Chris Johnson calls on AFL to bring KickStart national championships amid Indigenous player decline

With Indigenous player numbers declining across the AFL, Lions legend Chris Johnson is calling on the league to remodel the NGA system to have a national approach to Indigenous recruitment.

Triple-premiership player and Indigenous team of the century member Chris Johnson is calling on the AFL to rebuild a key Indigenous pathway to football — starting from the top — in a plea to not disregard the significant contribution of First Nations footballers to some of football’s greatest moments.

Johnson, who played 264 games at Fitzroy and Brisbane, said the Next Generation Academy system had to be remodelled to have a national approach to Indigenous recruitment, saying he can’t understand why the league doesn’t revisit a national championships model that brought almost 200 young footballers together amid a significant decline in the number of Indigenous players entering the game.

Johnson played a starring role in a famous Lions era.

The league’s Indigenous lead on the AFL executive — Tanya Hosch — departed headquarters last month after a lengthy and sensitive exit and Johnson, a former AFL staffer, said the reshaped corporate affairs portfolio role that will encompass First Nations Engagement and Inclusion must be someone who is present at AFL House.

“You need to be in the big house (AFL HQ), because you don’t know how it works until you’re in there day-in, day-out,” Johnson said.

“The clubs get X amount of money for the NGAs (Next Generation Academies) to deliver them … I would say if you want to do the multicultural stuff, go ahead and build it. But it’s of your own accord.

“The way it is, it’s terrible.

“They did a big survey a few years back and asked people, ‘why did you go and watch the football?’, and for so many people was because of the Buddy Franklins, the Dan Riolis, the Cyrils (Rioli) … we went and sold that to everybody.

“I don’t know why the AFL now don’t come back and produce the KickStart championships again. It wasn’t broken. It was getting results.

“Jarman Impey came through, Karl Amon, Jade Gresham, Shai Bolton. a lot of guys.

“And now, we’re not seeing through anyone at the moment.”

Johnson said the league was significantly lacking on the “frontline” when it came to engaging Indigenous youth, saying the KickStart national championships he was once a key part of would be a prime place to start as the league laments the declining rate of Indigenous players making their way into the top flight.

“If I was sitting in AFL House, I would be trying to push for this more than anything else,” Johnson, now a board member at Brisbane, told this masthead.

“I don’t know whether it was funding, but it (KickStart) just wasn’t broken.

“Where it comes back to is the community reach.”

In the 2024 national draft, only one Indigenous player was selected – Cody Anderson, chosen by Hawthorn with pick 64, with Ricky Mentha (Melbourne) and Malakai Champion (West Coast) taken as category B rookies.

It marked another chapter in what has been a significant downturn for Indigenous AFL players, with a 17 per cent decrease since 2020 in the total number of Indigenous players across the competition.

League officials put it to clubs last year that they should pick more Indigenous players. Recruiters said investment was key, with a number of pathways – like the KickStart championships – no more.

One recruiter told this masthead this week that the NGA review being conducted at AFL House couldn’t come soon enough, labelling elements of the current landscape as “bizarre”.

“Any avenue to increase Indigenous participation and help filter and support the most talented Indigenous players through the pathway system should be closely looked at,” they said.

States run First Nations programs, and the AFL runs the NAIDOC Cup for school footballers among a number of other Indigenous pathway initiatives, including the Woomeras and Medleys women’s football program.

The AFL KickStart program had started in 1997 for Indigenous youth across remote communities, and eventually developed into a week-long national championship where Indigenous youth players would represent their state in a national carnival.

Johnson at the Chris Johnson and Angie Nadredre Cup 2024, hosted by AFL Cape York House. Bamaga. Photo: Gyan-Reece Rocha

Some 50 players would be engaged in the program and a team of 25 selected, which Johnson said sparked interest not only in football, but a pathway to the industry as a whole – whether it be umpiring, coaching, media or even simply supporting the game.

The copious amounts of kids didn’t faze Johnson.

If anything, it was Indigenous of the fruits of football from far across the country – rich with talent from rivers and plains and ranges.

A Gold Coast hotel full, all laughs and stories and Sherrins into walls and late-night giggles among teammates.

Mateship. Involvement. A pathway. Footy.

