Teenage dream? How influx of Tiger cubs can kick-start new eraWith a flurry of early selections in this year's draft, Richmond faces a balancing act to manage the influx of young talent
By Nathan Schmook
afl.com.au
19 Nov 2024RICHMOND'S last No.1 pick Brett Deledio has backed his former club to handle an influx of young players and put the right support around them as the Tigers prepare to welcome up to eight teenagers inside the first 30 picks of this week's Telstra AFL Draft.
The Tigers face a balancing act that was last managed to an even bigger extent by expansion club Greater Western Sydney, which entered the competition in 2012 after recruiting 11 talented juniors in the first round of the Draft.
Richmond, meanwhile, holds picks No.1, No.6 and No.10 as well as another five selections before exiting the Draft at approximately No.28, once Academy and father-son bids are accounted for. Those picks could all be used on Draft night or some traded to move higher in this year's order or into next year's pool.
Deledio said the right mix of coaching, welfare and senior players to set an example would be important for the Tigers in 2025, while also recruiting players who had the right attitude to thrive in the new environment youth creates.
"My first year we had five picks in the top 20, so it was very similar to what Blair (Hartley) has got to play with, but we had a really good spread of more experienced players," Deledio, who is now a player agent with Mac's Sports Promotions, told AFL.com.au.
"Then at the end of 2009 when 'Dimma' (Damien Hardwick) took over, all of those players had left and in came five or six new players, one of them being arguably Richmond's greatest ever in Dustin Martin, which helps.
"I think the biggest thing with the development side of things was you've got to have good young coaches and guys that know what they're doing, but you've got to have a coach who's leading and a stable board in charge.
"We started 0-9 that year, so to get nervous about results and whatever else would have been detrimental to the whole cause, so ultimately, you've got to have good people at the top."
Having experienced on-field leaders around the new youngsters was one of the pillars for development in Deledio's experience as a large group of Tigers, including Matthew Richardson, Kane Johnson, Nathan Brown, Joel Bowden and Wayne Campbell, helped set early standards to follow.
An exodus of premiership heroes has left the Tigers with less experienced leaders in 2025, but the new crop can still look to captain Toby Nankervis and senior players like Jayden Short, Tim Taranto, Nick Vlastuin, Noah Balta and Nathan Broad for guidance.
While the draftees will likely spend time under new VFL coach and ex-Tiger Jake Batchelor, Deledio said it would be important to make them feel part of the AFL program immediately and reward hard work with senior selection.
"There's opportunities there if you put the work in, and that's where you can really mould these young guys and lay the foundations for them for their whole careers if they get to work," Deledio said.
"But that only works if you've got strong people at the top setting the standard, and I think that's where Toby Nankervis does a great job, and Nathan Broad and Jayden Short.
"Those boys work their backsides off, and that's where the young boys just follow. They are young, they're green, and they're eager to learn, but you've also got to understand that it's not just a school excursion.
"You're not there just to admire Tom Lynch, you're there to be a part of an organisation to try and help them win their next flag."
Deledio labelled Richmond list boss Blair Hartley one of the best in the game and backed him to nail at least 80 per cent of the Tigers' prime selections, laying a strong foundation for the club's rebuild.
As a comparison, seven of the 11 players drafted by Greater Western Sydney in the first round immediately before they entered the AFL played at least 180 games, with five earning selections in an All-Australian squad at some stage.
Long-time assistant coach and director of coaching Alan McConnell was instrumental in the Giants' early years and creating an environment designed to help young players thrive as they arrived in large groups each year.
The critical ingredient in those early seasons was the guidance of senior players Chad Cornes, Dean Brogan, Luke Power and James McDonald, who all signed on as playing assistant coaches at the end of their careers elsewhere.
"They had been leaders in their clubs in very successful systems and played pivotal roles in keeping the place calm and steady and on course when maybe the results were going to look to try and destabilise us a bit," McConnell told AFL.com.au.
"The thing that was really pivotal was those guys were fierce competitors, but they actually weren't competing for their next contract because they all had their next contract to coach at the club.
"They were invested because their nature meant they were invested and they were incapable of doing it any differently, but the real investment for them was in the long-term future of the club, not their own contract or personal success."
McConnell is now working within the high-performance coach development team at the Australian Institute of Sport, helping guide up to 60 Olympic sports coaches across all levels and disciplines.
While coaches would be important to the development of the Tigers' new players, with Adem Yze supported by a team including Chris Newman, Steven Morris and Ben Rutten, he said they could not do the job alone.
"It's got to come from your peers and the leaders in the team, and I guess that's the reason why Brisbane had Luke Hodge and then Grant Birchall, who were pivotal to their growth and development," McConnell said.
"They weren't there at the end, but I'm sure that Brisbane would articulate that they were pivotal to getting them to where they got to."
The coming years for Richmond's coaches and the club's growing crop of youngsters will bring challenges with measuring improvement, McConnell said, if losses mount and external focus turns to the scoreboard.
The Giants won three games across their first two seasons before climbing to finish 16th in 2014 (six wins) and 11th in 2015 (11 wins) as an aggressive youth-led build started to pay off, with a maiden Grand Final appearance against the Tigers in 2019.
If the next year or two is tough for the Tigers as young stars are introduced to the AFL, at least the pay-off will be sweet.
"We were talking about just winning quarters and kicking goals, and even winning in five-minute blocks at the back end of quarters," McConnell said.
"So being able to quantify that growth in the playing group, and in particular with those young players is the biggest challenge.
"But the connections you make along the way are the piece that keeps you coming back.
"When you spend that much time together and you're in the public eye, it is pretty cool to sort of survive and then thrive."
https://www.afl.com.au/news/1256946/teenage-dream-how-influx-of-richmond-tiger-cubs-can-kick-start-new-era
