The Rendell comments were shocking, and it makes you wonder how commonly those sorts of views are held. At the top end of the draft those views are self-defeating, because you won’t last long as a recruiting manager if you miss on the best talent in the top 10 of the draft, whatever their background. It’s in the later rounds of the draft where it can really affect whether young blokes get to pursue their dreams of playing AFL football.
I don’t know what recruiters/clubs are thinking, but it seems from the outside that AFL clubs are prepared to invest the resources to help wildly talented players who don’t fit the middle-class, private school mould if they are so talented you’d be an idiot not to take them, but are less likely to think it ‘worth the hassle’ for a guy who they could take a flyer with in the third round. To me that’s a mistake. Hitting on those late round/rookies can make or break a team.
You just have to look at someone like Luke Ryan. By all reports he didn’t really pull his finger out until he was a little bit older, and he’s a slightly different cat. But Freo took a punt on him, and seem to have dealt with him reasonably well, and so we got a gem of a player for pick 66. Would we have gone down that path if he was a young indigenous kid? I hope so.
In the AFL’s defence, I think this issue is part of what drove them towards the academy model. Part of the issue seems to be how kids from very different backgrounds fit within a very rigid AFL environment. Giving young kids the chance to get a taste of that, while also encouraging clubs to engage with talented kids and get to know them a bit, can only help.
