OVER the past two months, the NAB AFL National under-18 championships has showcased Australia’s future football stars.

But few would realise that the carnival also featured the next crop of developing umpires believed to have the potential to break into AFL ranks.

If there’s anything in a name, 20-year-old Nick Foot seemed destined for a life in football. Like many umpires, Foot started out playing as a 12-year-old, in his home town of Hobart. His dad was a senior goal umpire and encouraged him to try his hand in the field while continuing to play.

Eventually he was confronted with the inevitable choice between playing and umpiring, and the latter won out as Foot developed an ambition to reach the top level of his craft.

While players in the national championships are vying for positions with AFL clubs next year at the tender age of 18, the road to elite level umpiring is longer, with most umpires joining the AFL panel in their mid-20s.

For a kid with aspirations of umpiring AFL football, coping with the challenges and barriers of a job that most adults would probably cringe at is character-building to say the least. Longevity requires an understanding of the human condition.

“The majority of the time it’s a very passionate sport,” Foot says.

“So a lot of the times when you are copping abuse, you’re copping abuse for making the right decision. So, it’s something you’ve just got to learn to live with – it’s in one ear, out the other.”

Learning to accept his own shortcomings has kept Foot coming back each week, season after season, for eight years.

“Sometimes you can look back at a taped video and think; ‘Well yeah maybe I was a bit wrong there’. But at the end of the day you’re going to make mistakes, and at the end of the day, players probably make more mistakes than you.”

The week leading into Wednesday’s final round of matches at Telstra Dome saw Foot and 18 other aspiring AFL field, boundary and goal umpires from around Australia converge in Melbourne for a series of lectures, seminars and training sessions.

Addresses from AFL Umpires’ boss Jeff Gieschen, umpires’ coaches, fitness staff, psychologists and current AFL umpires gave the group a sense of the requirements for taking their umpiring to the next level.

“It’s been a very good learning experience,” Foot says.

“Fitness is the core around umpiring, which I’ve learned this week. We’ve attended AFL training and things like that and (fitness coach) James McEniry has basically got into us that fitness is the key component to getting there and getting into your positions and things like that. That’s the one I’m definitely taking away with me.”

Foot draws motivation from those who have trodden the path from the Apple Isle to the MCG before him.

“There’s Scott Jeffrey, who’s a Tasmanian, and Shane Stewart, who’s got on the panel this year, who’s also a Tasmanian, that I look up to that have gone through, that I can follow similar paths in making the AFL,” Foot says.

“My next step would be to get in the VFL from home – we’ve got a Tasmanian based VFL side – and that’s the next step for me. That’s the next stepping stone after that for AFL. Those are my aspirations.”