Behind the scenes of building Collingwood’s playing list

The work of an AFL recruiter affects a huge number of people. Aside from players, there are coaches, whose employment prospects largely depend on the quality of your work.

There’s corporate areas, reliant on your work to generate excitement and drive for memberships. There’s also the club’s supporters, who count on you every November to give them a reason to believe for the years ahead.

Dominic Milesi is National Recruiting Manager for the Collingwood Football Club, the biggest club in the land, if not the biggest in Australian sport. He’s been with the Pies since 2008, going full-time in 2010.

It’s been a long road to get to this point — his early career scouting and recruiting AFL prospects were unpaid volunteer hours at the Box Hill Hawks in the VFL.

Milesi’s role at Collingwood is the culmination of nine years of part-time and volunteer work at Box Hill, Hawthorn and his own research work, all while holding down a full-time job ‘on the side’.

Talking to the Australian sports podcast ‘A Sporting Discussion’, Milesi tells what goes on behind the scenes of drafting players for Australia’s most famous club.

The Set Up
Collingwood’s full-time recruiting team consists of four people – Milesi, Derek Hine (List Manager, responsible for contracts and trades) and recruiters Matthew Rendell and Adam Shepard.

“We’ve got four, which is actually one of the smaller (full-time) teams across the AFL,” Milesi says. “Some of the others run with seven, eight or nine.

“We’ve got about 15-16 part time staff scattered across Australia. They’re probably the unsung heroes of the football industry – they do all the hard yards going to games in the country that we can’t get to, a lot of them have normal jobs, they work Monday to Friday and they just do it for the love of footy.”

“We rely very heavily on them to be our eyes and ears on the ground because we can’t be everywhere at once.”

Travel, analysis then more travel and more analysis
Counting preseason, school competitions and leagues around Australia, Milesi says he’d attend over 100 games a year. “A lot of the time you’re only at a game for two quarters, three quarters then you’re off to the next one, it’s hard to keep an accurate count. I tried to once and gave up!”

The hard yards start each Monday at the Holden Centre, reviewing statistics from competitions across Australia, talking to part-time staff, interviewing prospects and moving the obligatory magnetic names around on the whiteboard.

The team receives up to 50 games’ worth of video footage from the Australian leagues. The footage is provided by Champion Data and is coded by player, giving Milesi and his team deep access to potential draftees.

“Basically, Tuesday and Wednesday is watching edits of players we might not have seen a lot of, guys who have been recommended. There’s a lot of sitting in front of the computer watching footy,”

Milesi is quick to point out that video isn’t the ‘be all and end all’ for deciding on a player. “All the video in the world might not give you the whole story on a player. There’s never any substitute for watching a player live.

“You have to go and watch them live and see what their running patterns are like, what they’re like at the breaks, at the huddles, in the warmup. They probably don’t think we’re watching them at those times, but we are, we see how a kid reacts if they’re dragged.”

Looking past talent
The profile of your typical AFL recruit has changed a lot over the years. It used to be that raw talent alone could get you drafted, but as Milesi explains, this has evolved for the ‘modern AFL’.

“It’s really changed from when I started a few years ago – you have to really have to know what the learning style of the kid is, what kind of coaching style is going to work for him.”

“AFL footy is so structured and most of the kids are coming out of a competition where they’re really encouraged to play. They don’t actually have much structure in terms of their setups and we prefer that, we can just assess them on their playing ability – but then the issue is they come in and have to learn how to adapt to whatever game style that particular team is playing.”

Collingwood pays a lot of attention to a prospect’s off-field life. “We have to do a lot of assessment on their psychological makeup – we have a psych employed who helps us with that – but a lot of it is just talking to people – teammates, coaches, school teachers, his boss at work – get a bit of a feel for them that way.”

Baking the bread
With the work of the recruiter so entwined with a coaches role, it’s easy to assume that a coach would lean on the recruiting team for a specific type of player or indeed a particular individual. Not so, says Milesi.

“When I started at Collingwood Mick Malthouse was coach at the time and he had a saying, ‘Let the baker bake the bread’ and Bucks (Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley) is of a similar opinion – they’re there to coach, we’re there to recruit. They don’t know these kids like we do, they haven’t been watching them for three years.

