The unlikely rise of Darren Reeves from cricket hopeful to Port Adelaide AFL coach
The remarkable tale of a cricket-loving Blue Mountains boy who’s shattered AFL coaching conventions to reach the big time.
He’s a coal miner’s son from the Blue Mountains who grew up in rugby league heartland dreaming of playing cricket for Australia.
But Darren Reeves, who didn’t play his first season of Aussie rules until his 20s, is now an AFL assistant coach gearing up for his first year in the country’s most lucrative and scrutinised national competition.
It’s one of the more remarkable stories in the rich history of Australian sport, breaking the traditional mould of top-level coaches having previously excelled in their chosen field.
But Reeves, who turned 50 this week, is anything but an overnight success. He’s spent more than 15 years honing his craft as a coach and can thank a former Adelaide cult hero for giving him his first break.
Inaugural Crow Eddie “Scud” Hocking was A Grade coach at suburban club Salisbury, where Reeves had been part of an SA Amateur Football League Division 4 flag in 2007. The club’s B Grade coaching position became available in 2009 and Hocking asked Reeves if he was interested in the role.
“He suggested to me, ‘I reckon you’d be a good coach, do you want a crack at coaching the reserves?’,” Reeves tells Mark Soderstrom on The Soda Room podcast.
“I was like, ‘I’d never really thought about it, but I’ll give it a go.’”
And thus began a journey which has also seen him coach at Nuriootpa, NT Thunder, Central District, North Adelaide and Glenelg before ultimately joining AFL club Port Adelaide as a member of a new-look Josh Carr coaching panel.
Sitting in the coaching boxmanaging the Power’s forward line was certainly never on his radar growing up in Blackheath, about two hours west of Sydney, where his father worked in the coal mines and his mother was a nurse and worked in the local pharmacy.
The young Darren Reeves dabbled in soccer and rugby league but his real passion was cricket – spurred on by an uncle who joined backyard games almost every day and an energetic kelpie who retrieved the ball from wherever it was hit.
What he lacked in talent, Reeves made up for in work ethic and developed into a handy wicket-keeper/batsman who progressed through the ranks making various junior NSW state teams before moving to the big smoke to try his luck at Penrith Cricket Club.
He scored a spot at Rod Marsh’s Adelaide-based Australian Institute of Sport cricket academy in 1997, joining other young hopefuls including David Hussey and Nathan Bracken, who would both go on to represent Australia.
Reeves’ time at the academy culminated in a tour to India and Sri Lanka. The AIS’s first game in India, at Chennai, provided Reeves with one of his favourite cricket memories. Against an international side including South African Lance Klusener and Indian VVS Laxman, Reeves had a day out with the bat, belting 60-odd off 30 balls in front of about 50,000 fans.
“It was quite phenomenal – I’ve still got the photos at home and it just blows your mind that you’re a part of that sort of occasion – it was incredible,” he says.
The AIS team made about 300 but a blistering 140 from Klusener saw the international team win with about 15 overs to spare.
Another highlight from his year at the AIS was meeting his eventual wife Linda at famed North Terrace nightclub Joplins.
The couple moved back to Penrith in 1998 but returned to Adelaide the following year, where Reeves joined West Torrens and was added to the SA state squad under then coach Greg Chappell.
Graham Manou was entrenched as the Redbacks first-choice wicket-keeper but Reeves played Second XI for SA and his four seasons of Premier Cricket with West Torrens yielded a top score of 112 and 100 dismissals behind the stumps.
“I walked away from cricket knowing that I left no stone unturned,” he reflects with Soderstrom. “Right until the end I continued to work really hard and once the family started and other things sort of took priority, it became a bit harder and I probably walked away from playing cricket at 28 or 29 and then footy started to take over.
“I wish I had the mindset that I’ve got now through my cricket journey … It’s such a mental sport, cricket. And that was probably the thing that let me down … I probably never really reached the levels that I aspired to reach.
“It wasn’t the work rate – I continued to work incredibly hard – I just feel like I didn’t have the mindset needed to succeed. And that’s probably one little regret over the time.”
Despite growing up in a statedominated by rugby league, Aussie rules football wasn’t completely foreign to Reeves as a teenager.
A high school physical education teacher from Victoria introduced him and his mates to the game. They sometimes kicked the footy around at lunch times and he started following the Sydney Swans in the AFL.
