Inside the exhaustive process to find an AFL senior coach

A big Melbourne club. No success to brag about for more than two decades following a period of sustained success. An unhappy supporter base that have started to lose faith, wondering if they will ever see success again. And the club is looking for a new coach, after sacking another coach mid-season. Does the club go through a process? Or do they simply appoint an icon from club’s past?

The club, Richmond of 2009, decided not to appoint Kevin Sheedy after briefly exploring the idea. They decided to conduct a process, potentially the first truly “exhaustive” process undertaken by an AFL club to identify their new coach.

People forget that after Terry Wallace was removed midway through 2009, Sheedy launched an impassioned plea on his friend Kevin Bartlett’s radio show, promoting his wares to be the next Richmond coach.

Discussions with Richmond president Gary March led to Sheedy withdrawing his interest. Four months later he was appointed as the inaugural senior coach of GWS.

The hierarchy at Richmond decided to run the process they did for two reasons:

1. To appoint the best coach; and,
2. To gather knowledge about what the best clubs were doing.

Point No.1 is obvious but on the second point, the club felt they had fallen behind what modern clubs were doing and wanted intel from as many sources as possible to propel the club forward.

The process was set up to run in two stages. The first stage included eight candidates and was about who they were as people, where they thought the modern game was going and broad coaching philosophies.

Leon Cameron, Justin Leppitsch, Brad Scott and Mark Neeld participated in this stage of the process but didn’t progress.

Part of Leon’s feedback was to broaden his experiences and consider going to another club (he had been at the Western Bulldogs for seven years as an assistant coach). He moved to Hawthorn the next year and was appointed to take over from Sheedy at the Giants three years later, after knocking back the Port Adelaide job, which was subsequently taken by Ken Hinkley.

Leppitsch got a job at Richmond as an assistant coach off the back of the interview process.

The four to go through to the next stage were Hinkley, Alan Richardson, Damien Hardwick and interim coach Jade Rawlings. This stage was about more tactical and technical football questions, analysis of game footage, their take on the Richmond list and what their potential coaching panel might look like.

After all that, and with some in the football media questioning why a club would conduct such a search, Hardwick narrowly edged out Hinkley. The margin between the pair was wafer-thin.

What followed was Richmond’s first premiership in 37 years and another two over the ensuing three years. The “process” and the people running it picked the right candidate.

But not only that, they got the pool of candidates right.

Those eight candidates, who were all assistants at the time, would go on to coach a combined 66 seasons and 1370 games at the highest level.

Premierships are how we judge the ultimate success, but you can be successful without winning a premiership. Most of those candidates became successful coaches.

Another interesting component of the Richmond search was that they had two CEOs on the panel.

Steven Wright had announced he was finishing up, and Brendon Gale had been announced as his successor but was yet to start in the role. Gale took early leave from his role at the AFLPA to be part of the process. He wanted to have “skin in the game” with the new coach. It was wise then, and you can’t help but feel that when the pressure came on Hardwick at the end of 2016, it may have played a small part in Brendon backing his man.

A process is on a spectrum. It may be lengthy with multiple applicants and stages, or it may be where a particular coach is headhunted. They are both still processes.

The next time Hardwick was selected as a senior coach, by Gold Coast, he was headhunted – the CEO and chairman famously flew to Italy to interrupt Hardwick’s holiday – but it was still a process. There was a “series of actions, steps or operations carried out in a particular order, to achieve a specific result,” which is one definition of process.

Either process can get you the best candidate, but that is only the start. It is then up to the club to help make the coach successful.

When I hear that people say that Essendon is “different” to other clubs, I’m not so sure. What I do know is that if you win, the noise goes away. To win, you need the key people to be talented and aligned. That is true for every organisation in the world.

A week into Andrew Welsh’s presidency he faced the call of whether to trade Zach Merrett. Six months later he faces the biggest call a club has to make – the selection of their senior coach.