“They might get to see them once and watch a bit of vision, so they don’t get too involved saying you should pick this player or that player. They might say ‘we might need another midfielder’ or ‘we might need another key back’ but these days with free agency, the ability to take mature age rookies and the trade period being much more open, you can balance up your list in other ways. It’s not as reliant on the draft as it was.”

A good example of ‘list balancing’ was Collingwood’s recruitment of Adam Treloar from Greater Western Sydney in 2015. “Usually we start targeting guys a fair way out, it’s not like you get to trade period and go ‘this guy might be good.’” Milesi says.

“With Adam Treloar, we put an enormous amount of work into him in terms of watching him for 12 months in the lead up before we started negotiating with GWS.”

The best versus the best fit
It’s the key question for recruiters in the heat of the draft – do you take the best player available, or do you draft to address the club’s specific needs? Milesi says it’s a mix of both.

“Everyone likes to say you’re going to pick the best player available, and in an ideal world you would, particularly early on that’s what tends to happen. But I do think as the draft opens up and it becomes very even, clubs do start going a bit more towards needs.”

“We try to balance it a bit – we wouldn’t pick five ruckmen in a national draft, but at the same time you have to be careful that you’re not reaching too much for a particular type of player.”

“We really make sure we know what the depth is in each position and we won’t go overboard and pick a player 20 positions higher just because he’s a key forward or a key back.”

Ignore the present, plan the future
When Milesi joined Collingwood in 2008 it was a time of high prosperity – the club was playing finals regularly and the ‘premiership window’ was well and truly open. In these times, it can be easy to get caught up and forget to lay a foundation for the future (see Brisbane’s results in the mid-2000s). Milesi is fully aware that his job is to secure the club’s on-field fortunes.

“You’ve got to keep to a plan of sustained success – you can’t throw all your eggs in the basket of winning a flag next year and whatever happens after that, we’ll pick up the pieces. Every player we pick, we have a view that they’re going to fit in to give us a sustained run at it over a several year period.”

Collingwood has been taking heat in recent years for its list turnover, particularly from its supporters who expect a high level of performance. Milesi encourages a patient approach.

“We’ve regenerated the list quite a bit since Nathan’s taken over – we’re still in the bottom half for average games played. We’re certainly confident with this group, we’ve got a strong group between 20-24 and we think they’re going to stick together for the next few years and provide a sustained crack at the finals.”

Milesi also has some clear advice for those fans who expect each draft crop to walk onto the field and dominate: “A lot of the players who get drafted in 2016 will realistically play their best footy in 2022-24. You hope a guy will have an impact in his first year, but realistically you’re only going to get your Chris Judds and the like once every ten years.”

One that got away
Every now and again a draft has ‘that’ player recruiters dream of picking – the total package that can serve a club for decades. Unfortunately, there’s 17 other clubs who want that player too. There’s always hard luck stories – Milesi’s was Dyson Heppell, drafted by Essendon in 2011.

“He was probably the best interview I’ve done in my time, but our first pick was number 45 that year. We interviewed him in February and we didn’t see him again because we knew he was an absolute no-brainer. The next time we saw him was at the draft, he came up and shook hands and remembered every recruiters name, you could tell that not only was he going to be a great player, he would be a great leader around whatever club got him.”

Nailing it
There’s good news stories too – the times when a recruiter is especially proud of how a player he’s picked up flourishes. Take Josh Smith, who started at Collingwood last season.

“Our stats analyst Michael O’Loughlin should take a lot of credit for this one. He was running the numbers and kept pushing him up, saying this guy was doing really well on all our key metrics in the NEAFL – so we went up and watched him.”

“He was 22 and had been through the system and just slowly improved, so Derek and I went and interviewed him before the draft and he was that hungry for an opportunity, just desperate. He was working in childcare, was a fantastic person and just wanted to take whatever opportunity came. We walked out and said ‘we’ve gotta give this kid a chance.’”

Collingwood drafted Smith in the second round of the 2015 rookie draft. He ended up playing 18 senior games and finished seventh in the Copeland Trophy, the club’s best-and-fairest award.

Pies fans across the country will be hoping that Milesi and his team can hit the target again in 2016.