OAK Park was a kick away from playing off in the Essendon Ford Division 1 Grand Final – a game in which they may have been a sneaky chance of knocking off Craigieburn.
Coach Ben Chapman moved on and eventually took the senior job at Thomastown, opening up the Oak Park role.
That role landed with ex-Oak Park player Michael Hooper, who in the last three seasons played 53 games with Greensborough – including the club’s 2014 premiership.
Being your first coaching job, have you had any mentors that have helped you develop as a coach?
Yeah the last three years at Greensborough I’ve been the midfield coach. Greensborough have line coaches so I’ve been a senior assistant for three years. In my first year there I was under Robbie Hyde, who’s obviously had a lot of success, so I took a fair bit being under his wing a little bit.
Have you put the boots away for good now?
Yeah I’m on the wrong side of 30 now so I’m just going to concentrate on coaching.
How does it feel being back at Oak Park and part of the EDFL?
Yeah I played here for four years and had some really good times, so it’s good to get back to a family-orientated club. It’s nice and local for me as well living in the area.
List-wise it feels as though Oak Park is in a pretty good spot. Do you feel that way too?
If you have a look at the side last year, they had a lot of young kids coming through and we also had some good older heads to lead them as well. I think the focus will be to make sure we keep all those young kids on-board and really try to develop them and have a few senior heads to really lead the way. Being one kick away from a grand final showed they do have the ability, so we’ll just try to identify a couple of areas that we need to improve on. But we’re hoping a majority of the playing list will stay on for next year.
How many are you aware of that are leaving?
At this stage Danny Campbell is the only one we know is going, so we’ll obviously try to keep everyone else. There are a couple of boys that might go overseas so we’re waiting to hear of their plans, but at the moment we’re just trying to retain much of the list from last year.
Have you had much time to really look at what you need?
One of the focuses is that we need a couple of talls. Last year we may have been two talls short. Obviously you look at someone like Rhys Bloomfield and we had him in the ruck, but he’s a really good focal point up forward as well, so we probably need to try and find a ruckman and maybe another tall defender.
What about the club’s ambitions? This is a club that was a force in Premier Division/A Grade. Is the aim to get back up there and how quickly do you want to achieve that?
We definitely want to be back up there but the main focus for us is to develop a list that’s going to stay together and be good enough to compete up there, but that may take a couple of years to really get up and firing. It’s a hard one but obviously we want to play finals again next year and see how we go.
But now that Craigieburn’s gone, do you see an opportunity to strike next year? Because it looks like Essendon Ford Division 1 has completely opened up...
There’s always an opportunity. Craigieburn was always going to be a hard side to beat last year with all the players they had. Obviously Tullamarine’s always going to be strong and I guess no one’s sure what Airport West will be like coming down, so I guess everyone does see it as an opportunity. But we’ve just got to be careful and go about it the right way and work really hard to form a team that can actually work and gel well.
