Originally Posted by
Meg
The following re Academy comes from Andrew Ireland's interview posted on Swans site.
"SS: Another area of the club which has attracted attention this year is the QBE Sydney Swans Academy. We�ve just seen that the bidding system for the 2014 National Draft will not change this year; what are your thoughts on that decision and any criticism the Academy has received?
AI: If you talk about it in a general sense, I thought the criticism of the Academy was pretty pathetic. The reality is that there was no sense that the development of football, or of players to come into the national draft, had improved one bit for all the money that was being spent in New South Wales. While there were a number of really good programs, the numbers just didn�t show improvement. We had always argued that if you really wanted to make an impact in NSW and Queensland, then you needed the AFL clubs to have a vested interest in trying to drive the outcomes. With that in mind, we�ve been really happy with the programs we�ve been able to put together with Dennis Carroll as the Director of our Academy and Chris Smith running it, and initially Paul Roos coaching and now Michael O�Loughlin, driving a really intense and great program. We get kids as young as nine or ten trialling for it and we�ve always had a view that it would take a number of years before we would see players benefitting from the programs and come out the other end as potential draftees.
We have been willing to invest an awful lot of money into the programs, but the AFL established the rules, and although we do lobby for them, at the end of the day they approve them. The fact that the first time a boy of potentially high quality was seen to be coming through, we have people complaining about it, and that�s why I say it�s pathetic. Most of that was coming out of Melbourne, where they don�t know or don�t care about how hard the game is to develop in the northern states. With that in mind, I�m really pleased that there have been no changes made this year. It would have been an abysmal decision by the AFL to try and change things so late in the year. It�s never occurred before with the rules, so that�s a sensible decision, and now we�ll just see where it goes in the future.
I was very much involved with the introduction of the bidding system, because we always felt that the father/son rules were too skewed and it was ridiculous to see the case of Tom Hawkins, being the best player in the under-18 competition at the time, able to go to Geelong as a round three selection. The bidding system has changed that dramatically, and there may well be a better way to make it even closer, but the thing that the AFL has always accepted even if they do bring in a new system, is that they will have to provide compensation or an ability for clubs who run Academies to get a benefit from doing it.
The other thing is, as much as you might try and rate what a draft pick is worth, which is the complicated thing they are trying to do, no two drafts are the same and no two players are the same. There have been great first round picks and there have been lesser first round picks. It�s never guaranteed and to try to micromanage every bit of that when there are so many unknowns about the outcome would be a mistake."
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