Tuesday June 4

It’s the second week of June, eight o’clock at night and dark for a few hours already. Vic Metro training is over, the Princes Park lights have been flicked off and the players are on their way to the car park, bags slung over shoulders, searching for parents waiting in warmed-up cars.

The boys played their first game of the national championships two weeks ago but Tom wasn’t part of that side, the coaches preferring to let some of the younger players see what it was all about, as they did for him and a few others last year. He’ll play for the first time this weekend and knows a lot of what to expect: what it’s like to travel, to stay in hotel rooms, to play on unfamiliar grounds, to take on better players. He knows what it’s like to do it all knowing there are recruiters in the stands, sitting who knows where, taking notes, deciding what they think of you.

Still, this year feels different. Tom thinks it’s the expectation – his hopes and those of other people. He spent the first two weeks of the season in Europe with the academy team, the best part of their nine-month program by far, the thing all the boys had started looking forward to as soon as they were selected. In their three camps they were taught all sorts of things: how to improve every little football skill, what to look for on food labels, how to organise their diaries, how to think through and manage their stress. They had etiquette lessons and they each spent a week with an AFL team, getting some work experience.

Tom trained with Collingwood and the six days of pre-season training helped him see exactly how full-time life as a footballer will be. There wasn’t just one training session per day – there were two, or even three. There was no slacking off, even in the middle of January: every session needed to be better than the last and each one was fully reviewed. “The days were long but it wasn’t just that,” Tom said. “It was how much concentration it took to be focused on footy all day, every day.”

The academy trip was the same, with the added challenge of being a long, long way from home. The team spent five days in Italy, living and training at the Australian Institute of Sport’s European base, a centre used at different times of the year by cyclists, rowers, basketballers and all sorts of other athletes. They did their skill sessions on a local soccer pitch with a handful of recruiters there, watching from just a few steps away, taking notes on their iPads, looking to see which boys worked hardest, who encouraged the others to keep going, how the boys interacted, who struggled away from home and what the families who travelled with them were like. Tom’s parents, Anita and Geoff, and his younger sister Tessa were on the trip, one of nine families who wanted to be there, for one of the last times before they handed their teenage boys over to an AFL club. That Copenhagen was on the itinerary convinced them to buy tickets: it’s where Anita was born and grew up, before meeting Geoff on a trip to Portugal.

From Italy the boys flew to London and Copenhagen, playing against combined European sides that they beat easily, though that wasn’t really the point of the trip. Their coach, Michael O’Loughlin, was intrigued to see which boys did the things they were meant to do against lesser opposition, but like the recruiting managers he was more interested in how they coped with the busy schedule, with living like full-time footballers and with travelling, in some cases for the first time. And they didn’t do everything right. After a handful of players neglected to fill out their daily monitoring form on the conditioning coach’s computer – how they had slept, how various muscles felt, how motivated they were feeling – the whole team had to do knuckle push-ups, in zero degrees and softly falling snow, by the front door of their hotel in Surrey.

It was a long, tiring trip but as one of the team’s leaders Tom did his best to think about other people just as much as himself. The players came together with the exact same goal – to be drafted – but from completely different backgrounds. James Aish had just played in a premiership for Norwood, following his grandfather, father and uncle, and, at 16, becoming the youngest player in South Australian history to do so. Errin Wasley-Black had moved out of home three months earlier, knowing how hard it can be for kids from Alice Springs to get noticed and wanting to prove that he could look after himself in Darwin, doing his own cooking, following his gym program and working part-time in a sports store.

Nick Bourke had injured his shoulder early in the MCG game: it needed to be operated on, but he wasn’t sure he had done enough to get drafted, so didn’t know whether to have the operation straight away or wait and keep playing, until he felt sure he had proved himself. Kade Kolodashnij was a late call-up and had left his twin brother home in Launceston. For the first time, they were not part of the same team. For the first time, they were apart for more than a day or two. Cameron Conlon had injured his knee doing squats in the gym a few weeks earlier, and wasn’t even allowed to come away.

