The following is a personal recollection of the Brunswick U13 Dragons’ 2013 premiership winning season in the Yarra Junior Football League. This is an edited version of an article by Director of Coaching Trevor Ludeman that was originally published in the Brunswick Junior Football Club 2013 Annual Report.
The old adage in Amateur Football is “hold your list, add six and don’t book holidays in September!” The expectation is that this strategy should get the team into a final series. This came true for 2013 with the U13 commencing with 16 players of the U12 Premiership returning while we were very fortunate in having six new players coming into the side, being James Andrianakis, Patrick Boreham Delany, Gus Coverdale, Raff Carroll, Tahj Haddock, and Declan Ramage. These players came with new Assistant Coach Ross Coverdale. Both Ross and these players were wonderful additions to the U13 side and were definitely required given that the U12 were elevated from Black to Blue Division for season 2013. With the success in the first four grading games for 2013 the U13 team was further elevated into Green Division.
This year one of the strategies to improve players’ awareness was to play each player 4-5 games in the forward, defence and centre lines. This task took Ross about 90 minutes in team selection, while parents would have also noticed that rotations were made about every seven minutes to ensure all players had at least three quarters per game. Overall this strategy worked as the players could play in any position, while from round 12 onwards we started to finalise team positions based on the player’s ability.
The elevations of the team into Green Division was a positive move as the first four games resulted in large wins and for the players to develop; they needed to be tested throughout all positions on the ground. They needed to be able to “run both ways”, i.e. from defence to forward line.