What is the key for young players, such as boys in the QBE Sydney Swans Academy, who want to be drafted to an AFL club?
What are the ingredients needed to build a playing list capable of challenging for an AFL premiership?
If there is anyone who knows the answer to those questions, it’s Kinnear Beatson, the Manager, Recruiting and List Strategy, for the Sydney Swans.
Kinnear started his AFL recruiting career with the Brisbane Lions, where he worked from 1994 to 2005. He’s been at the Swans since 2006.
In his time at the two clubs, he’s overseen the recruitment of players involved in seven Grand Finals, for four premierships (three with Brisbane and one with the Swans).
In an interview with Sydney Swans Media, Kinnear reveals how the Swans recruiters go about their business in a highly competitive sporting landscape, and how they work with the Swans Academy.
In part one, Kinnear reveals the type of player his Swans’ recruiting team looks for, and advises what aspiring young players should work on.
THE SWANS WAY – THE SEARCH FOR FIERCE COMPETITORS
What are the non-negotiable traits you and your recruiting team look for in prospective players?
There are certain key requirements needed to play AFL football.
- Young players need to be good athletes, and need to have a good running capacity.
- They need to have a sound skill set, both hand and foot, and that includes ball handling.
- They’ve got to show the capacity to make good decisions under pressure, and pressure can be the tempo of the game, the pace of the game.
- They require courage, not only to win contested ball, but to push themselves when they’re fatigued, and that comes down to their attitude and competitiveness.
- They’re the non-negotiables for young players. The harsh reality is that making it in the AFL is a tough caper, but if it wasn’t, everybody would be doing it. The reality is many people are incapable of it.
What is the benchmark in terms of running capacity?
Anyone that is falling under a level 13 beep test would be a concern. It depends a little bit on the position they’re playing, and we’re getting a lot more GPS data now from their games that measures running capacity, so we can assess that.
How much consideration do you give to character when you are looking to draft or recruit players?
Character is very important. We are constantly looking back at drafts from previous years, and assessing why players did or didn’t make it at their clubs.
Invariably, unless the player has had a really bad run of injuries, generally if they haven’t made it, it will be because they didn’t have the discipline and attitude to do the hard work to succeed.
There are many stories of players who were less skilled but very disciplined and desperate to achieve, who have just committed themselves totally and they have gone on to make it.
And then there are players who have been physically gifted who just didn’t have the attitude and the willpower to work.
As recruiters we have to continually remind ourselves of that, and not get seduced totally by the skills and physical attributes a young player might have.
When looking at draft age players, or players from the QBE Sydney Swans Academy, how do you find out about their character?
We interview a number of different people, such as their coaches, sometimes their teachers, team managers, we do home visits. There are a lot of people within the football world you can tap into who will tell you about the kid’s desire.
But we also assess it by watching the players in game situations and seeing how they react in certain situations. For example, what happens when his team is getting beaten badly, how does he respond? Does he continue to fight and try to play his best, or just succumb and roll over?
It’s very important. Once you’ve established that they’re a good kick, and they’ve got the right body type, and they can run, then it comes down to, well okay, who is the more competitive out of these two prospects? And you watch and judge that through how they respond in game situations.
Is there a particular Swans way, or Swans type of player?
Ever since I joined the Swans, from the days when Paul Roos was coach, the first question the coaches always ask is, ‘How competitive is he?’
That was always the mantra from Paul, and things haven’t changed much with John Longmire. They always want us to give them a competitor first and foremost.
What does a competitor look like to you?
It is a never-give-in attitude, someone who plays with what we call ‘intent’. That is a word we use a lot in our recruiting department. We ask our scouts to report back on, ‘What was the intent of the player?’
In essence, intent is the attitude they take into the game, and how they try to impact the game. That is what we mean by their intent.
If you boiled it down, they are the key attributes we’re looking for – intent and impact. And then we start looking at the effectiveness of their ball use, and decision-making.
Then we try to get an idea of the background of the player, and what access they’ve had to elite coaching, so therefore what room for improvement is there?
Has that player been in a system where that opportunity for improvement has been exhausted, and they haven’t got the capacity to continue to improve? Our system provides us with an environment where we can assess that.
How can you tell if they’ve got improvement in them and can keep progressing to make it at the highest level?
The system we have in place now allows us to assess the boys as they come through the various stages of their footy career.
