I’ve been coming to the draft camp for 10 years now and, yes, I have asked some strange questions at times, but believe me- it’s because I love these players.
Sometimes, the players I really challenge and ask tough questions of are the ones I actually want to pick and I want to see how they handle it.
If you don’t get the opportunity to pick them, the players remember it for a long time, but I leave the room thinking, oh that kid’s great, or, I love that kid.
Unfortunately, you just don’t get the opportunity to pick them all, but at least I’ve felt like I’ve had some level of engagement with the players and they leave knowing they’ve handled a tough situation.
At Port Adelaide, we do some things a bit differently to other teams, but basically we want to see if a player understands the game and also some of the requirements of learning.
I can remember back to 2006 when we interviewed Travis Boak. I’d only seen him play one game and he hadn’t played much at all for the season because he had osteitis pubis or some another injury.
People pointed Travis out to me and identified that he could be a great player, so I wanted to have a chat to him and one of the things we did was to take some vision into the meeting.
We showed him some centre bounce work and asked him what he noticed.
Honestly, to have a young 18-year-old like him understand the game and the intricacies of the centre square work really suggested to us that this guy would be great in traffic.
From that 15-minute interview we determined that Travis would, not only, be able to grasp the set-ups very quickly, but he’d also be able to instruct other people and I think that’s vital to a team.
If you can get a real positive out of one of those learning experiences with a young player, you can always guarantee that once they get to your club, you know what you’re getting and I think that’s the value of coming to draft camp.
At times, the questions we ask can be difficult things to answer, but others might be as easy as, ‘what would you do with your first end-of-year paycheck? Or, ‘when you’re driving, what would you do in this situation?’
I might even ask them if they would get a tattoo with their teammates if they won a premiership.
The kids look at you and think, what are they asking that question for?
And there might not, necessarily, be a right answer, but again it’s something different and I like to see the humour, the confidence, the calmness or the anxiety come out.
Recruiting has become pretty sophisticated now and clubs train their players for interviews, but it’s pretty hard to prepare for mine!
The views in this story are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or the clubs.
