With Skilled Stadium unavailable to the Cats for pre season training due to turf resurfacing, Geelong’s troops have been conducting most of the sessions at Elderslie Reserve, home on Newtown & Chilwell football club.
The change of training venue has represented a unique return to the club for Geelong’s assistant coach Brendan McCartney, who played with Newton & Chilwell as a player, and who also began his coaching career with the club, along with Cats assistant general manager of football, Steve Hocking, who coached Newton & Chilwell in 1995 and 1996.
“It’s a great club and I have great memories and life long friends from here,” McCartney said.
“The club was always run by a bunch of great people. People like Nigel Austin, Jackie McLean, Andy Wierzbowski and Peter Landers. It was a wonderful club that had a lot of success and a really great place to play footy and be involved.
“I came up through the juniors. The little league was on the bottom oval where they still play under 9s.
McCartney played over 150 games with the club, including 87 with the senior team. He was a member of the club’s 1978 and 1982 premierships, the former when McCartney was still a teenager. And the influences from those days still resonate in 2010.
“I was lucky, I played in a flag (1978) at a young age and another in 1982,” McCartney recalled.
“The coaches from my playing days were great men. Hugh Strachan was a real father figure and he went out of his way to make me feel welcome. And Kevin Higgins was way ahead of his time. Kevin trained us really hard given it was local footy. Both were good coaches that influenced me going forward.”
After a break from football, McCartney returned to Elderslie Reserve as coach of the club’s reserves. The Eagles weren’t one of the competitions better teams, finishing with just six wins from 18 games.
“Well we weren’t a great team as the record shows,” McCartney remembered with a laugh.
“Andy (Wierzbowski) and Pete (Landers) gave me that chance and I really enjoyed it. I went on and had another couple of years as assistant coach after that and then moved onto Ocean Grove. Working in the AFL wasn’t really on the radar. Newtown really gave me my start in coaching and it’s good to be back there with Skilled unavailable.”
After finishing his AFL career with the Cats in the 1994 grand final, Hocking spent the next two years as senior coach of the Eagles. It was that role that eventually led Hocking to his current position.
“I really enjoyed the club and the people when I was there,” Hocking said.
“When we come down to train it’s great to see people like Lenny Alford and Noel O’Dwyer who is now the president.
“I enjoyed the coaching but there was also a fair amount of administration involved and I found that was what I really liked. I made the decision that if I was to get back into AFL it would be in a management / admin role rather than on the coaching side. So that was the starting point for my current role.”
The Cats use Elderslie reserve for most of the major skills sessions through the summer, with training back on Skilled Stadium not expected to resume until early in the 2010 season.
