PETER Rohde is leaving Port Adelaide on a high.

After an incredible, 10-year roller-coaster ride where the Power went from winning its first premiership to being the AFL’s basket case and then its Cinderella story, Rohde yesterday walked out of his Alberton Oval office for the last time confident the club is on the verge of winning its second flag.

“I walk away thinking we’ve got some good times ahead of us,’’ said Rohde, who is leaving after 10 years as football operations boss to help run Executive Fitness Management and dab into player management.

“We’ve still got a lot of challenges, football clubs always face them, but with the side we’ve got now, with the age demographic of our list, I’d like to think that we will be playing regular finals football in the next five years and hopefully we can win a premiership.

“We have a core group of young players — the best we’ve had since the 2004 premiership — who are hopefully on the cusp of sustained success.’’

Rohde — Norwood’s 1997 premiership coach and Western Bulldogs coach in 2003-04 — opened up to The Advertiser about how Port turned around its on-field fortunes, its three coaches in his era, including why sacked Matthew Primus is an unsung hero, his biggest regret and the great draft successes and failures.

ANDREW CAPEL: Why are you leaving?

PETER ROHDE: The time’s right. I’ve been involved in football for 32 years as a player, coach and administrator, have just turned 50 and am at a stage where I probably either commit to football for the rest of my working life or try something different.

I’ve always had a desire to run my own business and it was now or never.

Very few people get to leave footy on their terms — I am a member of the sacked coaches club — and it’s nice to be able to have a staged exit where I feel I’m leaving a place in good shape.

AC: What’s your greatest achievement at Port?

PR: Leaving a good list of players together.

I came into the place in 2004 after we’d just won the premiership and the list was very old.

We had a lot of players who were going to be on the way out in the following few years. The process took a lot longer than what we thought but the list is now in terrific shape and set up for sustained success.

It really started with drafting Travis Boak, Robbie Gray, Justin Westhoff and Paul Stewart in 2006.

We made the grand final in 2007 but that was based mainly on top seasons from older players like Shaun Burgoyne, Brendon Lade, Chad Cornes and Warren Tredrea, who is the best player I’ve seen in my time at Port.

When those guys disappeared we had to try to fill the gap that was created underneath and that has taken some time.

To have sustained success and win premierships you need to keep a good group together for quite a few years, like Hawthorn and Geelong have done recently and Brisbane did in the early 2000s.

We feel we’ve put ourselves in that position now and that the rewards will come.

AC: You’ve overseen a lot of changes at Alberton. Any regrets?

PR: I often think about that period between 2008-12 (when Port finished 13th, 10th, 10th, 16th and 14th).

We were always going to face challenges during that time because of the retirement of key players and the demographic of our list but my greatest regret is that we didn’t fight hard enough for the resources we needed in the football department.

We went from being middle of the road in footy department spend to almost bottom and our footy performance suffered and it affected the morale of the place.

We’d bought a lot of young players in and we weren’t able to support and develop them as well as would have liked.

You could argue that the development of Hamish (Hartlett), Robbie (Gray), (Matthew) Lobbe and Boaky (Travis Boak) early on was hampered in that period because medically and fitness wise we didn't have the resources we needed to keep them out on the ground more.

AC: Why didn’t you fight harder for those resources?

PR: We were always mindful of increasing spend in that area but money became very tight at that time.

The bottom line is that in 2004 when I arrived we had won the premiership and made less than a $1 million profit.

In 2007 we played in a grand final and the profit was $300,000-$400,000. In almost every other year we’ve been under severe financial pressure.

All the CEO’s I’ve worked with have tried to put footy first and resource the footy department as best we can. But it’s tough when you’re making a (financial) loss and relying on the SANFL and the AFL to fund you.

Success and failure is not all about money but there is a link. To come out of our struggles we’ve had to bite the bullet and invest a helluva lot more in footy.

There’s been lots of reasons why we’ve improved in the past few years but that’s one of the big ones. Looking back, perhaps if we’d taken more risk and invested more in our footy department earlier we might have got a better return.

AC: In one year — from 2012 to 2013 — Port went from AFL basket case to Cinderella story. What changed so quickly?

PR: There’s many reasons but I always say in footy that things are never as bad as they seem and they are never as good as they look. There’s always things going on behind the scenes and even though we’ve had some success in the past two years we are still facing a lot of challenges.

Obviously there has been some staff changes and some things done differently but the biggest thing is that our playing list has grown together.

We’ve long had faith in our rebuilding process and the players we’ve brought into the club but it got to the stage (in 2011) when we began to think that maybe we’re kidding ourselves, so we got independent people to analyse our list.

The feedback was that we had potentially one of the better lists coming through. We just had to find a way to get enough games into our young players.

That’s where Matty Primus was so good. We were very under resourced but to his credit he continually played all the younger players.

He made some hard decisions, played some unbelievably young teams and we got some pretty bad results.

But I think a lot of what we are getting now, results wise, is because of the efforts Matty and other people put in back then.

AC: So in some respects Matthew Primus is an unsung hero?

PR: Matty made some mistakes in terms of the way he coached and handled people but he was very true to himself and the club in terms of putting the club first.

As captain he always did that too. It’s very hard to stick to your guns when you are getting smashed and you’re personally coming under pressure but one of his great strengths was that he played young players at a time of transition for us.

He was never scared to put young players into important roles knowing they could fail but that ultimately it would be good for their development.

It was a case of short term pain for long term gain and the club is seeing the benefit of that now.

AC: But there were clearly issues between Primus and senior players Chad and Kane Cornes and Dean Brogan which didn’t help his cause?