If I’m talking to a group of young players, or their parents, I tell them that the tempo and intensity of the game continually gets quicker and tougher. So as the players come through the grades and levels of the sport – for example, from the Swans Academy series, to the Allies representative team that plays in the Under 18 national championships and competes against Vic Metro, Vic Country, WA and SA – the tempo and intensity rises all the time.
That gives us an opportunity to see how these young men are going to cope as the tempo of the game starts to get a bit closer to AFL level, which is frenetic. We’re looking to see, do they continually improve? Can they cope with those steps?
At the higher level, are they better than the players they’re competing against? Are they more skilled, are they fitter and stronger and tougher? Is their attitude to win the hard ball equal to their opponents and team-mates?
We’re looking for the players who are able to deal with that. That is the harsh reality of elite sport.
To put it in simple terms for players and their parents, I always draw an analogy. Most cricketers could face someone bowling 110 kilometres an hour and they’d survive, and be able to play some shots. But facing someone bowling 130-plus kilometres an hour, that is a different cup of tea, because you don’t have the same amount of time to make decisions to allow you to play the required shots.
Footy is no different. The higher the level you play, the quicker the game becomes, the more intense it becomes, so the time you have to make decisions and execute your skills continues to diminish.
And unfortunately for many young players, they are unable to cope with that, and the whole thing becomes a mess.
That is difficult for a parent to try to understand. Because their son might still be getting the ball 20 times a game, but we see that he’s making poor decisions and giving it back to the opposition all the time, and he just doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the pressure at that next level.
He might be a star just one level down, so that is where it is really hard.
In the AFL, there is miniscule time to make decisions and you have big strong opponents coming at you and trying to intimidate you, and you have to be able to deal with that.
We see many cases where it is too much for them to deal with. That is unfortunate, but that is what elite sport is and why they are so well recompensed when they can deal with it.
Are you seeing the benefits for the Swans Academy and other NSW boys of the new system where a combined Allies team plays in Division One at the national championships?
This year there was a new structure for the Under 18s. It started with the Academy series, featuring teams from the four Academies (Swans, Giants, Suns, Lions) in a round robin competition, along with NT and Tasmania. From there they picked a combined Allies team, who played against the division one teams at the national championships, so that gave our boys who were selected that elevated level of competition.
At the under 16 level, the Swans and Giants Academies play each other and form the NSW-ACT team, so the structure is slightly different.
The beauty of some of our under 18 NSW boys going to the division one national championships is that it puts them into a situation where they are competing against elite players from their age group around the country. So we’re now able to make comparisons on where they fit in the jigsaw puzzle of all this, and see how they handle the intensity at that level against the best players from other states.
We’re seeing a significant improvement in the football played by kids from NSW and Queensland, because of the work being done by the Swans Academy, the Giants Academy, and the Lions and Suns academies in Queensland.
Their talent identification has improved dramatically, and the coaching has improved. They know how to play the game now, and that wasn’t always the case.
Going back only about five or six years, there was a significant difference in the style of game that the second division kids (NSW-ACT, Queensland, NT and Tasmania) played compared to the kids from the first division teams in the mainstream footy states.
Now their ball movement, their decision-making, is on par with the other states.
How important are the national Under 18 championships in your assessments?
The vast majority of players who get drafted have played in the national Under 18 championships that year.
The Under 18 championships go over six weeks, but there is one intense week in July where all the teams play two games in the space of five days, so you’ve got the majority of the best kids in one place at one time. The benefit to that is seeing them on AFL venues, on Simonds Stadium at Geelong, and Etihad Stadium. We don’t always get to assess talent on AFL-sized grounds. We love watching games at Simonds because it is long and narrow. You see who can run, who can kick with efficiency, who can kick with penetration, but it is still narrow enough that you get physical contests. If you can’t run or kick well, you get exposed there.
And it’s a little bit the same at Etihad, because it’s such a quick surface. But when we’re watching the various state league comps, especially the TAC Cup and some SA games, they’re small grounds and they often have cricket wickets in the middle, so in the winter it gets muddy and congested. WA is very different, they don’t have cricket wickets, the grounds are huge, so the games are quicker, there are fewer physical contests but they have to be able to run further.
You’re always trying to weigh up these factors when you watch and rate players.
After the championships, Michael Agresta and I do interviews with players. The players either go into their own club for the interviews, or for example, we had a group of boys from the Sandringham Dragons come to our offices in Albert Park. They’re welcome to bring parents, that’s up to them.
They are informal interviews, just to find out their background. When we’re assessing talent, it’s really important for us to understand the person as much as the footballer. Part of our role is selecting players we think will work for the Sydney Swans.