Getting to know everyone was one thing. Trying to make sure they worked as a team was another, particularly given the boys were the same age, at the same stage, wanting exactly the same things. “It’s a bit different to being back in the TAC Cup. I think it’s being together all the time that makes it different, and the coaches have put a lot of responsibility on us,” Tom said. “Some of the recruiters have been saying we’re a quiet group, and the coaches came to us with that and asked us to do something about it, so we had to think about what was the best way to get that across to the group and get everyone thinking about how we could do it.

“There’s so many different personalities. While you know the guys, you don’t know them really well. You haven’t known them for three or four years like some of the guys back at home. You want to listen to them and also help direct them a bit, I suppose, get the balance right and help get the coach’s message across. It’s been a pretty steep learning curve. But I can see how the next level would be another step up again. The more serious the environment is, the more competitive it can be.”

The boys were home by mid-April, busy in more familiar ways. Most weekends Tom played for Eastern on Saturday afternoon, then went home to watch footy on TV. Last year his friends used to get frustrated when he wouldn’t do anything with them at night, when he had to go home early, when he needed to sleep because he was either tired or making sure he was properly prepared to play the next day. They understand the way he thinks much better now, but there are times he feels like he’s missing out on things, that it’s impossible to play football and have the sort of social life kids his age are meant to have. Even now, he’ll get invited to a party, decide he wants to go, then get there, feel tired and head home to bed.

“I’ve guess I’ve stepped away from the social side of things a bit in the past year,” he said. “I’ve never really been one to go out and party anyway, but it can be tough. You don’t meet too many new people and your friends feel like you’re shunning them at times. But at the same time, you get to do some pretty good things that other people don’t. It’s not really that tough, when you weigh it up like that.”

His weeks become much busier from there. Tom spends most Sundays at his desk, trying to get some homework done. After school each Monday there’s a recovery session at Eastern, then a meeting to review the weekend’s game, then some more study to get through. On Tuesdays he has Metro training then heads home to Ringwood, hungry. Each Wednesday he gets out of school a little early, gets his work done before dinner and has time to relax for a bit before bed. On Thursdays there’s another Metro session and on Fridays he usually studies some more, then watches the footy on TV.

There’s an English test coming up this week so he’ll start preparing for that when he gets home from training tonight; thankfully this one is split over two days, which eases some of the pressure. There are times it feels tough to keep up, but he just does. It’s not like he has a choice. “Footy’s ramping up and school is busy, but this is the last time they should both be busy at the same time and I want to do as well as I can at both,” he said. “There’s only a term and a bit to go, and I’m probably through most of it now. That’s what I keep telling myself.”

Tom went straight back to his TAC Cup team after the Europe trip too, and that challenged him in different ways. He’s kicked 19 goals in the past month, and that’s the major reason this year’s championships feel so different to last season: he has something to live up to. People are expecting things, like they did two years ago ahead of the under-16s. But his teammates played three games while he was away, and got used to him not being there, losing the first two matches but winning by seven goals in the third.

When he got home he felt like he was kicking someone out of his position, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He sensed that some of the other players were looking at him more closely than usual, wondering if the trip had gone to his head, whether he thought he was better than them because of what he’d been doing. He felt like a little bit like an outsider, but it took only a few weeks for things to get back to normal.

“It’s just subtle things you notice, people watching you more closely or being a little bit wary of you. In a way you almost need to go out of your way to be a bit more humble, a bit introverted for a few weeks, because everyone’s looking to have an opinion on whether or not you’ve changed. You think about it a fair bit. You don’t want to upset anyone.”

Now he’s away again, this time with the Metro team. He wants to play well, in every single game. He wants to find ways to get involved even if he’s not taking marks and kicking goals, to measure whether he’s played well in less black and white ways. He wants to have a good attitude no matter what’s going on, to set a good example and lead the team.

It’s impossible to predict what will happen, but he knows there are things he can control: knowing precisely what the coaches want of him, staying upbeat and playing with absolute effort, all of the time. It doesn’t really matter what other people expect of him this time, because he knows he expects even more and that he’ll need to be mindful of assessing himself according to those high hopes.

“Most of the time it’s good to have big plans. It pushes you to new levels, it makes you better. But the other five per cent of the time it can be a burden that you carry into games, and that can make it harder to pick yourself up or pull yourself out of a slump. I’m trying to remember that, but I really want to test myself. I want to see where I’m at.”