AFL NATIONAL talent manager Kevin Sheehan has given a glowing appraisal of the young talent on show at the 17th NAB AFL Draft Combine, which concluded in Canberra on Friday.
Four days of intensive testing and interviews has seen long-standing records broken and much information gathered by the 18 AFL clubs in attendance.
"With about 150 sets of eyes on the draft hopefuls I reckon we've all learned an enormous amount about their strengths and development needs of most of them; the ones that were able to work out and even the ones that couldn't," Sheehan said.
"Kids like Josh Caddy or a Dyson Heppell have had wonderful All-Australian years, [excellent] national championships and have continued to build their reputations. They're super competitors, very good athletes and wonderful-sized players that you can play in so many spots.
"You could go through so many of them and say that there's no fault there and they should play a lot of AFL footy."
The last test of the combine was the 3km time trial, which Oakleigh Chargers' young gun Andrew Gaff took out in a time of 10 minutes even, which puts him in the top-three all-time.
"Andrew Gaff is a real pro," Sheehan said.
"You see his work-rate out on the ground; he averages 30 disposals a game and you can see why because he has an elite engine.
"He's eclipsed Jarrad McVeigh's time for the 3km time trial and McVeigh is a best-and-fairest winner at an AFL club in the Sydney Swans. Gaff has got a bigger engine than that."
Queenslander Joel Wilkinson was one of the stars of the combine with wins in both the sprint tests and an elite 15.3 shuttle run. Sheehan pointed to him as one of the success stories of the combine process.
"We've found a boy who walked in to his teacher two years ago and said 'I want to drop out of the athletics program and play AFL'. The teacher said 'You're kidding aren't you?' and he said 'That's what I want to do'.
"He wanted to play in a team sport - this year he captained Queensland in the under-18s and now he's shown what an elite speed/endurance athlete he is."
While the combine continues to evolve from its humble beginnings, with so much data available, Sheehan agreed there was still plenty of room for an experienced eye.
"Our job is to help create a healthy pool of potential players and then you've got to sift through and decide between some very even ones," he said.
"The beauty of all this is it's not perfect. It won't spit out the exact order of who's going to be the most successful overall.
"Some people who might have some deficiencies will overcome that with their work rate; the Brett Kirks of the world.
"You just can't quite tell how they're all going to pan out, but that's the brilliant challenge that engages so many of these recruiters and coaches."
