in great position once I grew. The skills of resilience and hanging in there. Nothing really fazed by the end of that.”

Lack of opportunity with football and a talent for cricket saw Goodwin drawn to the summer game. He was so talented, he captained South Australia’s under-19 state team.

It was football versus cricket and if not for Shane Reardon (under-19s coach at South Adelaide) and Ken Sheldon (senior coach), cricket could’ve won.

Goodwin played under Reardon in the 1994 premiership team and six games for Sheldon in 1995 in the seniors, which had him earmarked for national draft selection.

But football spat him out again.

“I sat through the whole draft and got rejected.”

He watched the draft with family and friends in the lounge room.

“I was pretty devastated, it was just another knock down. You get your hopes built up and they got let down.”

Simon Goodwin celebrates a win with the Adelaide fans.

His pain was short-lived. The Crows selected him at pick No. 18 in the 1996 pre-season draft that December, which started a colossal career.

Goodwin would play 275 games for the Crows as half-back, then midfielder and occasionally forward. He would captain the club, be a three-time best and fairest winner, a two-time premiership player and a five-time All Australian.

Not bad for a bloke who used to worry when his pubic hair would arrive.

“Life experiences” hit hardest towards the end of his playing career.

In 2007, Goodwin sought help for a gambling addiction.

Again, things happen for a reason.

“It certainly wasn’t where it was absolutely out of control in ’07. What was out of control was that I actually bet on an AFL game, which came out, and I got a $40,000 fine ($20,000 suspended),” he says.

“The thing with gambling is it consumed a hell of a lot of time in my life. You’re reading a lot of form, betting most days. You invest so much time into the art of gambling while playing footy. My biggest concern was the amount of time I was wasting and the emotional impact it was having on my family.”

This is not about Simon Goodwin the gambler, about how much was won or lost. This is about confronting his life and how intense rehabilitation put him in touch with self-discovery.

He acknowledges that if he didn’t attend rehab, he wouldn’t have just finished his first day of coaching.

Simon Goodwin after announcing his retirement from playing for the Crows.

“I don’t think I would be sitting here today if I didn’t go through that,” he says.

“Addiction is ... what’s the best way to put it ... people chose different paths. Mine was gambling. You learn a lot about yourself through that period.”

From February 2007, he attended a clinic every day for 10 weeks, which included the start of the football season. He would train in the morning, attend counselling sessions throughout the day, and be back to the club in the afternoon.

“Through that time, my life changed significantly, from someone who was really quite selfish, emotionally not in tune with the people around him, to someone who understood more about himself, understood more about investment in family, investment in people.”

Goodwin has a million stories to share, but only reveals one. He remembers sitting in a rehab session with “two sex addicts, two drug addicts, an independent mother who couldn’t deal with her daughter — she was that attached to her it was an addiction. There was a shopping addict who couldn’t stop spending money, there was a guy who was a cross dresser. I was sitting there thinking, I’ve only had a bet.

“I didn’t say boo for four days and I was thinking, my life isn’t too bad. But they were probably thinking of me, gee, what a desperate, what a f---ing desperate.

“Each person would tell their life story And when you hear some of their stories of their lives growing up, I felt really fortunate of the life I had.

Paul Roos and Simon Goodwin working closely together during 2016. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

“This story is going down a funny path ... and I don’t want a headline about how my life changed when I stopped gambling. It’s not about that.”

Instead, he says, it’s about these exact experiences that have helped him to listen, to share, to try to understand.

In essence, it’s not about football coaching, but people coaching.

“Yes. Part of your role when you’re building relationships with people is having an understanding of what people are going through.

“You build relationships and eventually people will open up and then you can better relate to them. You’re a footy coach, but you’re also a life coach as well. They’re young. They come in when they’re 18. You don’t know what you don’t know as a young kid.

