Emma Quayle is an award-winning journalist and draft expert who spent 16 years covering AFL for The Age newspaper before joining the GIANTS’ recruiting team in February, 2017. As one of the industry’s most respected writers and talent spotters, Quayle has a unique perspective on the GIANTS’ recent crop of draftees. In the second of her insightful six-part series, Quayle sits down with selection 64, Nick Shipley.
Nick Shipley thinks back on it all as one big, happy coincidence. Had the GIANTS not come and done a clinic at his school on that day five years ago, he might still have no idea who they are. Had his class not been picked to take part in it he might not ever have kicked a football. And had the club not emailed him out of the blue three years later, to see if he wanted to try out for their academy one more time, he might not just have been the first kid from western Sydney drafted onto the GIANTS’ list. “I look back and think, how did it happen?” he said. “And it’s all just been good luck.”
With a lot of hard work thrown in, that is. Shipley was a soccer kid back when he was 12, a “real-life western Sydney boy” from Campbelltown whose father grew up on the same side of town and whose mother moved to Sydney from Peru with her family as a kid. He was obsessed with the idea of playing for Sydney FC in the A-League one day, and while his performance in the schoolyard session with the GIANTS was enough to catch the eye of the coaches, who got him to Albury to play in an academy carnival they weren’t able to convince him to keep going, and see where this sport might take him.
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Not then, anyway. “I was just too in love with soccer. Soccer was my life, I was obsessed,” said Shipley, who played as a midfielder for the Macarthur Rams. “My mum’s family was soccer crazy too, that’s all they played, so I did five sessions with the GIANTS and played in Albury and after that I just didn’t have much interest and gave it up because I really wanted my soccer to go to high levels. I was fixed on trying to play for Sydney FC. That’s all I ever wanted, and then footy came along again.”
Second time around, it was an email that got him in. Shipley was 15 when the invitation from Jason Saddington, the Academy’s head coach, turned up one day, asking if he would like to try out for the under-16 squad. He can’t remember why exactly he said yes, but he went down to Blacktown, trained, made the cut and gave soccer up almost on the spot. “Soccer was expensive, really expensive,” he said, “and footy had such a better environment. In soccer you sort of stick to yourself, it sounds weird but it’s not a real team thing. And with footy, even though it was just an academy try-out everyone was so nice and the coaches were so good. I just loved the vibe of it so much more. I pretty much gave soccer the flick, just like that.”
Then he got to work. Shipley loves to run and started doing it for 20 minutes when he woke up every morning then again straight after school, lap after lap of an oval near his home. He had his family sign up for Fox Footy and started watching every single game, and every single show, that he could. He made the NSW-ACT under-16 squad and played at the championships despite having just a handful of games at club level, starting out in the backline. “It was the most nervous I’ve been for my whole life, I’m not joking,” he said. “I just tried my best to run around and get the footy.”
His confidence grew. Shipley played a handful of games for the GIANTS’ NEAFL side in 2016, and felt better with each one. Last pre=season he stuck by Saddington’s side, wanting to get better at understanding when and where he needed to run to, and asking him question after question, “even if it seemed like the most stupid thing to be asking him. He probably got a bit sick of me, but he answered every single question that I had.” He kept watching AFL matches, as well as certain players, to see how they did things. When he played alongside senior listed players in the reserves, he watched even more closely.
It didn’t all go smoothly. Shipley missed out on making the state side as a 17-year-old in 2016, and wondered whether he was making up ground quickly enough given his late switch from soccer. He didn’t play as well as he hoped to play in last year’s under-18 championships, and worried again about where he was at. “It made me question things a bit,” he said. “I thought, ‘should I have stuck with soccer?’ but only for one minute. I knew I just needed more games. I knew I wasn’t experienced but I embraced that and remembered how far I had come and it made me just want to keep going with it. I tried to have my best attitude all the time, and keep working as hard as I could. I always felt like I could push myself harder, and keep going past my limits. That made me think I had a chance, and I always wanted to make it. Right from the first time I started training, I knew I wanted to get drafted one day.”
He got there. Shipley took just his parents and two sisters with him to the draft last November; they had no idea what this new sport was all about when he told them he wanted to play it three years ago, but gave him the biggest cheer of the night in the draft room when his name was read out at pick 64. Our wait wasn’t nervous like Nick’s was, but we were needing to see which club if any would place a bid for him, and where it would come. That we didn’t have to match a bid before our previous pick meant we were able to choose Zac Langdon too.
“My parents love footy. My whole family does. They love the culture of it, just like I do,” Shipley said. “And they always supported me. Whatever I wanted to do, they helped make sure I could do it. My mum was a bit intimidated at first because of all the contact, but she saw I loved it and she just let me go. Anything that makes me happy makes my mum happy.”
Shipley isn’t the first player from Sydney’s west to make it to an AFL team. But that he is the first to be drafted to the GIANTS means a lot to him. He wants to make sure he gets into the team and goes as far as he possibly can, but he also hopes that in merely making it to the club, other kids decide to aim for the same thing. “When you grow up in Campbelltown, not a lot of people like it. They look at you a bit funny and think it’s this dark and bad place where all the bad kids are, but it’s not,” he said.
“I think it’s a pretty good place and it’s always been good to me. I’ve never had any troubles and I’ve had a good time growing up there. There’s a big population out there, and a lot of kids who would be good enough to play footy if they came over and started out and tried it like I did. So to have this chance, it’s unreal. It’s so good. It’s up to me to make the most of it now, because I believe I can give a lot of hope to other kids. It’s a big goal of mine, to make sure I can do that.”