At times we will bypass good players in the draft. We think they’re talented, but we won’t select them because we don’t think it is going to work at the Swans. We don’t think their attitude or background is right for us, or we might think they’ll want to go home after a year or two, or they’re just not going to have the resilience to deal with living in Sydney.
What are the most important questions you ask young players during an interview?
How they deal with adversity. And the answer might not come so much from what they say, but what others say of them. That is when you might tap into their coaches, their team managers, their state managers, or sometimes a teacher.
It is a difficult question, because the boys are young, most of them are 17 turning 18. There is a lot of debate about whether the draft age is too young, and it is a dilemma, but I think it needs to remain at 18. I genuinely have concerns that some boys are too young, but we are not America and we don’t have a college system that they can transition to.
The state leagues in Australia wouldn’t be able to cope with kids who had finished year 12 and had to play another year before they were drafted.
My fear is the vast majority of boys would take ‘a gap year’, and sit at home on their backsides thinking they’re going to craft their football skills. I hear the argument that the draft year conflicts with Year 12 studies, but I would ask, ‘Is that any different to a kid who is trying to be an elite swimmer and it is the pool every morning at 5am? And has to go back there after school? It is any different to a kid who is trying to become an elite tennis player?’
I think it is a bit of a cop out. For every kid you hear whose Year 12 has been affected by footy, I’ll give you a story like Swans players Dan Robinson or Brandon Jack who have got very high ATAR scores in their draft year.
It is about time management, and most of the regional managers and coaches at those levels are fully aware of what they’re dealing with and are pretty sympathetic in terms of giving kids more time for studies.
They manage it pretty well.
When you’re assessing young players, how much do you concentrate on their faults, rather than their assets? Are you looking to cross kids off your list?
Yes we are, that’s true. We tell our recruiting staff - and we put a lot of weight on this – that it is just as important to be able to say no, as it is to say yes. To say no, that kid won’t make it, as harsh and cruel and tough as that might be.
That is a really important thing to be able to bring yourself back to, and I learned that very early on in my time as a recruiter.
It’s not based on just one bad day. We view them enough. You look for trends and repetitive traits in players, and that’s what the decision is based on. We know what won’t work at AFL level, and if a particular fault in a player remains a constant over the season, we know that is not going to work.
Have the required traits changed much over the past 10 or 20 years?
The core values have remained the same – they need to be competitive and skilled. What has probably changed is the need for players to also have a really strong running capacity, due to changes in the rules and the number of rotations and interchanges.
Is it more important to be a good athlete, or a good footballer?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, everyone was looking for the athletic types, but now there is more emphasis on finding good footballers.
The difference between a pure ‘athlete’ and a ‘footballer’ is their ball use and decision-making, their natural instincts, their ability to read the play and get to the right spot. It’s the subtle things the ‘footballer’ does when they don’t have the footy. Where they run. Dumb players will fill up spots where other players could lead to; good players will stay out of that space so it opens up opportunities.
As the season unfolds, you ask your scouts to look for more specific things like that, the subtleties of the game, their decision-making and poise and composure.
How much do you take into account teamwork, and team attitude when you’re assessing young players at rep level?
That’s hard because quite often you’re not privy to what their role is, or what they’ve been asked to do by the coaches.
What you would look for is their attitude towards their defensive responsibilities - will they chase, will they tackle when it is their turn, would they block for an opponent? We watch for the one-percenters.
You look at how they react in the game situation. If their team is winning well, do they start to goof around and start doing ridiculous things?
And conversely, if their team is getting belted do they throw their hands up and say we’re no good, or do they fight on and show pride in their performance.
How closely do you work with the Sydney Swans Academy?
We’re constantly in contact with general manager, Chris Smith, and head coach, Jared Crouch, and we also liaise with John Blakey and Rhyce Shaw after the Academy boys have played as top-ups in our reserves team in the NEAFL.
The difficult thing for us is to keep ourselves in a situation where we make a reasonably clinical decision on our Academy players, against the rest of the national talent pool.
It is easy for staff of any football club anywhere in the country to ‘fall in love’ with these young players because they see how desperate they are to make it, and how committed they are to it.
We have to keep ourselves removed from that. And that is difficult, and it can be disappointing for the Academy staff when we overlook a player.
But we see that all the time, whether it be with TAC Cup staff in Victoria, regional managers and coaches, or coaches of the South Australian or West Australian under 18 team. They all say, ‘but he is such a great kid’.
We know that, but there is a difference between being a good kid, and being a good kid and a competitor who has the attributes we think will make it in the AFL.