When he and Linda moved back to Adelaide, several workmates (at a former Retravision site on Port Rd) were also stars at Central District so he started following the Bulldogs in the SANFL while playing local footy for Salisbury.
“I loved the team aspect of it (footy),” Reeves says. “Cricket’s a very individualised sport, and you need to be successful individually for your team to be successful.
“But in football, you’re relying on the bloke next to you and the bloke next to him, and you’re reliant on each other to be able to be successful, and I just love that part of it.
“I was engrossed early on in how do you get the best out of everyone to make sure your team’s working really well … particularly when I started coaching. I fell in love with it instantly, to be honest.”
Coaching, rather than playing, quickly became his priority and in 2010 he jumped at the chance to step up to the A Grade coaching role when Hocking left Salisbury a year after persuading Reeves to lead the B Grade.
He led Salisbury to two grand finals in four years before winning the senior coaching role at Nuriootpa in the strong Barossa Light and Gawler Football Association in 2014. Former Essendon AFL players Henry Slattery and Jay Nash helped Reeves and the Tigers win the premiership the following year.
Seven-time SANFL premiership coach Central District Roy Laird enticed Reeves to Elizabeth in 2016, where he spent two years coaching under-18s and another two coaching reserves before he headed north to Darwin to coach NT Thunder in the final year of the now defunct North East AFL.
Reeves returned to Adelaide in 2020 for a three-year stint as reserves coach at North Adelaide under Jacob Surjan and then landed his first SANFL head coaching role at Glenelg.
He won the Glenelg job in late December, 2022 and spent most of the next two weeks of a family holiday back in NSW on the phone, introducing himself to his new charges.
The process was part of establishing connections with his players – a philosophy he singles out as one of the most critical aspects of the coaching caper.
It’s something he learnt from his old Penrith Cricket Club coach and NSW state player Trevor Bayliss, who would go on to coach the English and Sri Lankan national teams.
“He would be away playing a Shield game in Perth or Brisbane, or wherever he was, and he would spend the time to make contact with me during the week and check on how I was going,” Reeves says.
“And it was never about cricket – it was always about me as the person. At the time as a 19 or 20-year old, I used to think ‘this bloke’s a sticky beak’.
“But it wasn’t until I started coaching (that I realised) no … it was about the person and not about the player.
“And from that point, when I started coaching … I didn’t have the football background so I didn’t have Xs and Os and the knowledge, so I had to make it about the person I was coaching and get to know them and understand them and try and work out what I needed to do to get the best out of them.
“That’s probably been my one wood from a coaching perspective all the way along and something that I even now I think is the most important aspect of it.”
The focus worked a treat at Glenelg, who won back-to-back flags in Reeves’ first two years. He had signed up for a fourth season at Tigerland and just led the club to a third successive grand final when he got a call from new Port Adelaide coach Josh Carr the next day.
He sat down with Carr and Port chief executive Matt Richardson on the Friday and they offered him a three-year contract, initially working with the midfield in a stoppage role.
They gave him the AFL grand final weekend to think about it and a media release announcing the news went out the following Monday.
When former assistant Tyson Goldsack announced he was returning to Collingwood days later, Reeves became the Power’s new forward coach, a role he is now relishing.
“I thoroughly enjoy … getting to know those guys,” he says. “That’s probably the moment where I do pinch myself – when I’m sitting down with Sam Powell-Pepper for a coffee and having a conversation with him, that’s the moment where I really do (pinch myself).”
Along the journey, Reeves has struck up a friendship with former Adelaide 36ers coach Phil Smyth and, through Smyth, has also been mentored by two-time Brisbane Lions premiership coach Chris Fagan.
He knows he has travelled an unconventional route to the AFL but hopes he won’t be the last to do so without having played at the elite level.
“Just don’t give up on it – find a way,” he urges others dreaming of emulating his success.
“I know that there’s some amazing coaches out there … who maybe just don’t have the thought in their mind that there are opportunities … but there are.
“In Australia, you’re seeing more and more of it … that you don’t have to have played at the highest level to be successful as a coach.
“I’m hoping that my journey’s not finished – I still feel like I’ve got a lot more to achieve.
“I didn’t feel like I’d ever be in this point, but I’m certainly not finished.
“I’m gonna keep chasing whatever that is and wherever that takes me … and I hope others will see it and jump on board as well.”
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Originally published as The unlikely rise of Darren Reeves from cricket hopeful to Port Adelaide AFL coach
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