By day, it was matches between states at the KickStart championships, which began in 2011, the best and brightest of Indigenous youth from across the country showing their wares and flairs.

But the hallways are quiet now. No hotel pools being inundated by dive-bombs or duckdives after a big day on the field.

The championships in that form ended, just prior to Covid.

Johnson believes that under the remodelled Next Generation Academy system, it is the boots-on-the-ground contact with Indigenous youth that has gone “missing”.

“Since it’s been handed over to the NGA … I think there’s been a lot of multicultural kids come through, whereas Indigenous players are based in the NGA as well, where the clubs haven’t got the resources or the numbers to do what they can do at a community level,” he said.

Jamarra Ugle-Hagan was the first pick in the 2020 draft. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Photos

“I don’t know whether the NGA needs to go to being just multicultural players (in the zones) and then have the Indigenous (players) where you’d have it national.

“I think, if it’s important to the AFL, why don’t they grab that again and start the KickStart championships back up again?”

Female players were involved soon after the inaugural boys’ competition, which was overseen by Johnson, then-league head of diversity and the league’s top Indigenous official Jason Mifsud and then-AFL diversity manager Ali Fahour.

“If they come in at 13 into the (selected) 50 and they don’t make the 25, they’ve got an introduction and they know what it’s about,” Johnson said.

“So it’s the pathway steps. They’re saying that’s what the NGA is designed around, and I don’t see the value in the NGAs for the Indigenous people.

“Yes, the big story was Jamarra Ugle-Hagan who came through the Bulldogs’ NGA, and went pick No. 1 with the NGA, so that’s sort of worked, but Jamarra was always going to make the standard.

“It’s the kids on the outskirts.”

He’s had many conversations about the dearth of Indigenous youth coming into the competition with former Brisbane chief executive turned AFL executive and football supremo Greg Swann, who Johnson is optimistic can create change amid a review of the academy system and discontent among some clubs as to their operation.

Johnson cites Essendon forward Jade Gresham as a success story of the former system that “wasn’t broken”.

“Gresh was in our KickStart program at Under 15s,” he said.

Bomber Jade Gresham. Picture: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

“We sort of got him through it, got him to a level where he was in the squad for the Vic Metro, and he missed out. So then we got him back a year after to play as a 16-year old in the KickStats … and then from there, the next year, he got invited back to Vic Metro as a 17-year-old and in Under 18s, he became captain and he obviously got drafted. I feel it was a progression from him from Under 15s, then coming back in as a 16-year-old and then to be able to get the level up.

“The biggest thing for us was that the kids … if they didn’t get through to the final stage but they’d been involved in it, it gives them a pathway into the Coates League.

“Then there’d be more of a pool there. So then you’ve got more of a pool in the draft.

“There’s been a lot of talk around that Indigenous kids aren’t up to it and all that sort of stuff, but you’ve got to put the foundations in, yeah? They’re the things that I think need to be done.”

The lack of Indigenous coaches in AFL is well-storied.

Johnson once tread the coaching path, and was part of coaching development programs for aspiring Indigenous mentors.

Twenty-odd phone calls to players after training until 10pm on weeknights made him realise “I’ve got to get out of this”, with his passion now in advocacy for others and business, having started SKS Indigenous Technologies which employs around 30 Indigenous people around the country after just two and a half years of operation.

Three premierships at Brisbane, induction into the Indigenous Team of the Century and two All-Australian guernseys, Johnson was the last Fitzroy player to play in the AFL having transferred north when the Bears became the Lions.

Growing up in Jacana, he’d not had much line of sight of the adversities that had faced his people in the generations before him, but as his knowledge grew, such did his desire to advocate and educate, now head of engagement for the assembly in Victoria’s truth-telling process, the Yoorrook Justice Commission.

He doesn’t believe in quotas at club level, but said having spaces in level 3 and the soon-to-be-reintroduced Level 4 coaching programs “would be the best way to do it”.

“It wasn’t my path. I’m glad I tried it, but it wasn’t for me,” he said.

“They always put it back to past players and players that have retired getting into it, but it doesn’t have to be.

“If you can identify four or five of the best Indigenous coaches, and you have that over five years in the program, that’s 25 Indigenous coaches that you’ve brought to the table.”

Originally published as Chris Johnson calls on AFL to bring KickStart national championships amid Indigenous player decline