St Kilda has recently announced plans to start up its own football academy to develop young players and prepare them for a professional football career.
Dubbed the Saints Player Academy, it will be modelled on the youth academies that are found among the bigger football clubs of England, Spain and Holland.
Chris Pelchen, the head of football at St Kilda, has publicly made reference to Barça as his source of inspiration for the concept.
Barça’s academy is known as “la Cantera” (the Quarry), emphasising its objective of looking for nuggets of gold among the stone and rubble.
A key idea that the Saints want to take from Barça is that the academy program should get as much focus as does the senior team, and that philosophy will be underpinned by making the head of the academy a position that sits alongside that of the head coach, not under him.
With this sort of structure, the Saints will run two parallel but linked programs: the AFL program under the head coach, and the academy program under the academy director.
All draftees and developing players will spend most of their time early in their career undertaking the academy program, which will be closely aligned with the Saints VFL club, Sandringham, the Saints’ reserve grade team.
Conversely, senior players will spend most of their time with the AFL program, but they too will dedicate some of their training hours going through the academy.
Chris Pelchen has also publicly stated that he is looking for the Saints to interact seamlessly with off-shore football academies. It is a bit unclear what he means here, whether he envisages partnership arrangements with European football clubs and/or other sports.
We probably need to read between the lines to understand what the Saints are thinking of doing down the track.
In a separate article that appeared in Wednesday’s Age, Pelchen makes a direct reference to the AFL’s international scholarship scheme, and the little known fact that AFL clubs can sign up to eight scholarship holders per annum, up to a maximum of 24.
Not many clubs have pursued this recruiting line in a meaningful way, except for one, Hawthorn, which has formalised partnership arrangements with AFLNZ and has signed four international scholarship holders to date from New Zealand.
Kurt Heatherley, a champion junior basketballer, was signed up at age 14, and now approaching the age of 17 is already 191 cm tall. He moved to Melbourne this year to finish his final year of schooling and the Hawks have hopes that he might debut as early as next season.
A couple of the other scholarship holders, also aged 16, are even taller than Heatherley, and come from a variety of sporting backgrounds.
This perhaps gives us a hint as to what the Saints are thinking of doing through their academy, especially in terms of off-shore recruitment.
In the last couple of years, the AFL has expanded its draft combine to take in various overseas localities, with plans to do even more in the future.
I suspect that an objective of the Saints’ academy will be to pass an eye over such combines with a view to bringing young players back to Australia to go through the academy, perhaps after having spent time in an overseas facility aligned to the club.
And surprise, surprise, who had a central role in developing Hawthorn’s international scholarship program which has already netted the Hawks four young athletes from New Zealand?
Why, it was Chris Pelchen himself!
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