Jed Adcock and Troy Chaplin have come a long way to celebrate their 200th AFL games Emma Quayle
The Age
July 25, 2015 The day after they were drafted, Jed Adcock met Troy Chaplin at the Maryborough Oval. After growing up in the same town, sharing rides to basketball tournaments and playing in many of the same football, sides the teenagers had been sent in two very different directions: Chaplin to Port Adelaide as a first-round pick and Adcock to the Brisbane side that had just won three premierships. Both had understood they would have to move from home no matter which club chose them. But that far? It felt like a lot to take in. "It will be a good move for me," said Adcock on that Sunday morning back in late 2003. "I'm still just getting used to it."
That was then. Twelve-and-a-half years later Chaplin and Adcock don't get to see each other too often: their reunions are almost always confined to the couple of minutes at the end of a match in which their teams have just played each other. "It's funny," Chaplin said. "We're doing the same job and living the same sort of life. Your careers just start taking you different ways."
The pair will share something big again this weekend, though. Adcock is where he was, and will play his 200th game for the Lions on Saturday. Chaplin made the difficult decision to leave Port Adelaide at the end of 2012, and will be wearing yellow and black when he plays his 200th on the same day. After all these years - after moving, fighting for their first games, starting to feel comfortable, dealing with injuries, playing finals and wishing they could play more - they have ended up in the same spot at the same time. "It's a nice coincidence, isn't it?" Adcock said. "It feels like it's come around so fast. Everyone tells you how quickly your career goes, and they're right."
Adcock wasn't sure how he would ever get into the Brisbane team when he got there. The first people he met had surnames like Brown, Black, Voss, Akermanis, Lynch, Power, and the list goes on. In his head he had plans - to move to Melbourne, live with some of his friends and play footy while they started university - but after about six months he felt comfortable with the change in direction, like he lived in Brisbane and wasn't just visiting. "When I stopped looking at every little break as a chance to get home, I knew I was happy."
It frustrates him now that kids want things to happen in such a hurry and that some of them start looking to leave so quickly, though becoming a regular part of the Lions side in his second season did help him settle a lot further in . Adcock hasn't missed too many games since then - injuries took chunks out of three seasons - but he would have played more games by now had his team played more.
The Brisbane Lions have played just two finals since their last flag and a leg injury meant Adcock missed the first one, but he feels like he arrived at the club at a good time, not a bad one. "I guess some people would say 'one final?' but I was lucky to get here when I did," he said. "If I didn't, I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to understand what I had to do and how hard I had to work to play senior footy. The things I learnt very early on are things that have stayed with me."
Chaplin went to a good team, too: it was Port Adelaide that ended the Lions' run in the 2004 grand final and he realised soon after he got to the club that it was going to be very hard to find a way into the team. Like Adcock he watched his senior teammates closely, copying everything Chad Cornes did, following Warren Tredrea around at training and going through vision with Darryl Wakelin.
The wait felt longer than it was, in the end, and Chaplin isn't sure he would be where he is had he not had the opportunity to learn from those players as well as two key coaches: Mark Williams and Dean Bailey. "That's one of the things you can never know, I guess. But going to that club meant I met some pretty amazing people early in my career. All those people had a really big impact on me," he said. "I'm not sure I would still be here or whether I would have played all these games if I didn't learn what I learnt over there, especially early."
His life has changed in other ways in the years since then, and so has Adcock's. He met his wife Hayley in Brisbane and considers the city his home now, though he would like to get into coaching one day and knows that could take him and his family somewhere new. Being part of a team that travels every second weekend has meant working hard to make sure he spends enough time with Lily and Archie, and his thoughts about home now revolve around them, and making sure his parents get to be a big part of their grandchildren's lives and know them as well as they can.
"I guess that's what changes. It's not what you're missing, it's what your family is missing out on, and those relationships are really important for my kids. I want them to grow up knowing both sets of grandparents and being a big part of their lives," he said. "As a kid all you worry about is playing footy, but when you grow up and have kids there's so much more to think about."
Chaplin has been thinking about coaching, too, and while chipping away at a business law degree has started doing some part-time coaching with the Oakleigh Chargers, the teenagers' energy and endless questions making him want to keep going back. He knew his wife Lisa before he went to Port Adelaide, and moving to Richmond was partly about being closer to their families and where he wanted to be when football does one day end. The couple has been challenged in an unthinkable way, losing their stillborn baby boy Archie five years ago, but are parents now to four-year-old Elke and Blake, two. "It's a great time for us," Chaplin said. "We went through an extremely difficult time but now we just enjoy watching the kids grow up, making plans for the future with them and pretty much cherishing everything they do."
In some ways Chaplin is doing what he thought he would be doing back on that Sunday morning in 2003: playing footy, striving to win a premiership. But he never would have imagined doing it for long enough to be playing in a 200th game, or thought up any of the things that have happened along the way.
"You're so innocent when you start out and your career goes through so many transitions," he said. "You go through all these different stages I think most players go through, and I can see it now with our young guys, but the thing you're never going to know is what's going to happen along the way, how you're going to be challenged and how your life changes. That's the unknown when you're 18 and just want to start playing footy, but it's also, in a way, the fun part."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/jed-adcock-and-troy-chaplin-have-come-a-long-way-to-celebrate-their-200th-afl-games-20150724-gijjr0.html