How much input do you have with the Swans Academy in terms of influencing how an under age player should be developed?
This year, Ross Monaghan, who is our new futures co-ordinator, sat down with Chris Smith after the national Under 16 championships. He talked about what he’d seen in the Swans Academy players, outlined what we thought their strengths were and where we thought they were deficient. He outlined what we believe their Individual Development Programs (IDPs) need to focus on to get to the stage where we consider them as a draft option.
We don’t give that feedback on any other kids in the championships, it’s only for our Academy kids, to our Academy staff. So we have those conversations, but we don’t try to override what they’re doing.
After the Under 18 national championship games I had a meeting with Chris Smith, to talk about who we need to see playing in the Swans reserves, what we’re looking for, and who are the priorities.
How has your attitude to NSW boys changed since the Academy started?
Now, they are certainly a preference for us. If there is a 50-50 decision between two boys, one from interstate and one from NSW, then it will be a NSW boy every time. They’re local, there is not the ‘go-home’ factor, and it is beneficial to the club in a range of different ways.
What are the overall positives of having the Swans Academy?
The role of the Academy is multi-pronged. It is foremost about growing and improving the game in NSW, in terms of better players, coaches and administrators.
We’re finding even now there are players back in the NSW system that are graduates of the Swans Academy who are playing and coaching for UNSW etc, which is great. Sydney Uni has five or six Academy graduates from last year’s NDS (NEAFL Development Squad) in their team who are playing really good footy. They were 19 year olds, they are now 20, and a number of them got selected in the NEAFL rep team that played Tassie this year. That is great for those boys, and they’re getting exposed nationally.
We want to try to grow the Academy to the point where the talent pool is so strong that we can’t draft them all. That will be healthy, because what we’re finding nationwide is that the talent pool is diminishing a little. We’ve got 18 AFL teams and realistically, there is not enough elite talent to service 18 teams.
Can you see that happening in the next few years?
Yes, if the style and talent of what we’ve seen in our under 16s this year is an indicator of the growth to come, then absolutely.
How do you develop that crucial trait of competitiveness?
Part of that can be how they’re coached and how they’re dealt with, in terms of how they receive feedback and criticism, and how they deal with adversity and hardships.
Part of the system for getting into the AFL is that it weeds out kids who don’t have that competitiveness. It is tough and it is hard and it is not for everybody. A kid that might have been a really talented junior at under 14, as he progresses through, might get to a stage where he says, ‘this ain’t for me, it is too tough and too demanding, I’ve got other interests’.
What about the ones who are still driven but don’t quite make it, how should those expectations be managed?
That is hard, and I feel for the Academy staff in that. Every parent that has their son involved in the program wants the best for their kid, and for many that might be playing AFL footy. But I just hope all the parents realise their child’s involvement in the Academy has benefits and their kid will come out of it a better person and more skilled in a range of ways, no matter what happens.
They’ll be better disciplined, and their capacity to build relationships will be enhanced from the experience.
How closely do you look at players beyond draft age? Are there reasonable prospects for boys if they don’t get drafted at 18?
Absolutely. Last year alone at the Swans, in the rookie draft we picked up Ben Ronke who was 19 years old, and Robbie Fox who was 23, and in the national draft we selected Darcy Cameron with a third round pick and he was 21. We always look at their circumstances and ask why.
Robbie Fox was an under 20 state basketballer for Tasmania, then he moved to Victoria and played football in the Essendon District League, had a good year and moved to Coburg in the VFL, and came to us from there. So he hadn’t really been introduced to the elite football environment until a later age.
Darcy Cameron is a tall player who at 18 or 19 wasn’t physically ready as a ruckman forward, but at 22 he is.
We’re mindful of the fact that we have to keep an open mind about players. We’ve kept a really close eye this year on our Swans Academy graduates who have gone to Sydney University or UNSW.
It is a fallacy that if you miss the draft at age 18 you’ll be overlooked. You won’t. But what is important is that players keep themselves in an environment where they will be monitored and watched.
One of the real benefits of having the Swans, GWS, Gold Coast and Brisbane Lions reserves playing in the North East Australian Football League (NEAFL) is that there are now a staggering number of mature age recruits coming out of that competition.
We know our Academy players, either in their 19th year or beyond that, will be scrutinised by AFL club recruiting departments because they get all of those NEAFL games on video, the same as they do with the TAC Cup, the WAFL, the SANFL and the VFL. They can go back and review a particular player’s game, so they are watched, absolutely.
