From Windy Hill to land of GIANTS

Greater Western Sydney Head of Sports Science, John Quinn reflects on the journey that brought him and veteran coach Kevin Sheedy to the GIANTS.

When I got a call from the Essendon Football Club out of the blue in 1998, asking if I wanted to be their fitness co-ordinator, I didn’t know how to spell AFL.I had never seen a game, I had no interest in the sport and I couldn’t have told you the colours of Essendon.I worked for the Australian Institute of Sport and was on secondment down in Tasmania. I was working with elite athletes, mainly sprinters.It was almost surreal but the time was right for me to make a change, so I went to Melbourne.It was an interesting time for the football club; there was a lot of pressure because Essendon hadn’t been doing very well for a few years.They were looking for a new fitness coach and Kevin Sheedy had the final say on that appointment.Kevin said that he wanted someone in the role who is in to developing the body. He didn’t want someone who was tried and tested in the AFL but someone from the AIS to come to Melbourne and work with his players.I think that Kevin took a great leap of faith on me as someone that had never seen a game of football before and it’s a perfect example of the kind of innovative thinking that has made him so influential in the AFL for so long.Because I hadn’t seen the game, I looked at football in a very different light and our program at the Bombers was very different to anything they had seen before.I stayed at Essendon for ten years and it was fantastic.The year 2000, when Essendon won the premiership, was a surreal year for me.I was appointed as one of the team coaches for the Australian Olympic Team for track and field. While we were experiencing success every week at the Bombers (we only dropped one game for the season) but I was also working with incredible athletes like Cathy Freeman, getting them ready for the Olympic games.In the midst of all of that, my mother contracted terminal cancer. My mother passed away on the first week of the finals, which made it a bittersweet year for me in many ways.The success that we experienced then was great, but it’s much better in retrospect. At the time, you have a job to do and you don’t have time to get caught up in the emotion of it all.We have a lot of talent here at the GIANTS and the potential for success, if we can get this right, is there in years to come.I think that the sort of success we had at Essendon in 2000, will feel better if we were to achieve it in Western Sydney.The reason for that is because we are building something unique.Essendon was fantastic but at any other AFL club, you are dropped in to a journey and then you are pulled back out of it. It existed before you arrived and it will go on long after you leave it.Fast Forward about twelve years and Kevin Sheedy was on the phone again, offering me another opportunity to work under him, this time for the youngest club in the competition, the Greater Western Sydney GIANTS.To help build a club from nothing is amazing. Eighteen months ago, where I am sitting now was a grass paddock and we didn’t know who our players were going to be.Here, the journey existed when we got here and although it too will go on long after we have left, we will have left an indelible mark on this club because we are the foundations of it.The same goes for everyone involved in the GIANTS in our inaugural year, the players, corporate partners, members and staff.To me, the Kevin Sheedy that I met at Windy Hill in 1998 is a totally different Kevin to the one who will walk out on to the field tomorrow night.He has energy, passion and enthusiasm that I haven’t seen shine quite so brightly in him before. He is relishing in the opportunity to help guide this young talent and develop this football club in Western Sydney.People underestimate him, say that he’s past it and his best coaching is behind him but Kevin Sheedy thrives on being an underdog and you can see the twinkle in his eye at the moment.At the beginning of the season, I cast my eye down the fixture and saw that we would be playing them at our new SKODA Stadium in Round 9.Like some of the other old Essendon staff we have here at the club, I have a lot of friends there and enjoyed my time working at Windy Hill but make no mistake, I can’t wait for the first time that we beat them.

GET YOUR TICKETS TODAY

2012 TOYOTA AFL Premiership Season – Round 9

GWS GIANTS v Essendon

SKODA Stadium

7.40pm Saturday 26 May, 2012