The latest edition of 'In Black and White' magazine has hit shelves and member mailboxes.  Collingwoodfc.com.au has published an excerpt from the lead story on Scott Pendlebury's Copeland season.  Click here to purchase your copy.

Having claimed his first Copeland Trophy, Scott Pendlebury is not likely to sit back and smell the roses. As he tells James Weston, there is still much work to be done.

The Los Angeles Times recently quoted San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh, whose NFL team is experiencing success after some time in the wilderness. After such a drought, Harbaugh noted his fear of complacency.

“Dangers lurk, no question about it,” he said. “The thing we just stress is (to) keep climbing; we don’t want to hang on. Like a rock climber, it takes more energy to hang on than to keep climbing.”

While he spoke of his own situation, the Niners’ coach might well have been directing his thoughts across the Pacific, where they apply - to the letter - to Collingwood vice-captain Scott Pendlebury.

There has been plenty of climbing throughout the 23-year-old’s career. Equally, now is not the time to stand still.

“The expectation I had of myself was to improve again this year. Make sure I stuck to what worked in the past but just to push the limits a bit more,” says Pendlebury, who emerged from the season with his first Copeland Trophy, ending the three-year reign of teammate Dane Swan.

Highly self-motivated, Pendlebury also stole a page from his teammate’s playbook in a bid to, as Harbaugh might phase it, “keep climbing”.

“Swanny hasn’t been consistently playing good games, he’s consistently been playing great games,” he said. “He wanted to strive not to be happy with any individual performance, but to step it up every week. He has been the best at the club at that.”

There is an argument to be made that Pendlebury has well and truly joined his Brownlow Medallist teammate among the most accomplished players in football. We’ll start with what we know: a Copeland Trophy in 2011, adding to his premiership and Norm Smith medals of 12 months earlier.

A dual All-Australian, he has finished fourth and third in the last two Brownlow medal counts, and the Copeland triumph was his fourth top-three finish in five years in his club’s highest award. Plus, he has won consecutive Anzac Day Medals.

Also impressive are the statistics. In 2011, Pendlebury was sixth in the competition in possessions. Just under half of his touches were contested possessions, evidence of his in-traffic ability to not only regularly get his hands on the ball, but do something with it - he disposed of the ball with 78 per cent efficiency. Yet there is something else that sets Pendlebury from the pack.

“He’s a bit like Neo in the Matrix - he makes time slow down, he looks like he’s got more time than anyone else,” says his new coach and former teammate, Nathan Buckley. “Pendles is not particularly quick, but he’s very quick in the mind. His basketball background helps him find time and space and make good decisions.”

Buckley is at pains to point out that, while Pendlebury’s apparent ease with the football derives largely from his natural talent, a substantial amount of hard work hammers home the week to week performance. “It’s not done easily,” he continues.