Player Watch #12: Jy Simpkin -

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Two secs.

North Melbourne rookie Jy Simpkin makes his AFL game debut
RUTH LAMPERD, Sunday Herald Sun, Sunday Herald Sun
March 25, 2017 8:00pm
Subscriber only
JY Simpkin’s mum and dad are up one end of the Scotch College footy ground.

It’s hard to keep track with the April sun in their eyes.

In the distance, five minutes into the third quarter, a player falls hard and stays down.

They scan for their boy among the upright. Was that Jy on the ground?

Footy kids’ parents wonder that many times each season. It’s hard to know which one’s your son when half the players are wearing the same gear and most of them have the same haircuts.

Jy’s tackle near the centre square was like any other he’d delivered in his junior career.

He was chasing a Caulfield boy, caught him, pulled him in and dragged him to the ground. Straight onto his own leg. Awkwardly.

Brian and Christine Simpkin didn’t hear the snap, but closer people did.

They didn’t hear his wail of pain, but they saw the aftermath.

Their son lay on the grass outside the boundary line with a broken leg for an hour waiting for paramedics.


Jy Simpkin was North Melbourne’s pick 12 in the 2016 draft, even though he was out of action with broken leg for half of 2016. Picture: Tim Carrafa.
Jy wavered between jokes and silence there on his stretcher.

They were all thinking, but not saying out loud: “That’s that, then — there goes everything.”

This was more than a season-crusher for a young bloke who was a good bet for the 2016 AFL draft.

He knew it might mean the end at his chance of an elite footy career before it had even started.

How would he from crutches prove to any clubs that he deserved a spot in their senior squads?

But in November last year, after playing just half a game for the season, Jy Simpkin, still leg-tender, was drafted at pick 12 to the North Melbourne Football Club.

He lived through a year of despair and disappointment to emerge anyway doing what most of Victoria’s smallest footy players start out believing they can do — play in the AFL.

And now, as Round 1 looms, Simpkin prays hard for a spot on the field at Etihad Stadium next Sunday.

He fulfilled unmet hopes of the 23,000 kids from his 2004 Auskick age group.

Now he gets to live the dream.


Jy Simpkin was one of a handful of teen boys who make it to the top — and still he has to get a game. Picture: Tim Carrafa
Simpkin can’t precisely remember the last time he had a cheeseburger and chips.

He pauses, thinking. “Maybe at Christmas when I was back in Mooroopna?”

As much as young Jy is just a boy from the bush, barely out of school, missing his mum and dad and mates back home, he’s already a part of the footy machinery.

The personal attention he gets from the AFL dominatrix takes just as much as it gives him.

He’s one cog to be oiled in a footy club that needs working parts, plus spares.

The upside is that he has what feels to him the best job in the cosmos.

“It’s like being at school, there with 40 of your best mates, just working hard and having a great time,” Simpkin says.

He grew up in Maroopna, two hours’ drive north-north-east of the Kangaroos’ Arden St ground. He stays now with a host family 20 minutes away in West Footscray. They look after him.

He does very little socialising. Doesn’t drink much. Watches TV. And sleeps a lot.

Nothing prepares these young players for the workload — Jy is surprised at how tired the schedule makes him.

“When I get home about 4pm I’ll often have a couple of hours’ sleep, then have dinner, watch a bit of TV then go to sleep again,” he says. He yawns, as if on cue.

He’s up at 7am, and arrives at Arden St for a bacon, egg and avocado breakfast.

By 8am he has treatment and strapping and then he goes into meetings, hearing on-field strategies, team weaknesses, strengths, tactics. They go for an hour or more.


Jy Simpkin gets stuck into training. Picture: Tim Carrafa
He made the mistake once of zoning out accidentally. It was only for five minutes.

But he missed a critical bit of set-up information that had him that day in training zinging when he should have been zagging. Embarrassing.

And, he says, it won’t happen again.

In school you can stare out the window for a quarter of the lesson and still get by. Not here.

Training goes from 11.30am for two hours or more. There’s half an hour of recovery, then his preferred lunch of a chicken salad wrap.

This job has him living in a microcosm, earning good money from his favourite thing.

First round draftees have a base pay of about $75,000 and $3660 for every seniors match they play.

“I need to take life more seriously,” he says when asked what he should do better.

“I just left school. And then I came here. It feels like I’m on holiday still.

Everything is new and really enjoyable. I’m waiting for the feeling of “work” to kick in.”