“If a lad is having a gamble, he might think he’s a bad person. Well, he’s not actually a bad person. He might be doing it for a particular reason, that it might date back to other things in his life. It doesn’t make it wrong, what makes it right is he learns and gets better at it.’’

The next major lesson in life was the Essendon drugs debacle. An assistant coach at the Bombers, Goodwin resists opening up the past.

“I’ve moved on, I dealt with it. It was a shocking period, but I learnt more than I could ever have imagined. The four years at Essendon prepared me for senior coaching more than any other role. Does that makes sense? I’ve seen it go wrong, how it goes wrong, the people, the program, the trusting ... the trusting is huge.

Simon Goodwin was an assistant coach under James Hird.

“It was a difficult period in my life, it was a difficult period in the club’s life and the players. Everyone there was ashamed, embarrassed, everyone in the football department will walk away and say it’s something they will never forget.”

Goodwin is 40 on December 28. It is young for coaching in the sense most of the rest of the competing teams recently went old. Chris Fagan, 55. Rodney Eade, 58. Alan Richardson, 48 when appointed at St Kilda. Don Pyke, 46.

The Scott brothers turned 40 in May and Adam Simpson was 40 in February.

That makes Goodwin the youngest coach in the competition.

To the consternation of some observers, Goodwin has only worked in football. He played at the Crows from 1996-2010. At the end of 2010, he signed with Essendon. At the end of 2014 season, he signed a five-year deal with Melbourne as the successor to Paul Roos. He has three years to run on his contract.

What sold him to the Demons, he hopes, was his authenticity.

“When I first spoke with Melbourne I was honest with my experiences and what I believed would build a strong football club. I was open and candid ... and hopefully it keeps you authentic,” he says.

“People can relate to authentic people. It’s impossible if you try to portray yourself as a person who has been perfect the whole time. Everyone’s got some learnings from somewhere in their life and the more you share them the more you become authentic with people around you.

“That’s what I’ve tried to be. Don’t try to be someone I’m not. I like having a beer as we are now. I just try to be myself as often as I can.”

Simon Goodwin after he was announced as the successor to Paul Roos. Picture: David Caird.

A dinner-table discussion recently asked the question: Which coach is under most pressure in 2017?

Truth be told, they all are, but the leading candidates were Nathan Buckley and Damien Hardwick. Chris Scott got a couple of minutes, Ross Lyon and John Worsfold too, and then Goodwin was named.

He takes overs from Roos with expectations not so much boiling, but warming, and any regression would be highly unwelcome.

“It’s funny, I walked into the club today and obviously we’re not playing games, but I don’t feel pressure because of the people we’ve got working there. That’s the advantage of having a succession plan. I understand who they are, what they’re capable of, I know how to communicate with them, which is a different start to a lot of coaches.”

He listed key people — Brendan McCartney, Todd Viney, Jason Taylor, Josh Mahoney, Peter Jackson and David Misson.

“I don’t think as a young coach I could be better supported from a key personnel perspective.”

To that end, he regards himself as a “people coach”.

Simon Goodwin with his young children. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

He noted the performance of premiership coach Luke Beveridge.

Did he wonder, as mostly everyone in football, how Beveridge was able to coerce so much from a group so young? Goodwin nods.

“When you see the connection they had through the finals period, and probably for the whole year, there’s something in the way he communicates, his language, their environment. Luke would have worked on it for a few years to build that trust, that relationship. I don’t know him from a bar of soap, but he clearly is invested into the people, invested into their life away from footy.

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“Language is critical. If you want to create an environment of growth, how you talk, how you communicate the messages you leave players with is critical. It’s powerful.”

Goodwin will demand fundamentals. Not unlike Bulldogs fans, he wants Demons fans to “walk away from the MCG most Saturdays thinking, gee, I can see how competitive this team is going to be and how hard they are around the ball”.

“Hopefully, I’ve got an art to coaching that resonates with people. Coaching and teaching is about people and maximising what they’ve got.”