Lockyer guided WA into this year's final of the NAB AFL Under-18 Championships where Vic Metro ultimately prevailed, but despite that disappointment the coach remains convinced his players will figure heavily in what could be an unprecedented West Australian draft contingent.
"Anything can happen on draft day, of course, but I've heard anywhere from 17 to 30 players could get drafted out of WA this year", Lockyer said.
"In terms of my championships squad I would be hopeful that 10 to 12 of them would get picked up this year."
Those sorts of figures are a long way removed from the dark days of West Australian junior football that saw just one player – Kangaroo Daniel Wells at second overall – taken in the national draft of 2002.
South Australia produced 13 AFL draftees that same year and consistently yielded a dozen or so new players in the years that followed to maintain a reputation as the primary source of talent outside Victoria.
After nearly usurping the Croweaters for that title in 2005, Western Australian football provided six more new AFL players in 2006 and a whopping 11 more last year when SA supplied just four draftees.
It's a transformation that came about after a rethink by those in charge of WAFL and AFL development programs following the disappointment of 2002.
"I just think the WAFL clubs, and especially the colts coaches with the development programs that were put in place four or five years ago, you're probably starting to see the rewards of all that hard work," Lockyer said.
"The WAFL clubs are a really important cog in the machine -- their talent identification is second to none. I mean their colts teams might have 100 kids turn up on the first night and they would have played four or five years of development squad football before they got to colts age.
"But we're not sitting on our laurels. We're trying to push our development system here even further to ensure that we continue to have that good growth every year. I think it's been building, but I still think we've got at least four or five years worth of really good kids that are going to come through our system.
"We've got some quality people running our development system, not only at the WAFL clubs, but you've got people like John Haines and Rob Wiley with the work they do with the AFL high-performance coaching.
"The work that all these people do shows up in how many kids we're actually getting drafted."
Lockyer is nearing the end of his second year in charge of WA's under-18s squad, a role he was appointed to after heading up the prolific East Fremantle youth program that produced the likes of Paddy Ryder, Chris Masten, Rhys Palmer and Josh Kennedy.
He will, of course, follow the national draft closely to see how his boys fare. But Lockyer's gaze has already settled on next year's crop; a process he says is made easier by the long-range talent identification system they have in place.
"We're tightening that up even more. We're working harder and more closely with our state schoolboys under-15s," he says.
"We certainly already work very closely with our state under-16s and we've almost got it to the point where there's a handover period around this time of the year from the state 16s to the state 18s.
"The stats show that about half of our state 15s will go on to play state 16s and then half again will go on to play 18s.
"It all augurs well for the future of football in this state."
