Swan Hill playing coach Matt Wade is also the local policeman

MATT Wade is not only Swan Hill’s playing coach, he’s also the local policeman.

True blue campaigner: Matt Wade is the coach of the local football team in Swan Hill, and also a local policeman. Picture: Chloe Smith

THE situation is threatening to get out of hand. Police have been called in to help.

Then the senior coach of the local football club enters the room.

Only, he is not in his football jumper or club colours, but a blue uniform. He starts chatting to the person causing the commotion, and the conversation turns to football. The tension eases.

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This scenario is not unheard of for Matt Wade, Swan Hill’s playing coach and also a local police senior constable.

The coaching role, which he took on last year, has occasionally helped at work. He says people realise there is more to the boys and girls in blue than just their jobs.

“It definitely does help in situations where you may come up against a volatile situation where a person isn’t happy to be talking to the police,” he said.

“They do sometimes see that it’s me who attends the job and straight away they de-escalate because they know I’m not just a police officer per se, they know me from the footy side of things first and they’re happy to talk to me about that.”

And Wade is not an average footballer either. Last year, he won back-to-back league best-and-fairests in the Central Murray league, the latest in a long rap sheet of achievements.

Wade grew up in Pakenham and Nar Nar Goon. In 2010, when he was 21, he captained Nar Nar Goon to an Ellinbank and District premiership, the club’s first flag in 30 years.

“We felt how much it meant to the whole town, not just the boys out there playing,” he said.

Wade spent the following year with VFL club Sandringham, then headed to Tooradin-Dalmore in 2012.

The following year he started his police training. The idea of becoming a policeman was planted years earlier, but Wade had been advised to delay applying straight out of school.

“I had a family friend who was in the police force, and I always liked to hear their stories and what they got up to and that got me interested,” he said.

“They were making sure I had the right life experience. They said ‘Go and concentrate on footy and play and do that stuff’ … I started an apprenticeship and they said ‘Get that under your belt, then maybe think about applying’, so that’s what I did.”

After graduating from the police academy at the end of 2013, Wade started hitting the beat at Narre Warren, then the city, while continuing to play football for Tooradin-Dalmore.

In mid-2015, he took up a posting at Swan Hill, 400km away, and joined the local football club.

“I remember my first training session, we didn’t have our new lights then so it was a couple of floodlights on a pole that we had to run around at the end of training and turn them off individually,” Wade said.

“Everyone seemed to have a different nickname for every other person … everyone straight up introduced themselves. It felt like a great place to be, around the club.”

Wade played six games in his first season. The Swans came off the ground of the final home-and-away game thinking an upset win against Mallee Eagles would put them in finals, but another upset elsewhere meant Swan Hill finished sixth on percentage, one spot outside finals.

Swan Hill finished seventh in 2016, but that year Wade won the first of back-to-back Jack Betts medals, the Central Murray Football League best-and-fairest award.

Last year he also took on the senior coaching role. Swan Hill went on to crack the finals and made it all the way to the preliminary.

The Swans started their 2018 finals campaign at the weekend, a qualifying final thriller that went to extra time before Mallee Eagles won by four points.

It is common for Wade to clock on for a Saturday night shift after a game. And it will be no different this week — he is working a twilight shift on the eve of Swan Hill’s cutthroat semi-final against six-time reigning premier, Kerang.