The 20-year-old has spent the past two seasons on Collingwood’s rookie list after coming to the Lexus Centre from the Gippsland Power at the end of 2006.
But after an excellent 2008 representing the Magpies’ VFL team in which he led the goal kicking with 38 and emerged as a fine mid-sized forward prospect, Macaffer earned a permanent place on the senior list for 2009, and is understandably thrilled.
“It was an enjoyable year and it got to the end of the year meeting that each player has with the coaching staff,” Macaffer said on Friday in Flagstaff.
“They pretty much said then that I had to just wait and see what would happen over the coming weeks with trade week, but it was more likely than not that they were going to put me up on the list.
“So it was just a bit of a waiting game, and (chief of football) Geoff Walsh spoke to my manager, and pretty much told me from there that they were going to put me up, so I was rapt with that.”
With the coaching staff urging Macaffer to improve his endurance base, he has been using his first trip to Arizona to work as hard as possible, although he didn’t expect to have to work as hard as he did on Friday after Thursday’s gruelling Mt Humphrey hike.
“We got the news after we got back from the (Mt Humphrey) walk that today (Friday) would just be a bit of a recovery session because all the boys were a bit sore and tired in the legs from the big walk.
“But... we got down there (to the Northern Arizona University Skydome facility) and that sort of changed towards the end of it. We were put through our paces a bit and it turned out to probably be our toughest session since we got over here.
“We did a normal training session, but there was a lot of long running in the drills that we were doing.
“We’re doing a thing tomorrow, called the 10 commandments, which is 10 different exercises, you’re in groups of four or five and you work as a team. They decided we’d do three of them today... running up and down stairs as a team for 10 minutes, just flat out as many as you could, doing sled pulls up and down the gridiron oval, and then carrying a big heavy thing, two at a time, with sand in it, so it was pretty tough.”
Anyone who has witnessed the way Macaffer has applied himself as a player at Collingwood knows he shouldn’t have too many problems negotiating the remaining seven stations of the ’10 commandments’ in Flagstaff on Saturday, or making a good fist of his chance at AFL football in 2009.