BRAD Scott sticks his head through the door and interrupts the interview. Coach’s prerogative. He seems pumped about something. Maybe it’s his big brood of fresh talent this year — 11 new faces in the squad of 44.

And everyone agrees Jy’s form during the preseason competition was classy. His first game since the one when he broke his leg was against the Hawks.

A four-second GIFposted on the club Twitter feed shows him dummying round Hawks legend Luke Hodge.

But that was in February. It was the preseason. And you can be sure Hodge won’t let it happen again. What really counts is next week and the 21 games after it.

The Sunday Herald Sun is taking a punt. It would be nice if the draftee we chose as our Dream Chaser actually gets a game this season. (Not all of them do.) Preferably next Sunday.

So as Scott pops in for a brief hello, the Sunday Herald Sun asks: “How about you give Jy a game in Round One?” Jy splutters a bit on his bottled water. Scott says: “Ha, well, that’d be up to Jy and how he goes. We’ll see ...”. He winks.

Simpkin wasn’t thinking about Round One, though. He was still focused on that weekend’s JLT game against the Giants in Canberra. He had butterflies, but good ones. The ones that make you run faster and think clearer.

As he stands straight and serious on the field for a photographer, he smiles and shakes his head. In front of him, on level one of the Roos’ building, team mates 50m away are behind the window pulling faces at him. “Someone hanging s. t on you, mate?” he’s asked.

“Yeah, I’ll pay for this,” he says, gesturing at the lights and camera. Active ingredients of footy are work, play and a solid stirring.

Just like in the Under 15s. Some things stay the same.


Jy Simpkin, his dad when he was little. Picture: Supplied.

Jy Simpkin with his dad. Picture: Supplied.
STATISTICS don’t matter when you are, like Jy, one of the few.

But to the rest who didn’t make it to an AFL career, it’s worth understanding the odds.

They look loosely like this.

The players just out of year 12 who were drafted last November played Auskick in 2004.

In that year in Jy’s age group, there about 23,000 participants. By the time those kids had reached Under 15s, their number had dwindled to maybe 10,000.

And of those, about 700 players were listed in the TAC Cup competition, which takes the most promising of the juniors. The AFL clubs scour that competition, watching 14 and 15-year-old kids.

The funnelling continues — of those 700 TAC players, only 58 were drafted or rookie-listed to AFL clubs last year. That is, only one in 400 Auskickers will be drafted 14 or so years later.

Jy wasn’t always convinced he could make it. He’d played in an older age group for his school. His dad was his coach. And Jy would run water for the seniors for which Brian was coach and player.

But as one of the younger players in the TAC Cup Under 18 Murray Bushrangers he stopped dominating.


North Melbourne Kangaroos captain Jack Ziebell with draftee Jy Simpkin. Picture: Alex Coppel.
“I was thinking, maybe this wasn’t for me. I’d been so full-on with footy for so long and I started to think I might be one of those people won’t get through,” Jy recalls.

It was sobering. To think the pinnacle of his career might be the muddy country football change rooms with no toilet paper guaranteed.

By Year 11, he was playing for Scotch College. The Melbourne school had given him an indigenous scholarship and it catapulted his confidence and playing trajectory. (He strongly identifies as aboriginal — he danced at the MCG with an aboriginal troupe before the Dreamtime game in 2014.)

That was until that leg-breaking match last April.

It was the toughest year of his life so far. People were telling him not to worry, but he had a long recovery from three surgeries on his leg and infection.

A first seniors game is the next step. There’s always something to aim for.

“No one wants to be sitting on the sidelines. I’m competitive. I don’t like people being ahead of me on things that I can’t do,’ he says.

“I see someone doing something — then I’ll keep going and going until I can do it, too.”

And that’s what separates the men from the dreamers.

ruth.lamperd@news.com.au

@ruthlamperd
 

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I'm really looking forward to seeing Simpkin today; as with all the other boys. One thing I really love about the article & lots of other things I've read, is Boomers attitude. He might have thought he could kick on; but now it's all about cracking on. So pleased he's still around the club.
 
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I'm really looking forward to seeing Simpkin today; as with all the other boys. One thing I really love about the article & lots of other things I've read, is Boomers attitude. He might have thought he could kick on; but now it's all about cracking on. So pleased he's still around the club.
Well said, Boomer's attitude since he's back at the club has been all class. He will add to his legacy now and not have it soured as it was heading towards. Very very happy about that.
 

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