THE BUZZ around some of the young guns of Western Australian football provided under-18s coach Andrew Lockyer with a scenario a junior coach wouldn't normally be confronted with.

The sublimely talented Nicholas Naitanui and Daniel Rich have long been touted as potential top-three picks at the coming NAB AFL Draft and the subsequent media attention on them meant they had profiles worthy of AFL stars months before the actual draft meeting.

Throw in freakishly talented duo Chris Yarran and Stephen Hill, who both earned plenty of attention during the NAB AFL Under-18 Championships, and you could be forgiven for thinking Lockyer spent most of his time stroking egos while trying vainly to maintain team harmony.

Far from it.

"All those kids were terrific about what they wanted to do and they were very switched on about doing well for WA which is a great credit to them with all the press they were getting and the hype that generated," Lockyer says.

"But you also feel a bit sorry for them because they are only young men and they don't need that sort of pressure on them.

"As we kept saying to them, 'If it happens, it happens and you can only deal with it when it does happen'. You can have as much pressure on you as you like, but you've still got to deal with the day-to-day goings on of our football program.

"They all did that and I was so impressed with all of those blokes and the way they went about what they needed to do in such a professional manner.

"A lot of the kids over here just want to play footy and they don't get too caught up in the hype. Some of our kids probably do get a bit more press than some other kids in other states, but they all just want to play footy at heart.

"There certainly weren't any big heads."

Lockyer's Western Australian team fell at the last hurdle when Vic Metro took the final of July's championships, but the coach remains hopeful that up to 12 of his players will be selected at the November 29 draft meeting.

Lockyer believes ongoing improvements in his state's talent development programs have gone a long way toward equipping his boys with the tools they'll need to cope with what will be a tumultuous experience and the culmination of a dream at the same time.

"Next weekend a lot of lives are going to change; some of these kids are about to walk into a massive opportunity," he says.

"Sometimes you even fear for them because they're going to go from doing three nights a week training for the Colts and all of a sudden they're into the hurly burly of everyday AFL life and some of the traps that go with that.

"But we're trying to make sure that they're ready to cope with the rigours of AFL football straight away.

"The program that we run at under-18 level is designed to give them as close to an AFL experience as we possibly can without actually being at a club.

"The kids are training with us three nights a week, they're getting video feedback and their WAFL clubs are very supportive of the work that we do and vice versa."

Lockyer won't be drawn on which clubs he thinks will claim his young prodigies or how he sees the first round unfolding, but he did offer up an interesting tidbit when pushed on the future of his star ruckman.

"I've never seen so many people talk about and go and watch a kid - who was only 17 at WAFL level - just go and see what he could actually do and, when they saw him, say 'Wow, he is sensational!'," he says of Naitanui.

"He's 200cm tall and has Chris Judd's pace. He's just something exceptional and I don't think we'll see anything quite like him again."