IN part four of our exclusive interview series with John Worsfold, the West Coast coach reveals the strengths of each of his coaching team.

Your assistant coaches – what do each of them bring to you? Let’s start with Peter Sumich.
Suma just brings a different perspective to the way I look at things, and we’ve always been that way.

Is that because he’s a forward?
Yeah, I think he wanted to be a defender, but …  No, it’s just our personalities more than forward or back. We’re very different, but we probably live by the same values, but we go about it differently, so we have a good balance there.

Are you going to keep him for much longer or is he going to get a club of his own?
I hope he gets a senior coaching job and we lose him, but that might be here and then maybe I wouldn’t be as happy. [laughs] But I think the progression is [that] you want to see people achieve their goals, and I know he wants to coach at AFL level, so we’ll help him. By him being good for us, it helps him get a job, that’s the idea.

Tony Micale?
Obviously great experience. A good fallback for me at times – I know Boop’s been through all the situations we go through numerous times and would have made good or bad decisions in those cases, so we get to really pick his brains. He has our backline working very closely together and they’ve been a very strong unit for a few years now. Great premiership-winning experience, he’s a winner, that’s for sure.

Darren Harris?
Harro came in with that enthusiasm as a high-achieving footballer at coaching and playing level. He’s very meticulous about the way he goes about his job.

Michael Broadbridge?
Great experience in a variety of areas – he’s coached different areas on the field, and has the best knowledge of the current IT that’s going on in football for us. He’s our skills coach and has developed our skills program really well, and he’s on match committee so he offers us a lot more experience there as well.

Peter Worsfold?
He came in as the development coach, to work mainly with the young players and their onfield development, but has stepped up to oversee the on and off-field development of our whole list. He’s working very strongly with our leadership group, the next group of players coming through, and with our core values committee that was developed last year. One of his strengths is building good teams around him and developing people.

Gavin Bell?
He stepped in to take over the development coach role which is working with the young players. He’s worked with young players, colts players, coming through so he’s done a lot of coaching of young people in his own right. He’s a school teacher, so he has great communication skills with young people. He’s done his level 3 coaching (certificate) so he’s been developing himself to be coming through as a coach for a long period of time.