PR: There’s no doubt there was some personality issues with Kane but Chad and Broges were injured a lot in their last year here (2011) and because of their veteran ages Matty played younger players ahead of them.

Chad and Broges understood that and there was no angst with it.

There’s no hiding that things between Kane and Matty got difficult at times. They’d been teammates but not great mates but they’ve certainly always respected each other.

It’s hard to coach people you played with and Matty was trying to put Kane in a different role at half-back because he wanted to play younger players in the midfield.

AC: How tough was it to cut ties with premiership coach Mark Williams midway through 2010?

PR: The truth of the matter is that in the end, and Mark would say this, he and the club probably grew tired of each other.

He is that sort of personality, a pretty full-on bloke. But I found him incredibly good to work with.

He is an amazingly passionate, energetic and committed person. He never stopped thinking about the game and used to drive us crazy in some ways.

You would get a phone call from Mark at 8pm on a Sunday or between Christmas and New Year with some idea he wanted to get going. But his energy and passion for the club and his players was amazing.

He was very supportive of his staff and stood up for them all the time. But there’s no doubt he was tiring.

He would admit he liked to operate that way but you would never find a person who put more effort into anything than him.

He was quite obscure in lots of ways and did some pretty wacky things to get players motivated. Towards the end of his time we became very under resourced and that was a massive frustration for him but to his credit he always put the club first.

AC: How hard was it to get Ken Hinkley’s signature?

PR: Initially he was a reluctant coach. We always thought he would be a very good candidate but he was settled on the Gold Coast and had been a bit bruised by some of the other (coaching) processes he’d been through.

Once we got him here for an interview and showed him around the place things moved very quickly because I think he looked at our list and thought ‘gee, there’s a bit of talent there’.

He’s been terrific for our club. He comes across as being the quiet, country, meat and potatoes type of bloke but he understands the game as well as anyone I’ve seen.

He picks up what’s going on in a game quicker than anyone I’ve known and tactically he’s first class.

He relates very well to people and he certainly understands what makes the players tick. But he’s pretty tough and can be very harsh on the players.

If he wants to make a point he makes it very strongly.

AC: You’ve helped put Port into position to win a second premiership with astute drafting. Who’s been your most important selection?

PR: Once again I go back to the 2006 national draft. Mick Moylan was finishing up with recruiting at that stage but he deserves a lot of credit for what we did in that draft.

We recruited three players that year who have been integral to our success in the past couple of years in Travis Boak, Robbie Gray and Justin Westhoff. They were all terrific picks but Boaky is the standout for what he has done at our club.

Taking him was a massive decision because it was such an important draft for us and (Geelong’s) Joel Selwood was still available at pick five so for a long time people probably questioned the wisdom of our pick.

When we interviewed Travis his mum Chicki said she understood how the draft worked but that she was keen for him to stay in Melbourne.

We loved Selwood too but he was coming off a knee reconstruction so he was always going to be a risk. Boaky’s running ability, his mixture of speed and endurance, was what we desperately needed to inject into our midfield and he’s been even better than we’d hoped he’d be.

He’s so driven to get the best out of himself and is a tremendous leader, so we hit the jackpot there.

In more recent times, Ollie Wines is becoming the equivalent of Travis in terms of his leadership and influence around the club while Chad Wingard is just unbelievably talented.

AC: The best left-field picks?

PR: I love the Robbie Gray (pick 55) and Justin Westhoff (pick 71) stories.

A lot of people had their doubts about Robbie’s body shape and the injuries he had before he came here but we always thought he could be a pretty special player.

It’s just taken a long time to come out. Westy is one of the most under-appreciated played we’ve had. In that period when we were struggling he was the most unfairly maligned person at our club.

There were times when he was playing up forward when the ball went inside 50 30 times a game and he was competing with five blokes down there. He trains more than anyone else, he’s competitive all the time and when I look out of my office window he’s always running up and down the training track with our midfielders.

He’s a very unique, no fuss athlete who has become a bloody important player for us.

AC: The biggest blunder?

PR: The player should remain nameless but we once picked someone from interstate when we were very under resourced who we hadn’t interviewed and we learnt a big lesson from it.

We vowed we would never do it again. We took this fella late in the draft and we were very disappointed with the person we got when he arrived.

He wasn’t a bad person but he didn’t have the personality traits you need to be a good AFL player.

We now have a rule that we won’t pick any player we haven’t done our homework on or interviewed extensively because we don’t want any more surprises.

AC: The one who got away?

PR: We watched Nat Fyfe play at the national under-18 championships in 2009 as a third tall forward for WA and he was okay but we didn’t have him rated that highly.

Then before one of Port’s games in Perth we watched him play in an under-18 game for Claremont and he put on a clinic, kicking eight goals, having about 40 possessions and taking hangers in the forward line.

I sent (then recruiting manager) Blair Hartley a text saying we’ve just seen the next Royce Hart. His team missed the finals and we didn’t get a chance to see him play again but we really liked him and interviewed him before the draft.

We had three picks that year — 8 (John Butcher), 9 (Andrew Moore) and 16 (Jasper Pittard) — and we overlooked Nat because we just hadn’t seen enough good games from him and at his height (190cm) we didn’t think he could be a dominant key forward.

At that stage no-one knew he would develop into the type of star on-baller that he has.

AC: You know Phil Walsh better than most people. How will he perform as senior coach at Adelaide?

PR: They will be a much harder team to beat with Phil as coach. He’s a really deep thinker about the game, he is driven, he is very organised and he has an amazing work ethic.

He sees the game like Ken (Hinkley) and I’m sure he’ll get the very best out of their group.

There’s no doubt he’ll be demanding but I’m sure he’ll have them very well prepared.